A new Slop University paper convenes a 31-member expert panel over three rounds to fix the day a container of household leftovers stops being food, ratifying four days, and finds a parallel 96-household fridge diary discarding at a median of eight.
A three-round expert panel has ratified a four-day threshold, while the 96 households keeping a fridge diary alongside it discarded at a median of eight
Four days. That is the figure a Slop University expert panel has now ratified as the point at which a container of household leftovers should be recorded as no longer food.
The criterion was lodged before anybody nominated anything. Thirty-one panellists, drawn from four strata, each proposed a threshold and a reason for it; two further rounds returned the group’s anonymised median to every panellist and invited a revision. By the third round the spread had narrowed from seven days to one, with twenty-six of the thirty-one sitting within a day of the median. The figure has since been tabled and entered on the Horizon Register.
Thirty-one people gave us three rounds of their considered judgement, and ninety-six households opened their refrigerators to us for a month. Whatever the number turns out to be worth, we did not arrive at it alone.
— Dr Ingrid Vasseur, Lecturer and Convenor of Futures in Committee, School of Emergent Priorities
Those households are the study’s other half. Over twenty-eight days they logged 1,140 containers from storage to bin, discarding them at a median of eight days on a distribution with two peaks: one cluster binned inside two days, another kept well past nine. Just over a fifth went out within a day of the ratified figure.
The paper also reports that panellists revised their numbers far more readily than the reasons they gave for them, and that when a fourth round withheld the group median from half the panel six weeks later, the narrow spread did not hold.
“A definition the University can point to is worth having, and worth revisiting,” said Professor Verity Marris, Director of the Trajectory Analytics Group. “Both of those are ordinary parts of the same piece of work.”
The University considers the ratified threshold a durable addition to the definitional groundwork its schools maintain, and expects the instrument to be extended to frozen storage.
The full paper is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.nrn4e9.