Routledge Handbook of Food Waste

Christian Reynolds, Tammara Soma, Charlotte Spring, Jordon Lazell, Christian Reynolds, Tammara Soma, Charlotte Spring, Jordon Lazell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781138615861
• eBook ISBN: 9780429870699
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Technology & Engineering

This comprehensive handbook represents a definitive state of the current art and science of food waste from multiple perspectives.

The issue of food waste has emerged in recent years as a major global problem. Recent research has enabled greater understanding and measurement of loss and waste throughout food supply chains, shedding light on contributing factors and practical solutions. This book includes perspectives and disciplines ranging from agriculture, food science, industrial ecology, history, economics, consumer behaviour, geography, theology, planning, sociology, and environmental policy among others. The Routledge Handbook of Food Waste addresses new and ongoing debates around systemic causes and solutions, including behaviour change, social innovation, new technologies, spirituality, redistribution, animal feed, and activism. The chapters describe and evaluate country case studies, waste management, treatment, prevention, and reduction approaches, and compares research methodologies for better understanding food wastage.

This book is essential reading for the growing number of food waste scholars, practitioners, and policy makers interested in researching, theorising, debating, and solving the multifaceted phenomenon of food waste.

PART I

Understanding modern food waste regimes

Historical, economic, and spiritual dimensions

How did we get here? The four chapters in Part I offer several answers to this overarching question, aiming to understand the issue of contemporary food waste through a glimpse into the history, political economy, and regimes of consumption that have shaped and structured the pathways that have led us to the present. The chapters offer perspectives from anthropology, geography, history, and theology. Diverse approaches to understanding contemporary food waste issues are, and will continue to be, critical in the search for solutions. Together, these four chapters demonstrate transformations in how food has been valued, re-valued, framed, and re-framed throughout economic regimes, spiritual traditions, and historical timelines.

Part I’s chapters begin a journey of understanding the shocking food waste statistics we have grown used to hearing. Some chapters demonstrate that there is nothing accidental about massive wastage. As anthropologist David Boarder Giles argues in ‘After market: capital, surplus, and the social afterlives of food waste’, much of the wastage that we see (or do not see) is deliberate. Giles questions the actual efficiency of market-based capitalist economies that invest in the cultivation, processing, manufacturing, transportation, and sales of food, only for it to be thrown away. Giles’ chapter highlights multiple forms of biopolitical labour through which food becomes waste. However, surpluses culled by commerce – what he terms abject capital – form the basis of after-market, “shadow” economies of solidarity and food sharing with those marginalised from market life. Considering policies and corporate initiatives that also seek to make use of surpluses, Giles notes that these efforts nevertheless ‘leave the linear capitalist value chain unchallenged’. Food’s wastage as abject capital is not an accidental symptom, that systematic dis-use (desuetude) is what itself manufactures the scarcity upon which capitalist value-making is premised, upholding uneven processes of growth and marginalisation in contemporary market economies.

Complementing Giles, Jon Cloke’s chapter, ‘Interrogating waste: vastogenic regimes in the 21st century’, describes systems that both generate and profit from waste. The regime approach to food waste follows from McMichael (2009) and Friedmann (2016)’s regime analyses (Gille (2012) applies this to food waste). Cloke coins the term ‘vastogenesis’, defined through the premise that waste generation is a critical component of mass consumption. Cloke analyses appetite-creation as one of the driving forces of vastogenesis, and outlines examples of how arbitrary marketing or classification standards (e.g. of apples), and best-before date legal requirements, serve to send food products to landfill despite their edibility and safety (for more on the issue of date labels, see Milne (2012)). Cloke’s chapter also timelines the mechanisms and infrastructures that enabled the acceleration of food waste. These waste-accelerating mechanisms made massive transportation, storage, and consumption of food possible. The chapter also explains how diverse products are launched and are de-listed shortly after, as part of the ‘appetite-creation’ process that leads to wastage.

