It was the food price crisis in 2008 that made evident to the international community that food se-curity can be a complex threat to society. Since that moment, food waste gained great international relevance being considered in 2011 by the Agriculture and Rural Development –European Commis-sion as important as energy efficiency (EU Res. 2011/2175(INI)). FAO among other institutions re-ported that global limitations on food availability would exist in the upcoming years up to 2050, which, combined with current food waste, results in an unethical world-feeding situation. FAO’s report in 2011 exposed that in Europe about 95-115 kg of food per capita and year are quantified as wasted. That is, one-third of all food produced for human consumption is lost or wasted every year (FAO 2011). As a result, food waste started to be considered as an environmental, economic, social and food security problem (Kosseva 2013; Stuart 2009).
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Three notions: food wastage, food loss and food waste are randomly used in the different reports published. As a consequence of this lack of agreement, discrepancies among published data exist, and consequently, it is difficult to develop efficient strategies to handle food security. Nevertheless, an agreement exists in that re-sponsibility does not only lie at the European Commission or state level, but at local and even indi-vidual levels. Moreover, published data revealed that about 50% of the total amount of food wasted is generated in the last stage of the food supply chain: household and out-of-home food consump-tion. Therefore, in order to achieve an efficient food management system we need to understand consumers’ behaviour and attitudes towards food waste generation and
Three notions: food wastage, food loss and food waste are randomly used in the different reports published. As a consequence of this lack of agreement, discrepancies among published data exist, and consequently, it is difficult to develop efficient strategies to handle food security. Nevertheless, an agreement exists in that re-sponsibility does not only lie at the European Commission or state level, but at local and even indi-vidual levels. Moreover, published data revealed that about 50% of the total amount of food wasted is generated in the last stage of the food supply chain: household and out-of-home food consump-tion. Therefore, in order to achieve an efficient food management system we need to understand consumers’ behaviour and attitudes towards food waste generation and