Food Waste and Loss of Weight in Cooking

Abstract

There is a dearth of information on the percentage of waste during preparation of food by the average woman. Such figures would be of value in dietary surveys, since some food tables give analyses for raw foods only 'as purchased', so that edible portions on dietary records must often be converted to 'as purchased' amounts before conversion to calories and nutrients.During two long-term dietary investigations, records of wastage in food preparation were made and results are presented for comparison with existing tables or as a supplement to them.In addition, alterations in weight during cooking are of great importance when the nutritive value of edible portions of food is to be calculated. Alterations are chiefly due to loss or absorption of water or other liquid and also to loss of weight when fat melts and connective tissue hydrolyses to gelatin. Outer layers of old potato may slough away and fish may break apart. EXPERIMENTALGeneral. Loss or gain of weight during cooking has an effect on the nutritive value of a given weight of cooked food. As an example, two rice puddings consumed during the survey are cited. Both were made to the same recipe, but one lost 3'4% and the other 49% of its original weight: the first was cooked alone in a slow oven and the second was placed below other foods in a moderately hot oven.Recipe: 568 g milk, 57 g sugar, 42 g rice, 14 g butter. Total weight 681 g. Pudding I. 3'4% loss of weight. Portion consumed 142 g. Foods contained in this portion: 122 g milk, 12.3 g sugar, 9.0 g rice, 3-0 g butter. Unless allowance is made for evaporation during cooking, there is thus likely to be great inaccuracy in calculating the nutrient content of composite dishes. T o avoid this error, each dish cooked during the survey was made with weighed ingredients and the whole was weighed before and after cooking. Weighing a raw mixture allowed a correction to be made for any part of the whole adhering to the mixing bowl.Scope of the survey. Results in the present investigation cover the years 1949-52, and the average value for all figures computed in these years is given for each commodity. Care was taken to ensure that all edible parts were utilized, although, unfortunately, such care is not always practised by the average woman.

Household Food Waste Research: The Current State of the Art and a Guided Tour for Further Development

“…Shopping and domestic food storage habits are directly related. Some studies have shown that inappropriate food storage practices lead to the decay of both perishable and durable food (Chappell, 1954;Quested et al, 2013;Masson et al, 2017). In the case of perishable food, it is the unpleasant smell that draws the consumer's attention to the process of decay, while durable food is usually detected during 'spring cleaning'.…”