Plate Waste in School Lunch: Barriers, Motivators, and Perspectives of SNAP-Eligible Early Adolescents in the US
Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVE: To determine barriers, motivators, and perspectives regarding plate waste reduction of early adolescents. DESIGN: Trained interviewers conducted audio-recorded individual interviews with adolescents. SETTING: Elementary schools implementing the National School Lunch Program in Hawai'i, Montana, and Virginia. PARTICIPANTS: Early adolescents (n = 47, aged 9-13 years) from families receiving or eligible to receive Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits were recruited to participate. PHENOMENON OF INTEREST: Factors influencing plate waste among adolescents and potential plate waste reduction strategies. ANALYSIS: Coders analyzed content and thematic data to identify code categories and themes. RESULTS: Main barriers to reducing school lunch plate waste were unsupportive school policy, undesirable food quality, satiation, and social influences. Key motivators to reducing school lunch plate waste were supportive school policy, including allowing students to share food with peers and save food to eat later; and social influences. Participants found it acceptable to throw away disliked food and unacceptable to throw away wanted food; they perceived that their peers did not care whether food was thrown away; and they thought their parents disliked wasting food. CONCLUSION AND IMPLICATIONS: Results suggest that several factors might allow for minimization of school lunch plate waste in the National School Lunch Program, including improvements in food quality, food policy, and social influences. Under these important themes, strategies to employ may include improving food preparation and taste, allocating more time for students to finish lunch, allowing students to self-select food lunch items, and permitting them to share and save their leftover food.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".