The jury is still out on social media as a tool for reducing food waste a response to Young et al. (2017)

Young et al. (2017) conclude that “social media…cannot replicate enough of the interaction shown by face to face social influence interventions to change reported behaviour more than the control group (those that did not see the interventions)”.This statement is premature considering the weight of knowledge that has been accumulated in the behaviour change literature in fields such as psychology and medicine over the past decade. Rather than suggesting that social media cannot be used as an effective behaviour change agent in the realm of food waste we suggest that Young et al. (2017) well illustrates the importance of evidence-synthesis. The lack of behaviour change from a relatively small sample of people in a study with an untargeted intervention provides one small piece of the jigsaw.