Lakhasly

Schools are important entry points for tackling the complex relationship between food waste and nutrition for at least three reasons. First, school meals and school feeding programmes worldwide are an important source of nutrition and diet improvements for children (WFP, 2013). Second, schools are an effective setting for educating young consumers and influencing future habits regarding healthy eating (Micha et al., 2018) and sustainability (Derqui et al., 2018). Third, several studies in high-income countries have indicated that school canteens are a major source of FW (Cordingley et al., 2011; Derqui et al., 2018; World Wildlife Fund, 2019; Falasconi et al., 2015; Kaur et al., 2021). Although similar problems have been suggested by the limited evidence available from China (Liu et al., 2016, p. 1288) and Malaysia (Kasavan et al., 2021), food waste in schools in LMICs has hardly been studied. Food waste behaviour has been found to be influenced by a mix of both internal factors (such as attitudes, knowledge, habits and resources) and external factors (such as social norms and environmental contexts) (Abe & Akamatsu, 2015; Roodhuyzen et al., 2017). Across contexts, the most frequently leftover foods in schools are nutritious foods such as milk and vegetables (Blondin et al., 2015; Byker et al., 2014; Silvennoinen et al., 2015; Smith & Cunningham-Sabo, 2014). While increasing portion size can be an effective way to increase consumption of nutritious foods (Miller et al., 2015), this could lead to even more food waste.

Despite the potential trade-off between food waste reduction and nutrition goals, few studies have explored this link. To our knowledge, most studies have looked separately at efforts to decrease food waste and efforts to increase healthy food intake. When they were looked at together, the focus has been the nutritional aspect of food consumption, with food waste merely serving to assess nutrient loss (Kaur et al., 2021). Cohen et al. (2014) found that increasing portion size for vegetables resulted in more cups of vegetables consumed. The dearth of research that looks at both issues concurrently is troubling, given the need to look at trade-offs within the food system (Béné et al., 2019). Exceptions include two studies that assessed the impact of new USDA nutrition standards in the National School Lunch and Breakfast Programmes and did not lead to increased food waste among the elementary school children studied. Schwartz et al. (2015) found similar results in middle schools, where new school meal regulations that increased fruit consumption did not increase total plate waste.

Viet Nam provides a good context to explore the issue of food waste. Viet Nam is an LMIC in Southeast Asia whose population is going through a nutrition transition characterised by higher purchasing power for food and increased consumption of protein-rich and ultra-processed foods that are high in fats, sugar and salt (Raneri et