Purpose The world is focused on many levels of sustainable development, including food literacy and food waste. Students are the foundation of sustainability and talent education. This study examines how sustainable food literacy, culinary professional competence of surplus food use, culinary learning efficiency and culinary self-efficacy jointly influence students’ sustainable behavioral intentions in culinary education. Design/methodology/approach We used this model to examine students’ personal sustainable food literacy, culinary professional competence of surplus food use, culinary learning efficiency, culinary self-efficacy and sustainable behavior intention. This study was conducted using a survey questionnaire, and we adopted partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) to examine the relationships between the dimensions. Findings According to the PLS-SEM, sustainable food literacy positively affected culinary professional competence of surplus food use and culinary learning efficiency; culinary professional competence of surplus food use positively affected culinary learning efficiency and culinary learning efficiency positively affected culinary self-efficacy and sustainable behavior intention. This study verified that there were significant relationships between the dimensions. The findings indicate that culinary professional competence of surplus food use was a mediator between sustainable food literacy and culinary learning efficiency; cooking self-efficacy was a mediator between culinary learning efficiency and sustainable behavioral intention. Originality/value The findings of this study provide valuable insights into the factors that influence students’ sustainable behaviors from a culinary learning perspective. Specifically, the results suggest that a school’s emphasis on and integration of sustainable food literacy can indirectly enhance the effectiveness of culinary education and strengthen students’ understanding and practice of sustainable behaviors. Furthermore, the validated framework proposed in this study contributes to the development of sustainability-related competencies in culinary education, supporting global efforts toward achieving the sustainable development goals.
Lu et al. (Fri,) studied this question.