The purpose of this paper is to analyze how people judge the food items they throw away at home and why they judge in such way, by the research on household food wastage.
In the analysis, most of the food items were wasted because their quality had changed as time had passed. Some of them were regarded as such by the information from human senses, and the rest, by the information regarding dates, for example, the expiry date.
Most of the food items being judged by human senses as a result because people find by chance the food items smell or look bad. Some of the food items were carefully observed because people do so routinely to judge whether the food items were fit to eat.
On the other hand, some food items were judged by the information regarding dates because people had no motive to observe carefully, as the food items were too old or as they didn't hesitate to waste them. Other reasons are that the expiry date conveyed a wrong image, that people were careful regarding some particular food items owing to one experience, or that they judge routinely by the information regarding dates without any particular reasons.
The background of regularly judging food items by the information from their senses or the dates lies in whether people know how food items change as time passes, whether they had known how to judge when they started to manage food items at home, or whether they have motives or opportunities to judge by human sense. In addition, another fact about regularly judging by the information regarding dates is that people know the meaning of the best-before and use-by date, but they don't distinguish safety from deliciousness.

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This paper examines the present conditions of accessibility of a certain section of the population to grocery stores in Japan, focusing on a comparison between urban and rural areas. We define an urban area as a DID (densely inhabited district) and a rural area as a non-DID. The population under study in this paper satisfies three criteria: (1) they reside at a distance of over 500 m from a store, (2) they do not have a car, and (3) they are aged 65 years and above. These criteria helped us identify the people most likely to find the process of shopping for food inconvenient and laborious. We estimate that for fresh food stores and for food supermarkets, 3.3 million people and 5.6 million people, respectively, satisfy these criteria. In the case of fresh food stores, the size of this population and the average distance in a non-DID are greater than in a DID. In the case of food supermarkets, however, the size of this population in a DID is greater than in a non-DID. It is thus evident that accessibility even in a DID is constrained if people desire to go shopping at a store having a greater variety of foods. However, as the average distance in a non-DID is four times greater than in a DID, the locational disadvantage faced by people in rural areas is quantitatively demonstrated.

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Population aging and a decrease in the number of food stores affect the daily food purchase of elderly people. One of the factors burdening the elderly is the distance to stores. In this study, we estimated the population for whom distance to the nearest fresh food store is over 500m in Japan. Owing to the unavailability of a reliable list of the relevant stores in Japan, we employed the grid-square statistics of Population Census and Census of Commerce. We used the probabilities of the relevant stores being more than 500m away from residences, assuming that a store and a person are uniformly distributed in the grid and that stores are located independently of one another. We estimated that, in Japan, 44 million people and above live over 500m from the nearest fresh food store. We also analyze the actual conditions of food accessibility on the basis of the result of all municipality consciousness survey. There is growing awareness that accessing food issues, on the other hand it is delay taking action.

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