Three Things Twitter Can Tell Us About Food Waste

As loyal WastedFood.com readers are no doubt aware, Jonathan is taking a brief hiatus from blogging as he and his wife have welcomed a baby boy into their previously waste-free lives. I told Jonathan that the least a new uncle could do was throw up a guest post or two. Here goes:

Let’s begin by agreeing for the moment that Twitter conversation is a blunt but decent stand-in for national sentiment on the issues of the day. With that premise as a backdrop, I took an informal look at how the Twitterati prioritize food waste by comparing the volume of tweets that used various keywords. I can summarize my research in three points:

Lesson 1: A sizeable chunk of the Tweeters who discuss food waste are not Americans. A few casual Twitter search queries show that a lot of the conversation around reducing food waste from outside of America – with a pretty noticeable concentration in Great Britain.

Lesson 2: Comparing the volume of tweets on food waste to some other hot-button environmental issues, it would appear that we have our work cut out for us. This should be a call to action for WastedFood.com readers (and my bro when he starts sleeping again):

Lesson 3: Holy cow:

Stats courtesy TweetVolume.