CFCWR Blog
Building Food Skills to Improve Health and Reduce Waste: An Inside Look at the Nourish Research Study
Written by: Brenna Ellison, Divya Patel, and Melissa Pflugh Prescott
Overeating and food waste are big problems in the U.S. – but how can this be? If we are overeating, that should mean we are wasting less, right? Unfortunately, data suggests this is not the case. In the U.S., 40.3% of adults are considered to be obese. At the same time, we know that 30-40% of food that is produced ends up wasted, with households accounting for a large share of this waste.
So what’s going on? Overeating and food waste are likely outcomes of having an overabundance of food. One could argue that this is better than not having enough, yet 13.5% of U.S. households experience food insecurity. Further, if we ultimately waste the food surplus we have, we are also wasting the resources that went into producing it, such as land, water, and energy.
You might be thinking to yourself…these are big problems. So what can we actually do about them? We’ve spent years thinking about these questions too! While we don’t have all the answers, a research project we are working on considers whether cooking (yes, cooking!) could be a tool to help households eat better and reduce waste.
Our Research
Over the past several years, our team has been working on developing an educational curriculum called Nourish. Nourish is designed to be a 9-week program that builds individuals’ food skills and their ability to get the most out of their food dollars; the program covers topics like meal planning, grocery shopping (on a budget, of course, because food is expensive!!), safe food handling practices, food storage, cooking with leftovers, and what we like to call “improv cooking” – cooking with what you have on hand. We like to think of it as the almost natural, inherent skills that our moms or grandparents had, but somehow didn’t quite pass on to us. 😊
Something we really like about the Nourish program is that we are not only providing education, but participants also practice making home-cooked meals that are delicious and nourishing using ingredients readily available in their pantries. Program participants receive food bundles and useful cooking gadgets each week so they can practice their new food skills at home without having to spend the money up front to see if it really works – because we all need help stretching our food dollars right now, am I right?!
The next obvious question: Does nourish work?
While we only have data from a small pilot study in Cleveland, OH, the initial results are encouraging. We recently presented some of our preliminary results at the 2025 Society of Nutrition Education and Behavior Conference in Indianapolis, IN. Here are some of our key findings:
- Individuals who participated in the Nourish program reported increased satisfaction and confidence in food management behaviors such as meal planning, shopping, and food storage. Note: this is compared to a control group that did not receive the Nourish intervention (don’t worry, though – this group got to go through the program at a later date!).
- Nourish participants also significantly improved their food literacy – essentially food knowledge and behaviors that will help them make their food go further.
- Participants who frequently planned meals, shopped effectively (such as using a grocery list), and stored food in a way that enables utilizing it before it spoils all had higher food resilience, meaning they were better able to handle unexpected shocks or changes in their home food environment.
This early evidence is exciting because a resilience-oriented approach may be effective in helping individuals overcome common barriers like schedule changes or missing ingredients to cook nourishing meals at home and achieve better health and well-being.
Again, these are early results – we are excited, but have more work to do!
What’s next?
We are currently implementing the Nourish program with a much larger group in the Cleveland community, so we hope to have more data to support the findings we share here. Additionally, we are working on pilot data analyses to see if the Nourish program helped participants reduce food waste at home. More to come – stay tuned!
Lastly – a big THANK YOU to the National Science Foundation, which is providing funding support for the Nourish program (NSF Award #2115405), our fantastic team of students who make it possible to run the Nourish program, and the participants who shared their time with us during the pilot!
This work is supported by the Agriculture and Food Research Initiative, project award no. 2024-68015-42110, from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture. Any opinions, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this publication are those of the author(s) and should not be construed to represent any official USDA or U.S. Government determination or policy.