Awards issued prior to january 20, 2025, were funded under previous administrations and may not reflect the priorities and policies of the current administration.** in the U.S., about 32% of food is…

Awards issued prior to january 20, 2025, were funded under previous administrations and may not reflect the priorities and policies of the current administration.** in the U.S., about 32% of food is wasted at the consumer level, amounting to an estimated $160- $240 billion value annually. The massive amounts of food waste cause challenges for both the sustainability of the food supply chain and the implementation of consumer-oriented food policies. Due to the lack of appropriate empirical methods, existing research on consumer food waste measurement does not offer comprehensive food waste estimates that are both household-specific and commodity-specific for a nationally representative sample of households. Consequently, food waste has been mostly absent in the broader field of food policy studies that implicate consumer behavior issues. The overall goal of the proposed project is to achieve accurate, comprehensive measures of consumer food waste and apply them to analyze a wide array of consumer-oriented food policies. To realize this goal, the project team will (1) develop and apply novel empirical methods to estimate household-level and food category-specific food waste, based on a household utility maximization framework, (2) assess the overall trend in U.S. Consumer food waste and link food waste to household and food product characteristics, (3) provide an easy-to-implement calibration tool that can be used by researchers to calculate food waste using widely available consumer purchase data sets, (4) demonstrate how to use the food-waste estimates to adjust the household- level calculations of the healthy eating index, and (5) investigate whether food-waste adjustments to prior research of food access and environment would lead to different policy conclusions or recommendations.