The College of Agriculture’s Department of Agricultural Economics was awarded $1.5 million from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture for Professor Brenna Ellison’s research.
Professor of agribusiness management at Purdue University Brenna Ellison is the principal investigator for a new grant from the US Department of Agriculture’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture, which totals $1.5 million. Ellison will be investigating food waste alongside her collaborator Melissa Pflugh Prescott of the Department of Nutrition at Case Western University. The project aims to help eliminate food waste by analyzing how households currently generate food waste, and working with student food equity specialists in order to make recommendations to help meet the targets for national food waste and food loss reduction.
According to an article on Purdue University’s website, Ellison explained how her research is different from past projects on the same topic, and how her approach will be doing something new. She said, “Many efforts to reduce food waste in the U.S. are top-down in nature and sometimes provide ‘one-size-fits-all’ guidance. We’re interested in a bottom-up approach, working with different types of households to see how their food management behaviors differ. Our hope is to collect data and observe patterns, eventually co-creating behavioral strategies to reduce food waste that are tailored to households’ needs.”
The funding from the National Institute of Food and Agriculture will establish the Purdue Center for Food Conservation and Waste Reduction. The Center will recruit students to serve as food equity specialists in varied communities around the country. These student food equity specialists will be trained to become experts in food waste and in citizen science in order to engage communities in the work. The specialists will collect data about household food waste and will eventually compile the data into a presentation for a summit within their communities in order to educate even more people about the food system. In turn, these student specialists will also be able to apply for a “mini grant” from Ellison and Prescott that the students will be able to put to use within their own communities to help eliminate food waste. Additionally, Ellison and Prescott will compile an online resource for families to learn how to reduce food waste in their households, with tips on how to store leftovers and plan meals.
“We want to meet households where they are and hear about their unique barriers and challenges in managing food waste. By utilizing citizen science, our desire is to actively engage U.S. households in the conversation to cocreate a shared understanding of feasible, culturally appropriate strategies to improve food literacy and household food waste. We also hope to empower households to be more resilient and nutrition-secure,” said Ellison.
For more information about Purdue University, visit the school’s website.