In Chapter 2, Andrew F. Smith of the New School outlines a historical trajectory of food waste (and its problematisation) in a chapter aptly titled ‘The perfect storm’. From wartime propaganda materials encouraging citizens not to waste, to the growth of supermarket chains, food packaging, and the rise of food banks, Smith’s overview helps to contextualise the ebb and flow of food waste in societal consciousness. The chapter describes stakeholders who have become involved in campaigning for food waste awareness and reduction, from not-for-profit organisations to mainstream authors, celebrity chefs, and individual champions. He argues that the current trajectory of food waste awareness (emerging rapidly after 2008’s global price crisis) will continue to grow, as concerns around climate change and interest in economic opportunities from technological solutions become more widespread (see Barnard and Mourad, this volume, on how ‘awareness-raising’ solutions may fail to address systemic causes).

In ‘Food waste, religion and spirituality: Jewish, Christian, and Muslim approaches’, Tanhum Yoreh and Stephen Bede Scharper, scholars of theology, introduce the reader to ways in which Judaism, Christianity, and Islam approach the issue of food waste. The chapter engages with scripture and case studies from the three religions, showcasing the legal, ethical, and moral frameworks that admonish the respective faith communities to shun profligate wastefulness. The chapter also provides examples of how the three faith communities have mobilised to prevent and reduce waste. Yoreh and Scharper conclude that as faith communities have strong imperatives not to waste food, these communities may serve as worthwhile allies in the wider movement to prevent and reduce food waste.

Thus, the chapters in Part I introduce some of the complexity of the contemporary food waste problem, mirroring the complexity of dominant food systems. Here we are not speaking about leftovers or food scraps: the ‘unavoidable’ food waste (avocado pits, egg shells, clam shells) that is easily degradable and, in an ideal world – at an ideal scale – remnants that can be seamlessly incorporated as part of the natural environment back into a regenerative food production, or returned as nutrients back into the soil, the forest, the sand, river, and/or the sea. Contemporary issues around food waste reveal its global nature, with regimes that span multiple jurisdictions, involving both state and non-state actors, numerous types of packaging, cultures, and regulations. Food waste is also occurring at a scale (amount and cost) that defies individual interventions. Finally, due to the opaque nature of current international food trade, policies, and regulations, at an individual level, understanding the issues that lead to global wastage can be difficult. The chapters in Part I will hopefully assist readers and food waste scholars to better understand the historical, economic regimes, and spiritual trajectories of contemporary food waste.

References

Friedmann, Harriet (2016). Commentary: Food Regime Analysis and Agrarian Questions: Widening the Conversation. The Journal of Peasant Studies, 43(3), pp. 671–692.

Gille, Zsuzsa (2012). From Risk to Waste: Global Food Waste Regimes. The Sociological Review, 60, pp. 27–46.

McMichael, Philip (2009). A Food Regime Genealogy. The Journal of Peasant Studies, 36(1), pp. 139–169.

Milne, Richard (2012). Arbiters of Waste: Date Labels, The Consumer and Knowing Good, Safe Food. The Sociological Review, 60, pp. 84–101.

1

After Market

Capital, surplus, and the social afterlives of food waste

David Boarder Giles

Introduction

Business as usual makes great waste. Much of it, edible. Somewhere, a perfectly ripe peach reposes in a supermarket dumpster because customers prefer one with a longer shelf-life. Day-old bread is pulled from bakery shelves to make room for fresh-baked loaves. An ugly potato lies in the fields. Extra pizzas are baked just to spruce up the buffet. Single-origin, fair-trade chocolate is poured in excess because the machines take time to shut down. A sealed, organic smoothie is abandoned by the distributor because its “best-by” (not even “use-by”) date is too near its delivery schedule. And so on. At first glance, it seems incongruous that market economies—reputedly bastions of efficiency—should invest in the cultivation, refinement, manufacture, and transport of all that food, only to throw it away. Nonetheless, across the industrialised world they do. To what ends? What becomes of it?

Over the last decade, a wellspring of concern about food waste has emerged from the triumvirate of ecological, economic, and political anxieties that define our age. The lion’s share of public responses centre fickle consumers or technical inefficiencies. But as Tristram Stuart suggests, these narratives are a convenient exculpation for agribusiness and food retailers, ostensibly beholden to their customers’ demands (2009). In other words, they let capitalism off the hook.

