Semantic and philosophical approaches for advancing the identification and measurement of food waste

Abstract

Many global food-waste frameworks do not account for multiple concurrent factors, such as culture, time, context and the aims of the stakeholders. Using the semantic tools developed in the philosophical fields of analytic metaphysics and analytic ontology, we propose a framework to explore and document the conceptual nuances of food waste. By discussing food waste from the positions of substantivalism, adjectivalism and adverbialism, we account for the breadth of food-waste contexts to improve representation and communication in technical settings dealing with identification and measurement, such as report writing and policy development.