People’s habbits around food waste.
As a team that aims to work on Global Goals for our project that deals with poverty and food waste, we had to get to know people’s habbits around food.To achieve that, we interviewed more than 50 people of all ages.The answers we got varied ,but where enough for us to come to some conclusions.
First of all, we started by making our questonaires . Through the interviews many questions were added or missed depending on the answers we got.What was very important to us ,as a team , was not just to ask people if they throw away their food (something that almost everyone does and is ashamed of ),but to discuss in a friendly enough way that people would talk about that, on their own. It was a fact of a great importance to understand why people throw their food away and how this might be connected with other factors of their daily routines.
Most of the people we came in contact with, stated that they are left with extra food more often than not. They also said that they usually try to keep it simple and only cook enough food for every family member but in the end of the day, there is always some food left aside. When asked what they do with it, they replied that it either gets thrown away ,or it is given to stray animals around the house. Then,when asked what is this, that prevents people from taking action, most of them said that nowadays someone will not care about his fellow as he has his own problems troubling him. People try to make their lives as good as possible, unintentionally ignoring the others’ needs.
Finishing with the main questions,we moved up on other , more general ones ,such us their intention of helping others.As we had previously interviwed one manager of a big Greek super market company (AB Vasilopoulos) and had already learned that there are several companies that help reducing food waste and poverty , we wanted to test people’s awareness of such actions.We then came up to the sad realisation that most of the people didn’t even know about actions and campaigns ran in Greece and trying to fight poverty.Almost everyone,stated that if it was easy for them to reach out those markets,shops and companies they would definitely help,if not on a daily basis,on a weekly or monthly.
Those findings,helped us realise that the problem is not that there are not actions and campaigns,but that these actions are not efficiently promoted.Our goal ,then became much more clear.If people are bored to search how to help others and the actions taken are not popular enough , we should then try and spread awareness among people, by creating a website that would involve all actions taken,so that people would have them gathered and could choose the one they preffered.Moreover,our site would give to other organisations and companies the ability to join it.
Raed Raees (Christina Gourgoura)
Alkistis Joan (Alkistis Deli)
