Why Knowledge Alone Fails to Stop Food Waste in South Africa’s Informal Communities

In the informal communities of South Africa’s Fezile Dabi District, a striking paradox unfolds in household kitchens every day. Families who know how to cook, who understand the value of food, and who live with the daily reality of hunger still throw edible food away. A new study published in Frontiers in Sustainable Resource Management suggests that this paradox is not a failure of individual willpower or awareness, but the predictable outcome of a system in which knowledge, infrastructure and human motivation collide. Using a behavioral science framework known as COM-B, researchers from the Vaal University of Technology have re-examined survey data from 433 residents across four informal communities, revealing that food waste in low-income settings is shaped just as much by unreliable electricity and family preferences as by any lack of knowledge.

The stakes of this question are enormous. Globally, food waste occurs alongside persistent hunger: in 2024, an estimated 673 million people experienced hunger, while 2.3 billion faced moderate to severe food insecurity. South Africa sits squarely inside this contradiction. Approximately 10 million tons of food are wasted in the country every year, nearly one-third of national food production, representing an economic loss of roughly 61.5 billion rand annually. Yet 19.7 percent of South African households still experience moderate to severe food insecurity. Households that reduce waste could save as much as 1,200 rand per month, a substantial sum in communities where unemployment is high and food expenditure consumes a large share of income. The coexistence of waste and want, researchers argue, represents an unresolved public health and nutrition concern.

The study is a secondary analysis, meaning the researchers did not collect new data but instead revisited an existing dataset through a new theoretical lens. The original survey, conducted between June and August 2023, captured household food practices among adults involved in food purchasing or preparation in four communities of the Fezile Dabi District, an agricultural region that produces grain and maize and contributes roughly two-thirds of the district’s economic value. The researchers mapped previously collected factors, such as cooking knowledge, storage conditions, shopping habits and family meal preferences, onto the three components of the COM-B framework: Capability, Opportunity and Motivation. Developed by behavioral scientists Susan Michie, Maartje van Stralen and Robert West in 2011, COM-B proposes that any behavior arises from the interaction of these three elements, and that interventions fail when they address only one.

The capability findings reveal a sobering gap between knowing and doing. A large majority of participants, 83.8 percent, reported possessing cooking knowledge, and 85.9 percent said their skills were self-taught or learned from family and friends. More than half, 54.0 percent, were aware of waste management strategies. Yet only 21.5 percent reported always applying such strategies in practice. In COM-B terms, psychological capability, the knowledge and mental skills needed to perform a behavior, was broadly present but did not translate into consistent waste-reduction behavior. This echoes a well-established finding in behavioral research: knowledge is a foundation for change but rarely sufficient on its own. Skills acquired informally in home kitchens, the authors note, may equip people to prepare food adequately without equipping them to manage surplus, spoilage and leftovers systematically.

Opportunity, the environmental component of the framework, emerged as the most visible constraint. A striking 84.3 percent of participants reported an unreliable electricity supply, despite 91.7 percent having access to a refrigerator or freezer. Nearly half, 49.4 percent, said that the type and adequacy of storage influenced how much food they wasted, and 58.0 percent relied on public transport to access food retail. The picture that emerges is one of households whose preservation technology exists on paper but fails in practice: a refrigerator without dependable power cannot protect food from spoilage, and a freezer that thaws repeatedly can accelerate it. In COM-B terms, physical opportunity, the environmental conditions that enable or constrain behavior, limits whether knowledge and skill can be applied at all. This helps explain why education-only campaigns often underperform in resource-constrained settings.

Motivation, the third component, exposed the tension between good intentions and automatic habits. Shopping lists, a classic tool of reflective planning, were widely used but frequently abandoned: 39.5 percent of participants said they made a list but made decisions in-store anyway, 22.6 percent shopped without any list, and 37.8 percent expected to deviate from their list before they even entered the shop. Food monitoring was similarly weak, with 23.1 percent of participants reporting that they only realized food would be wasted when it was visibly moldy or smelled spoiled. Another 16.4 percent identified excess dishing that went unfinished, and 12.2 percent cited incorrect storage. These patterns point to automatic motivation, the habits, impulses and emotional responses that operate alongside conscious plans, quietly overriding reflective intentions at the moment of purchase and preparation.

Social dynamics inside the household added another layer of complexity. Half of the participants, 50.8 percent, reported that family members wanted to eat something different from what had been cooked, and 29.3 percent said waste resulted from switching cooking methods. Meanwhile, 57.0 percent admitted preparing more food than a single meal required, and 53.6 percent said they intentionally cooked extra. In COM-B terms, these are expressions of social opportunity: the preferences and expectations of others shape what gets cooked, how much gets portioned, and what ends up in the bin. Even participants who considered food waste an important concern found their intentions disrupted by household routines and the tastes of the people they fed. Waste, in this light, is partly a relational behavior, negotiated between cooks and eaters rather than decided by individuals alone.

Taken together, the findings argue forcefully against single-cause explanations of food waste. A household can hold cooking knowledge yet lack the electricity to preserve food; it can plan a shopping trip yet surrender to impulse in the aisle; it can value thrift yet cook for a family whose preferences change daily. The authors emphasize that these components are interconnected rather than independent, and that the behavioral capacity to reduce waste must be understood alongside the material conditions in which food decisions occur. This is particularly important in informal communities, where infrastructural and economic constraints can limit household agency regardless of personal commitment. The study is careful to note its own limits: it used a descriptive design reporting frequencies rather than testing causal relationships, the original questionnaire was not designed as a validated COM-B instrument, and age-related interpretations remain speculative pending further research.

The practical implications are correspondingly integrated. The authors recommend socio-technical interventions that operate on all three COM-B fronts simultaneously. On capability, this means food literacy programs covering storage, preservation, portioning and the safe reuse of leftovers. On opportunity, it means supporting households to adapt storage practices to unreliable power, and exploring community-based solutions such as shared or decentralized cold-storage facilities and low-energy refrigeration technologies, alongside composting for unavoidable waste. On motivation, it means promoting grocery lists, meal planning, expiry-date monitoring and stock rotation, potentially reinforced through accessible digital tools such as mobile reminders and WhatsApp messages localized into indigenous African languages. The point is not to choose between education and infrastructure, but to recognize that neither works without the other.

What makes this study notable is its setting. Most household food waste research has been conducted in high-income countries with reliable grids and abundant refrigeration, where waste is largely a matter of over-purchasing and portioning. In Fezile Dabi’s informal communities, waste emerges under conditions of scarcity, where every spoiled potato carries a real nutritional and economic cost. By demonstrating that the COM-B framework can organize behavioral evidence even in structurally constrained environments, the researchers offer a template for understanding food waste as it actually occurs for hundreds of millions of people. If the goal is progress toward the Sustainable Development Goals on hunger and responsible consumption, the message is clear: reducing food waste in vulnerable communities requires fixing the conditions of the kitchen, not just the knowledge of the cook.

Subject of Research: Household food waste behavior in informal South African communities analyzed through the COM-B behavioral framework

Article Title: Household food waste behavior in informal communities: a secondary analysis through the COM-B framework

Article References: Ebuzeme Eze, P., Oosthuizen, D., & Mofokeng, J. (2026). Household food waste behavior in informal communities: a secondary analysis through the COM-B framework. Frontiers in Sustainable Resource Management, 5, Article 1921659. https://doi.org/10.3389/fsrma.2026.1921659

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/fsrma.2026.1921659

Keywords: food waste, COM-B framework, informal communities, South Africa, food security, behavioral science, household behavior, electricity supply, food literacy, sustainable consumption, Fezile Dabi, refrigeration