Abstract
Kitchen operations waste considerable amounts of food in food service organizations, thus pinpointing chefs as critical stakeholders in food waste management (Goh et al., 2022). Therefore, the practices of chefs contributing to food waste prevention and reduction (preduction) must be carefully examined to identify areas for mitigative interventions (Filimonau et al., 2023). Practice theory can aid in understanding chefs' practices on how food waste is generated in professional kitchens and how it can be prevented and reduced, i.e., preduced (Hennchen, 2019). However, research on chefs' sustainable practices is scarce (Batat, 2020), thus outlining a knowledge gap.
Although cooking has long been recognized as a critical social practice in households (Mguni et al., 2020), research on food preparation and cooking in professional kitchens from the perspective of practice theory has commenced only recently (Munir, 2022). In tourism and hospitality, practice theory has been adopted to examine tourist shopping (Jin et al., 2020), fraud (Xu et al., 2022), museum (Wu et al., 2021), and cruising experiences (Lamers and Pashkevich, 2018). Research has focused on the social practices of consumers (Dolan et al., 2019), thus largely ignoring the perspective of other stakeholders, such as chefs. Further, limited research has considered the implications of social practices prevalent among chefs for sustainability challenges, such as food waste preduction.
Few studies directly relate social practice theory to food waste in professional kitchens. Social practice theory has enabled Hennchen (2019) to assign food waste practices of chefs to their food waste knowledge and awareness. Building upon this study, Filimonau et al. (2023) have proposed the concept of resourceful cooking, which can facilitate food waste preduction among chefs. Finally, Chawla et al. (2020) have examined the role of materiality in food waste practices in professional kitchens.
The recommendations for improving the environmental sustainability of kitchen operations often come from case-specific studies (Leverenz et al., 2021). These studies focus on kitchen processes and their particular kitchens, considering factors like menu offerings (Byker et al., 2014), customer demand (Amicarelli et al., 2022), available resources (Corrado et al., 2019), and kitchen layout (Chawla et al., 2020) in food waste generation and management. However, these recommendations are often limited to the specific conditions of each particular study thereby suggesting limited generalization and applicability to other kitchens.
The lack of generalizable empirical studies suggests the need to develop a holistic model of practice theory in professional kitchens. This model should help industry practitioners and academics better understand chefs' practices' critical role in food waste generation and management. This can enable the design of interventions to nurture sustainability in professional kitchens. This paper aims to partially plug this gap by showcasing the value of practice theory for food waste preduction. It also highlights the role of training current and prospective chefs to encourage more resourceful, i.e., “wasteless” practices.