Misunderstanding of Expiration Dates Causes Food Waste

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Introduction

 

I love to cook, which I chose food waste as my media analysis topic earlier in the semester, and as the topic of this final project. As you can see from the statistics above, food waste is both an environmental problem and social justice problem. Several studies have corroborated that the average American household wastes up to 32% of the food it buys (Source). This means that, although systemic change can and should be implemented, food waste is one of the environmental problems in which individual choices and behavior changes can make a substantial difference.

Food waste is a sprawling and complex issue too big for a one-person campaign. So, I chose to focus specifically on the confusion surrounding food date labels. Confusion around date labels leads to 20 percent of safe, edible food waste (Source). For more about date labels, see the pictures below.


Source

The Project

For my project, I wanted to communicate to home chefs that date labels on packaged food most often denote quality not safety, and so food that is “expired” can still be used and consumed. This message works towards the ultimate outcome of newly educated home chefs throwing away less food. I decided to create an education campaign. I chose social media as the channel for this campaign mainly for reasons of COVID-19 friendliness, and I chose Instagram because food is such a visual topic. The action of not throwing away food is kind of hard to measure, so as a proxy I used the number of likes on social media posts. Specifically, I was aiming for 100 likes. If a home chef likes a social media post about date labels, then they have presumably read the post and are “educated” on the topic and my education campaign has succeeded.

Because I am not an avid Instagram user I used a strategy suggested by Dan, which is to leverage already existing audiences. So, I reached out to various Instagram pages that I found by searching relevant hashtags (#foodwaste, #zerowaste, #sustainablechef etc.), and asked if they would make a post about date labels (after explaining my project of course). To make it easier for them to make such a post, I created a variety of resources for them to use. Some of those resources you can see in the above pictures. The above images are part of an Instagram carousel post I designed and provided to the Instagrammers I contacted. Additionally, I wrote up an old family recipe from my great great grandma Herndon using expired graham crackers and lemon Jell-O, and then took some Instagram worthy pictures which you can see below. 

The Instagrammer who agreed to make a post used some of these resources but not others. Her handle is @reduction_raider1 and her page is focused on “yellow stickers” which are the UK food sale stickers. Her motto is “eat well for less and avoid food waste”. I found her through searching the #foodwaste tag. She ended up using the carousel post which I modified to be accurate to the UK (where she was based) rather than the US (as in this blog). She framed the post as a guest post from an environmental communication student and tagged me in the comments. She felt it was a compelling hook and also that she (very kindly) didn’t want to take undue credit for my work.

Even though these pictures weren't used in my final post I am still very proud of them!

Results

So, did my campaign work? Yes! The post made by @reducation_raider1 has received more than 100 likes, which was my metric for success (yay!). Additionally, at the time of writing this blog post, several other pages have reached out to me and are in the process of making a post of their own on the same topic. Unfortunately, these posts won’t be implemented in time to be included in this blog post, but I am excited for my campaign to reach a wider audience!

Victory!!!!


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