Theses and Dissertations from UMD

Permanent URI for this communityhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2

New submissions to the thesis/dissertation collections are added automatically as they are received from the Graduate School. Currently, the Graduate School deposits all theses and dissertations from a given semester after the official graduation date. This means that there may be up to a 4 month delay in the appearance of a give thesis/dissertation in DRUM

More information is available at Theses and Dissertations at University of Maryland Libraries.

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    EXPLORATION OF THE FOOD WASTE ENVIRONMENT IN THE UNIVERSITY SETTING AND ITS IMPLICATIONS TOWARD A SUSTAINABLE FOOD SYSTEM
    (2020) Pavone, Lauren; Song, Hee-Jung; Nutrition; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    Americans are throwing away an alarmingly high amount of food. As highlighted in this thesis project, a multitude of factors account for why food waste occurs, but also a significant potential exists for food waste reduction. The purpose of this research was to investigate the food waste environment in the university setting to better understand where to focus food waste reduction strategies. The volume of student plate waste was quantified, and the nutritional and environmental value of this plate waste was calculated. Further, a behavioral survey guided by the Theory of Planned Behavior helped to identify the key factors influencing food waste behaviors in this setting. Plate waste was found to be 5%-14% of all food served in the dining hall facility. The top three food groups that were most frequently discarded included starch and added sugars, fruits and vegetables and whole grains. Food waste related behaviors were found to be strongly influenced by having the confidence and skills for proper food management, feeling guilty about throwing food away, and having financial concerns related to food waste. The results of this research suggest that student plate waste is a significant problem with enormous potential for food waste reduction.
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    ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACTS OF CHANING DIETARY QUALITY
    (2018) He, Pan; Baiocchi, Giovanni; Geography; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    The food sector has been recognized as a significant contributor to multiple environmental issues including GHG emissions, water shortage and contamination, ecological disruption, etc., while the malnutrition issues has been increasingly affecting global public health over the years, especially in developing countries such as China where the diet patterns have been shifting considerably over the decades. To develop a sustainable diet that can minimize the environmental impact while meeting nutritional quality targets within economic affordability and cultural acceptability, knowledge is required on how these aspects are interconnected via dietary patterns not only for different countries but also across heterogeneous subnational socio-economic status. The overall aim of this research is to quantitatively evaluate the environmental impacts and nutritional quality of different dietary patterns characterized by socio-economic status. With this overarching question, this study explores three specific research questions that address the historical and assumed dietary patterns at different scales: 1) How have the environmental impact of the Chinese dietary patterns changed with the human nutritional quality for different socio-economic groups over the years? 2) How would an improvement in nutrition quality change the dietary environmental footprints in China? 3) How would the global adoption of healthy diets affect the environmental impacts in each country caused by agricultural production? This dissertation is a synthesized analysis combining the environmental impact accounting and dietary quality evaluation. It links individual food consumption records with environmental impact factors and dietary recommendations to quantitatively analyze the nutrition-environmental nexus for individuals from different income groups, living areas, and countries, and compare how such nexus differ by these socio-economic features. In this way, this dissertation identifies opportunities and challenges in achieving a “win-win” solution for protecting the natural environment and improving public health jointly for individuals from various socio-economic contexts. Its findings provide implications for goal setting and cost-benefit analysis of integrative policymaking concerning joint nutrition development and environmental management.