In my previous research note, posted on the CESCAME website in March 2022, about the discovery of exceptionally low rates of household food waste in Czechia, I promised to revisit this ‘mystery of the missing food waste’ and shed some light on possible reasons for this phenomenon. With the recent publication in the British Food Journal of an article co-authored by Lucie Veselá and Lea Kubíčková from Mendel University, Brno, the time has come to pick up where I left off.

The 2022 research note hinted at the relationship between low food waste rates and households’ involvement in food self-provisioning (i.e., participation in non-commercial garden food production), related everyday behaviours and requisite skills and knowledge. These often largely invisible and unreflective practices were, in a different research context, referred to as inconspicuous adaptations (Ferenčuhová, 2022). These practices are rarely featured in the exponentially growing international scholarship on household food waste. It is surprising because productive gardening is a widespread phenomenon in many European societies, as well as in other parts of the world. For example, 55% of Czechs produce some food in their households, primarily in private gardens (Vávra et al., 2025), and 61% receive homegrown food as a gift (Jehlička and Daněk, 2017).

The British Food Journal article builds on and develops the tentative points raised in the 2002 research note. The data collection and analysis rested on the combination of two approaches. The quantitative data were obtained through repeated anonymous collections of food waste as part of mixed municipal waste, followed by waste composition analysis of a randomly selected sample. This was carried out in three types of settlements within the Brno city boundary, four times a year, a total of 12 times during the three years between 2019 and 2022. This research was combined with the qualitative data obtained through six focus groups with participants residing in the same three neighbourhoods. The focus groups were held in the autumn of 2021.

The data analysis revealed two types of interrelated patterns. The first pattern is a temporal, more precisely seasonal. There were profound, season-dependent differences in the amount of food waste. On average, the amount of waste in the summer, which is the season with the highest waste rates, exceeded the amount in spring, the season with the lowest rates, by 1.53 times. In terms of waste volume by season, the following sequence is observed, in descending order: summer, autumn, winter, and spring. The season also had a significant impact on the composition of food waste. A large part of the summer and autumn peak is accounted for by garden-grown fruit and vegetables that are harvested in these two seasons. More specifically, in Brno (population 402,000), 44% of the total annual average fruit and vegetable waste per person was discarded in a single season – in the summer, compared to 1.8 kg (19%) in the spring (Kubíčková et al., 2021). The reasons for this might include a surplus during the harvest period, spoilage induced by high summer temperatures and absence from home during the holiday period. Focus group participants were aware of the seasonality of food waste, as evidenced by the following quotation:

Also with the spoilage, you bring apples in, and it’s a fact that now I’ve thrown apples out too because they looked good in the cellar, but they just turned black [when brought] upstairs. So I think it’s more the summer and then the autumn, that’s when you kind of throw away more of these fruits or vegetables. (female apartment dweller, 53, focus group 27 October 2021)

The points made so far might appear to support the argument that gardening households produce more food than non-gardening ones, and by extension, that productive gardening is a factor that increases the amount of household food waste. In fact, the paper’s gist is the opposite. So far, I have established that gardening and garden production and food waste at the household level are intimately related. Moreover, this could be the case even for some households that, while not being directly involved in these production practices, are connected to this informal food economy only as recipients of homegrown food.

Taking this line of argument further, I want to claim that gardening, while linked to seasonal peaks in food waste, plays a major role in limiting the amount of food waste. To support what might, at first sight, appear as a counterintuitive contention, I draw on another discovery from the Brno project: Households in neighbourhoods where houses have adjacent productive gardens produce by far the lowest volumes of food waste compared to the other two types of residential areas under investigation. I feel compelled to repeat: In the context of the overall very low amounts of per capita household food waste in Brno (37 kg per capita and year, i.e., 41% of the EU average), households with gardens produce significantly lower waste rates than this already low overall amount. The amount of food waste found in bins with municipal mixed waste in residential areas, which included houses with productive gardens, was 52.5% lower than that found in multistory housing estates without gardens.

