Food waste is a significant environmental, economic, and social issue. In many cases, packaging protects food and prolongs its shelf life, reducing the overall environmental impact by reducing food waste. This research focuses on consumer perceptions of the role of packaging and on-pack labelling in reducing household food waste. The following research questions provided the framework for the study: (1) could packaging play a role in decreasing food waste; (2) what are labelling and packaging designs’ impacts on consumer decision-making about food waste? This research draws on two qualitative studies. Study One focuses on journey mapping—following food waste throughout the consumer’s engagement with food ‘journey’ from planning to disposal. Study Two comprises a series of in-depth interviews in consumers’ homes focusing on how consumers engage with food packaging and food waste. Results indicate that there are at least two streams of consumer perceptions to consider when determining the relationship between food packaging and reducing food waste: the first is how practically useful packaging is for consumer needs; the second is consumers’ perceptions about food packaging itself. There are tensions and trade-offs between these two sets of considerations. The results of the studies show consumers are unlikely to consider food packaging or reducing food waste as a primary motivation in their food purchasing decisions. The studies also show reducing packaging, including plastic packaging, is seen as more important than reducing food waste. Our results also highlight important elements to consider when designing food packaging. These results suggest that a fundamental review is needed for many aspects of packaging and storage information and that this review should account for consumers’ information needs at different points: purchase, storage, during consumption, and between instances of consumption. Furthermore, our results suggest packaging designs that provide clear information and instructions for consumers to reduce food waste are needed.

Consumers are vital stakeholders in creating and reducing food waste. However, limited research into consumers’ perceptions of food waste and food packaging is available to inform research, packaging design or policy so that sustainable consumption practices among consumers might be better encouraged and enabled. By applying multivariate linear modelling to a sample of 965 Australian consumers, this study investigated consumers’ perceptions of packaging and packaging’s relationship to food waste. Overall, consumers perceived packaging waste as a more serious environmental issue than food waste. Most consumers did not consider food waste as an extreme environmental issue. Consumers’ perceptions of the seriousness of food waste also influenced their perceptions of packaging designed to reduce food waste. Significant differences between men and women and older and younger consumers were found regarding the relationship between packaging and food waste as well as food waste as an environmental issue. This study provides a detailed understanding of consumers and packaging, and it alerts designers and decision-makers to the differing attitudes towards food and packaging waste as well as the likelihood of consumers taking up more sustainable consumption practices.

This article considers how creative writers use research to experiment with and expand the written form. Focussing on modes of storytelling for fiction and non-fiction, four current research degree candidates and a supervisor-mentor from RMIT University present snapshots of research works in progress, to reveal how they are negotiating the sticky yet rich relationship between theory and practice. Specifically, they offer innovative ways of expanding the written form to combine creative and critical modes of thought, resulting in distinctive contributions to knowledge and practice that are relevant to their genres, forms and subject matters. The candidates, who are working across the lyric essay, screenwriting, performance writing and radio, are also members of a peer-to-peer group facilitated by the supervisor-mentor, which over a four-year period has supported research training in creative writing and assisted in the formation of new research identities. This collaborative support structure has helped candidates to transform from creative writers to creative writing researchers, encouraging playfulness and experimentation yet underpinned by the needs of academic rigour. This article thus offers a collective, reflective approach to finding innovation in/through creative writing research – methodologically speaking.

How might a writing form that includes both creative and academic work explorewhat sociologist John Law might call the ‘messiness’ of embodied knowledges (Law 2004)? Meeting the challenges of learning to live differently in a world that appears to be becoming increasingly uninhabitable for humans (and many other species) requires different methods of research that allow us to think anew about ‘the messes of reality’ and embodied knowledges (Law 2004: 2). My research threads together the practice of making things with food scraps that would usually otherwise be wasted and the practice of essaying. Drawing on philosopher Lisa Heldke’s notion of ‘cooking as inquiry’ and recipes as tools this paper uses an autoethnographic approach (Ellis et al 2011; Spry 2001) to explore how the form of the essay might expand recipes for things to make from food scraps to include theoretical and philosophical inquiries that have both informed and been informed by the practice of making things with the scraps. In this way, my research and this paper are both about experimentation in everyday cooking-like practices, and experimenting in writing, theorising and research, where the writing is not merely a metaphor, but also enacts the modes of inquiry discovered, explored and played with in the physical practices.