In contrast, my ethnographic research in Seattle, Melbourne, and other American and Australasian cities has located the origins of these surpluses in the rhythms of commerce itself. I have traced the afterlives to which they are consigned both by dumpster-diving in the commercial waste stream and through participant-observation with chapters of Food Not Bombs (FNB), a global movement of anarchist soup kitchens who retrieve capitalist grocery surpluses, by dumpster and donation, prepare them safely, and distribute them in public spaces—usually to people who are homeless or hungry, and often in defiance of city feeding restrictions. (I will return to these below.) In this way, I have explored those waste-making regimes of late capitalism that render obsolete the former commodity that is yet edible.

While such surpluses abdicate their exchange value, this chapter agues, they nonetheless circulate elsewhere, establishing critical sites for the social reproduction—or transformation—of capitalism. From food banks in church basements to opportunistic after-market social enterprises, they remain structurally imbricated in the production of waste, value, and capital. As such, this chapter explores broad, polyvalent relationships among different economic sectors often ignored by recent work on food waste, from formal efforts such as the UK’s “Love Food, Hate Waste” campaign to exposés like Jonathan Bloom’s blog wastedfood.com, or the documentary film Dive!. Such popular interventions may save the spotty pear from the tip, but they rarely challenge the structure of the commodity chain that consigned it thereto. My goals here are twofold: first, to digest my research to-date on commercial food waste, waste-making labour, and after-market economies (e.g. Giles 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016); and second, to trace incipient trends in the commercial production, recapture, and recirculation of unspoiled food surpluses which may suggest something about the future of capitalism itself.

To that end, this chapter develops four related themes: (1) the role of edible commercial food waste and other useful-but-abandoned commodities, which I term “abject capital” (Giles 2014), in the production of capitalist value; (2) the waste-making labours that render commodities abject; (3) the non-market “shadow economies” constituted by food charities that simultaneously redistribute abject capital and segregate it from the market; (4) emergent practices of capitalist reclamation and recapitalisation, from profitable social enterprises that resell retail cast-offs, to energy generation through anaerobic digestion, by which supermarkets recoup the caloric surplus value trapped within their food surpluses. These reclamations, I argue, represent incipient possible futures for capital accumulation, allowing businesses to reclaim their waste and bolster their bottom line without fundamentally restructuring their commodity chains. In such ways, I argue, may the capitalism of the Anthropocene seek to throw away its cake and eat it too.

Abject capital

“I mean things that you find in dumpsters, you know?” gushes Karen. After dumpster-diving in Australia and the United States, she is gushing about her favourite discoveries. “A whole bag of plastic chopsticks that haven’t been opened. And dolls. And clothes. And—what else—mango chutney.”

“Anything you want,” chimes in her partner, Terry. “Toilet paper,” says Karen. “Scented toilet paper,” adds Terry. “Yeah scented toilet paper,” affirms Karen. “Anything and everything, if you keep it up. I mean just the other day, an entire dumpster full of oranges. An entire dumpster.”

Seven decades and several thousand miles removed from Steinbeck’s classic The Grapes of Wrath, Karen and Terry are not consciously invoking his description of the Depression’s forbidden fruits. But the resonance would not be lost on them: Steinbeck wrote of the bitter taste left by the fruits of agricultural and ecological labour, destroyed to maintain prices. Truckloads of oranges and other bounty, left to rot on the ground. “The people came for miles to take the fruit,” he wrote, “but this could not be. How would they buy oranges at twenty cents a dozen if they could drive out and pick them up?” (Steinbeck 2006 [1939]: 348–349). Steinbeck’s oranges were doused in kerosene and left in the Californian fields. Karen an...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• Food waste: an introduction to contemporary food waste studies
• PART I: Understanding modern food waste regimes: historical, economic, and spiritual dimensions
• PART II: Food waste (and loss) along the food supply chain and institutions
• PART III: Overview of regional food waste: research, policy, and legal approaches
• PART IV: Methodologies in food waste studies
• PART V: Solutions to food waste?
• PART VI: Debates in food waste studies and looking ahead
• Index