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Dagon comments on Open thread, Jul. 11 - Jul. 17, 2016 - Less Wrong Discussion
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I went to a party recently, and the host provided the food. At the end of the party, there was an awful lot left over, and my understanding is that most of it went to waste.
I had a thought when this was happening: if I was the host, why not keep track of how much food my guests actually ate, and try adjusting the amount of food at my next party to match?
The host was not a rationalist, as I suspect most hosts aren't, but upon researching the issue, it doesn't seem as if there's a widespread solution.
There are charities that focus on "recycling" food waste, and there are plenty of suggestions for how much food to bring to parties of various size, and yet I still have the experience of purchasing/preparing far too much food for parties, and almost every party I go to has far too much food available.
What exactly is going on, and how can it be made better? It seems to me as if this is a reasonably low-hanging fruit - getting people to properly estimate how much food people actually consume at parties in order to reduce food waste. It's the sort of calculation any restaurant with an all-you-can-eat buffet has clearly made in order to determine their price point.
Is this a publicity issue, that people don't realize they can optimize the amount of food they purchase and prepare? Or is it psychological, related to akrasia or a bias? I've been told that a host's greatest fear is that they run out of food, but why? Is the way to attack this problem through exposing that fear as unfounded?
This is one of the first external questions I've considered, since committing fully to instrumental rationality.
I'd like to hear everyone's thoughts on the matter.
Thanks.
TL;DR:
Why do people waste food at parties? Is this a solvable problem?
For most problems like this, it's worth solving once or twice at small scale before you look for general solutions. How many parties have you thrown (or guided the food procurement for), and what have you found that makes for better estimation of needs?
Have you talked with caterers or other experts in such estimation? It would be interesting to learn how they decide when to risk too little vs too much, and the clever tricks they have to control consumption (which will make the estimates more accurate). For instance, having lots of cheap starches and limited meat, along with explicit or subtle rationing, can lead to high waste measured by weight or calories, but fairly low waste measured by cost.
Not sure caterers will be helpful since they're paid for what they bring to the party and they don't care at all whether it gets eaten or not. Similarly, the all-you-can-eat buffets have lots of data from which to estimate how much an average customer eats, and they have the law of large numbers on their side, too.
For the house parties the usual answer is just experience. After a few missteps most people can learn to have a workable idea of the amount of food needed without formulating a full Bayesian model or even without a simple spreadsheet. Of course there is some uncertainty and the incentives make the host provide the amount at the top end of the reasonable estimate interval.