Sometimes there is something paradoxical about the way we buy and order food. Household food waste – i.e. the huge amount of food and drink we throw away (27 kg per year for every Italian according to Waste Watcher International Observatory on Food and Sustainability related to 2022) – is the most unacceptable sign of this.
You live better with less
While on the one hand our awareness of the problem is increasing – this is also confirmed by recent research carried out by organizations that combat the phenomenon as Too good to go And Buy Babaco – on the other hand, the shift towards more conscious consumption and, yes let’s face it, a leaner, less extravagant lifestyle, is rather slow. We know you live better with lesshowever the temptation is always to buy and order a little more, even absurd phenomena likeall you can eat.
Why; What happens in our minds when, according to the saying, at the supermarket we overbuy or at the restaurant we “order with our eyes” instead of listening to our body and its true need to nourish itself? We tried to figure it out with his help Vincenzo Russohis teacher Consumer Psychology and coordinator of the Neuromarketing Research Center at IULM in Milanas well as the author of several books, including “Neuroscience at the Table” (Guerini).
Thinking machines that get excited
Professor Russo also confirms that, especially after the pandemic period, our sensitivity to food waste has increased according to the interviews they continuously carry out at the research center he founded in 2008. The good news, then, because “on the one hand in utilitarian aspects, because wasting food is also synonymous with wasting money, on the other hand a greater respect for nature».
However, although rational awareness of these issues is increasing, it is also true that most of the time our purchases and restaurant orders follow other, more instinctive and emotional paths. Professor Russo at the IULM research center tries, through sophisticated neuroscientific techniques, to do just that, to distinguish people’s rational statements from emotional reactions, which are often unconscious, but still very powerful: “A beautiful phrase from the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio says that “We are not thinking machines that become emotional, but emotional machines that think“. The moral and rational dimension is often set aside when we enter the realm of desires because Our brains are naturally predisposed to respond to stimuli first emotionally and then rationally».
At the supermarket: 4 seconds to decide
This also happens in front of a supermarket shelf where, Russo explains, we spend time between 4 and 26 seconds: a very short time in which instinct often dominates and not a rational choice of what we need. In this period of time, the emotional reaction to the inputs we receive is even faster, 13 milliseconds. “In the supermarket we buy out of habit and, in 64% of cases, out of instinct, what strikes us emotionally at the same price».
Love at first sight with the product which, as it happens between people, is often guided by a single sense, the view. It is no coincidence if we look at the structure of our brain, where “50% of the cells are responsible for the visual system. So we shouldn’t be surprised if a label of a certain color is so strong that it even affects the taste. If we take a fruit juice and dye it red with an odorless and tasteless substance, people will say it is sweeter and fruitier than the exact same colorless juice.’
What to do then?
We often hear ours referred to as one welfare society; if it was just like that, it would generally be fine, but the problem is that more and more often this prosperity translates into an irrational waste of resources. The ideal, in theory, would be to steer the ship back to what we need, but reversals of this type are not so simple.
(tagsTo Translate)sustainability