While this research does not enable me to establish the exact causes of these differences, an educated guess suggests several factors at play. One obvious benefit is that gardens enable the composting of unconsumed food, which reduces the amount of food waste in bins and provides nutrients for the soil. More importantly, and based on knowledge of food-related everyday practices in Czech society (Jehlička and Daněk, 2017; Jehlička et al., 2019; Sovová et al., 2021), I would also expect that the widespread intimate experience with food production in gardens and subsequent food processing, sharing and eating has a significant effect. It contributes to the valorisation of food – both self-provisioned and purchased - which makes it more difficult to be discarded. This research suggests, therefore, that, in a straightforward sense, the gardens can serve as both sources (producing seasonal surpluses) and sinks of food waste (through year-round composting). At the same time, however, in a more indirect manner, yet materially in a much more significant way, they also contribute to preventing food waste.

The results of the Brno household food waste study underscore the significance of seasonality and dwelling type in determining the quantity and composition of household food waste. It is striking how rarely these two factors feature in the burgeoning scholarship on household food waste. Between 2014 and 2023, out of more than 1400 articles on ‘household’ and ‘food waste’ indexed in the Web of Science database, only 11 articles addressed the issue of the seasonality of household food waste. In addition, only a handful of these papers were actually based on the material waste collection and analysis. This appears surprising, given the close relationship between food growing, a profoundly seasonal and nature-related process, and food waste. Perhaps not accidentally, with a few exceptions (Ganglbauer et al., 2013; Keegan and Breadsell, 2021), the academic literature on household food waste tends to assume that the only source of food that becomes waste is the retail sector. The understanding that the type of residential area – e.g. multistory housing estates or family homes with gardens, as two extreme examples of these types – plays an important role in household food waste quantity and composition is slightly more prevalent in academic literature than the consideration of temporality. Nonetheless, even this factor is included only in a small minority of household food waste analyses (see, for example, Edjabou et al., 2016; Adelodun et al., 2021).

In light of these findings, it is difficult to avoid concluding that household food waste scholarship should give more consideration to seasonality and the type of residential area, if it is to provide effective guidance on waste management. What needs to be borne in mind when considering this recommendation is that the vast majority of household food waste research is based on interlocutors’ estimates and recollections about the volume and composition of the food they throw away (which can be at odds with reality by a factor of 10). In rare cases, when waste composition analysis is conducted, it is typically done as a snapshot only once, without due regard for the type of residential area from which the samples are taken.

Published: 10. 12. 2025

Sources:

Adelodun, Bashir, Sang Hyun Kim, Kyung Sook Choi. 2021. „Assessment of food waste generation and composition among Korean households using novel sampling and statistical approaches“. Waste Management 122: 71-80.

Edjabou, Maklawe Essonanawe, Claus Petersen, Charlotte Scheutz, Thomas Fruergaard Astrup. 2016. „Food waste from Danish households: generation and composition“. Waste Management 52: 256-268.

Ferenčuhová, Slavomíra. 2022. „Inconspicuous adaptations to climate change in everyday life: Sustainable household responses to drought and heat in Czech cities“. Journal of Consumer Culture 22(3): 729-746.

Ganglbauer, Eva, Geraldine Fitzpatrick, Rob Comber. 2013. Negotiating food waste: Using a practice lens to inform design. ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (TOCHI) 20(2), 11.

Jehlička, Petr and Petr Daněk. 2017. „Rendering the actually existing sharing economy visible: home grown food and the pleasure of sharing“. Sociologia Ruralis, 57(3): 274-296.

Jehlička, Petr, Petr Daněk, Jan Vávra. 2019. „Rethinking resilience: Home gardening, food sharing and everyday resistance“. Canadian Journal for Development Studies / Revue canadienne d'études du développement, 40(4): 511-527.

Keegan, Emily, Jessica K. Breadsell. 2021. „Food waste and social practices in Australian households“, Sustainability 13(6), 3377.

Kubíčková, Lea, Lucie Veselá, Marcela Kormaňáková. 2021. „Food Waste Behaviour at the Consumer Level: Pilot Study on Czech Private Households“. Sustainability 13, 1311.

Sovová, Lucie, Petr Jehlička, Petr Daněk. 2021. „Growing the Beautiful Anthropocene: Ethics of Care in East European Gardens“. Sustainability 13(9), 5193.

Vávra, Jan, Petr Jehlička, Maika Ohno. 2025. „Do green fingers munch on more fruit and veggies? Health effects of home gardening“. Urban Agriculture and Regional Food Systems 10(1), e70014.