Emotions play an oversized role in our shopping decisions, according to a new study. This is what makes most people skip the bananas with brown spots in favor of perfectly yellow ones. “We choose food based upon an expectation of what it will taste like that is bound to our feelings. So, if we expect a brown banana to not match the taste of a yellow one, we opt for the latter,” says Karin Wendin, an associate professor at the University of Copenhagen’s food science department. Approximately 716,000 tonnes (about 787 tons) of food are tossed out in Denmark every year—the majority of which are fruits and vegetables. In the United States, the USDA’s Economic Research Service estimates that 30 to 40 percent of the food supply ends up wasted, approximately 133 billion pounds of food worth $161 billion in 2010. Wendin laments this waste because brown fruit isn’t bad …