Results to Surprise Everyone

Young people who don't know how to cook, or are learning how to cook, don't use the internet to find information on cooking.

Older people (50s and 60s) who cook, however, DO use the internet to look up recipes and other information related to cooking.

This is perhaps the most surprising result of our inquiries into the cooking and waste habits of various folk in and around Dundee. So much for the idea that older people wouldn't use the internet and younger people would.

A somewhat less surprising result from our interviews was that older people do more meal planning, while younger people rarely plan at all. As a result, older people waste less food.

Additionally, older people seemed to have more knowledge about food. Younger people would throw out food based strictly on its expiry date--if, for instance, milk passed its "Use By" date, they would assume that it had magically gone bad (even if it was fine just hours before) and would have to be thrown out. Older people took a more laissez-faire approach to food spoilage; they often based their judgments on look and smell. They described it as just "knowing" when meat was going off. This increased knowledge of food spoilage was also a factor in older people wasting less food.

It was this anecdotal evidence that led us to decide to narrow our focus to young people: students, and other people leaving home for the first time. Often, our interviews suggested, they do not know how to cook or meal plan, and as a result, end up wasting a lot of food. A general lack of knowledge seemed to be the root problem, and that was something we felt we could address well within the scope of this project.

But first, we felt that we should gather more evidence. We surmised that students don't meal plan because of the generally chaotic nature of the average student's schedule. In our own experiences, we planned meals best when we were working full time: under those circumstances, we got home at the same time every day, and were able to plan our food consumption accordingly. To test this supposition, we designed a more in depth probe. We would ask students to record what they ate for two days, as well as how long it took to make it. We also asked them to photograph the food and any waste produced in the cooking. We were each to administer this probe to two students to see if there were any marked patterns in their food planning, preparation, consumption, and waste.