When restaurants first shut down early in the pandemic(疫情), Americans started cooking more at home— and, perhaps, causing more leftovers(残羹剩菜). Those leftovers can be a convenient future meal-- but they've got a dark side, too.
"There is a tendency(趋势) that if you put an item on a plate that's a leftover, there's a higher probability that you're not going to fully eat up that item. And so it's probably going to waste."
Brian Roe, an applied economist at the Ohio State University and his workmates recently studied leftovers and food waste by tracking the eating habits of 18 men and women in Baton Rouge, La. The participants(参与者) tracked what they ate using an iPhone app. During the weeklong study, the study subjects piled 1, 200 different foods in total on their plates.
After analyzing(分析) what got eaten，saved or thrown away, the researchers found that leftovers were more likely to be picked at and not fully eaten— a finding we can all probably agree with.
But they also observed that leftovers—perhaps due to being older and less fresh- directed directed diners' attention to the other, more new items on their plate, which brings up an interesting possible plan to get people to eat their. peas, perhaps surrounding it with leftovers is a way to make them focus on the newest item on the plate.
Overall, Roe says one bigger lesson emerged on how to avoid throwing food into the trash." For us, the real take-home here was: all else equal, choose a smaller meal, and you're less likely to cause leftovers. And that's a good thing because leftovers, all else equal, tend to be wasted."
