Wasted pumpkins: a real Halloween horror story
ISSN: 0007-070X
Article publication date: 22 February 2022
Issue publication date: 3 November 2022
Abstract
Purpose
This study aims to understand pumpkin waste awareness among people by converting unstructured quantitative data into insightful information to understand the public's awareness of pumpkin waste during Halloween.
Design/methodology/approach
To fulfil the study's purpose, we extracted Halloween-related tweets by employing #halloween and #pumpkin hashtags and then investigated Halloween-related tweets via a topic modelling approach, specifically Latent Dirichlet Allocation. The tweets were collected from the UK between October 25th and November 7th, 2020. The analysis was completed with 11,744 tweets.
Findings
The topic modelling results revealed that people are aware of the pumpkin waste during Halloween. Furthermore, people tweet to reduce pumpkin waste by sharing recipes for using leftover pumpkins.
Originality/value
The study offers a novel approach to convert social media data into meaningful knowledge about public perception of food waste. This paper contributes to food waste literature by revealing people's awareness of pumpkin waste during Halloween using social media analytics. Norm activation model and communicative ecology theory are used for the theoretical underpinning of topic modelling.
Keywords
Citation
Surucu-Balci, E. and Berberoglu, B. (2022), "Wasted pumpkins: a real Halloween horror story", British Food Journal, Vol. 124 No. 12, pp. 4718-4735. https://doi.org/10.1108/BFJ-07-2021-0823
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2022, Emerald Publishing Limited