الملخص الإنجليزي
Abstract:
Globally, there were changes in food consumption and food waste generation during the COVID-19 pandemic, and this study aims to assess these changes and the reasons behind them in the Kingdom of Bahrain.
A quantitative approach was selected and a cross-sectional study was performed through a structured survey which was distributed between February and March 2022 which resulted in accepting 390 responses, the rejected responses were either filled by respondents under 18 years or participants that
did not live in Bahrain two years prior to filling out the survey.
The results revealed stability in consumption of four food groups while high rates of consumption of
unhealthy meals and snacks was noticed during the pandemic.
Furthermore, there were few changes in the mode of purchasing food while the demand of buying food from online stores and food delivery services skyrocketed.
A positive awareness was noticed among the participants since majority of them did not stockpile food and 44.6% of them always prepared shopping list before visiting grocery shops.
The results in the food waste section revealed that the most common method to treat the leftover food was eating it the following day and majority of the respondents tried to control food waste and were aware of the problem of food waste in the Kingdom of Bahrain, these were found to be the respondents that minimized food waste generation.
Close to 50% of the respondents did not change the amount of food waste generated during the pandemic, and the increased generation of food waste was due to increased consumption of most
of the food groups and increased grocery shopping.
The limitations present in this research are the presence of bias since most responses were university degree holders and Bahraini citizens, and absence of benchmark and data related to food consumption
and food waste.
The main recommendations suggested are to perform further studies by weighing the amount of household food waste and finding its composition, increasing campaigns on the need to decrease the amount of food consumed and the number of trips to food outlets, the need to prepare shopping lists prior to visits to the grocery, and lastly, providing assurance to support vulnerable individuals during times
of distress.
