I do not doubt that cookies are the biggest source of *publicly visible* food waste, but if NCL bothered to do proper analytics on this they’d probably find that cookies actually prevent a huge amount of food waste. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been craving a small sweet treat after dinner, and I pace around the buffet, thinking that nothing looks very good. I grab a couple of items, take a bite out of each, and as suspected, they aren’t very good, so I waste them. I sometimes cut them up with my fork to try to disguise the fact that the entire dish went to waste. I end up walking up to the poor cookie guardian and begging for cookies. If they’re out of cookies, I might even make a late trip to the MDR to try a couple of desserts there, but they’re rarely good and are often wasted as well. Keep in mind I would never be this wasteful on land, but I have a serious sweet tooth and I will not stop until it’s satisfied. A couple of cookies is all I need, it’s not very complicated.
I’ve run into the same issue with food. The non-specialty food on NCL is so hit or miss that I end up wasting tons of meat because I literally cannot swallow it. If they’d just make it right the first time, there would be much less waste. I find the F&B culture on NCL to be very perplexing. I think there are many cases of middle management striving greatly to *appear* to be achieving sustainable development goals set by corporate, but if a real numbers person took a look, they'd realize that it's mostly just for show.