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This study determined how food handlers apply menu planning principles in food waste prevention in supermarket kitchens. The objective was to assess whether menu planning principles that positively impact minimising food waste are applied by food handlers in supermarket the kitchens in Soweto, South Africa, and to understand the underlying causes of food waste. The quantitative, structured observation was conducted using a checklist to observe food handlers' practices throughout meal production. The study found that food handlers lacked proper menu planning and execution principles for food waste prevention, including not following standardised recipes, poor food preparation skills, lack of food texture variety, improper meal distribution, and poor food storage practices. The findings revealed that food handlers overlook menus' importance as communication tools in planning, operation, and waste minimisation. This highlights a gap in poor practices that needs to be addressed as a step-in meeting target 12.3 of the Sustainable Development Goals, which aims to halve global food waste and loss. per capita by 2030 and recommends developing food waste guidelines specific for food handlers in supermarket kitchen. This paper contributes to the existing theoretical literature. The significant practical implication of this study is to enforce sustainability practices in supermarket kitchens.

Two significant realms of social anxiety, visible in the discourses of media and public policy, potentially pull practices of home food provisioning in conflicting directions. On the one hand, campaigns to reduce the astonishing levels of food waste generated in the UK moralize acts of both food saving (such as keeping and finding creative culinary uses for leftovers) and food disposal. On the other hand, agencies concerned with food safety, including food-poisoning, problematize common practices of thrift, saving and reuse around provisioning. The tensions that arise as these public discourses are negotiated together into domestic practices open up moments in which 'stuff' crosses the line from being food to being waste. This paper pursues this through the lens of qualitative and ethnographic data collected as part of a four-year European research programme concerned with consumer anxieties about food. Through focus groups, life-history interviews and observations, data emerged which give critical insights into processes from which food waste results. With a particular focus on how research participants negotiate use-by dates, we argue that interventions to reduce food waste can be enhanced by appreciating how food becomes waste through everyday practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]