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Part I
Speed and slowness
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1 Open crowd
Just-in-time food rescue
Daisy Tam
Introduction
Food waste is a problem on the global and local agenda. Every year, 1.3 billion tonnes of food goes to waste, amounting to approximately one-third of all food produced for human consumption (FAO 2013). In sustainability discourses, this is represented as a squandering of resourcesâa waste of land, water and energy as well as the human labour and capital that went into the production of food. As an environmental issue, food waste is seen as a pollutant, the worldâs third-largest source of carbon emissions and greenhouse gases that contribute directly to global warming and climate change (FAO 2013). Alongside environmental and sustainability issues, food waste is also a major topic in food security. In this arena, food waste is represented as a missed opportunity, as there are 821 million people suffering from malnutrition and other hunger-related diseases (FAO et al. 2018).
Juxtaposed alongside these staggering figures is the question of world population growth and rapid urbanisation. The 2019 UN World Population Prospects estimates that by 2050, there will be 9.7 billion people on the planet, two-thirds of whom will be living in urban environments (United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs 2019). In these discourses, affluent places are presented as resource-intensive sites; rich countries consume double the food of developing economies, and cities account for 75 per cent of global natural resource consumption (UNEP 2013, 4). The rapid urban population growth is preceded by an even faster rate of waste production: while waste increased tenfold in the last hundred years, the figure is expected to double by 2025 and over half of that is organic food waste (Hoornweg and Bhada-Tata 2012).
These figures are commonly quoted in studies relating to food waste: from climate and environmental sciences; agriculture and nutrition; food policy and security to planning and governance. Within each discipline, how food waste is conceptualisedâthat is, how and when food becomes wasteâis understood differently, mobilising registers of different scales and measures (carbon emissions, calories, blue water footprint etc.) such that different solutions to solving the problem are generated. In this chapter, I suggest that waste, as matter out of place, is produced by temporal systems of enclosure: hoarding, either through storage or proprietorship, restricts access and eventually leads to degradation and decomposition. This can be observed in our urban commercial food systems, where edibility and waste go hand in hand. Food rescue, as a form of surplus redistribution, extends the life span of food and reduces waste by facilitating circulation. This form of food sharing has been hailed as an âall winâ solution. In practice, however, there are still many challenges that need further investigation. In this chapter, I explore the becoming and unbecoming of commercial food, attending to its temporal specificities by approaching the question of food waste as matter out of time. I also present Breadline, a web application I developed to demonstrate a possible solution to the temporal and spatial challenges of food rescue. In other words, this chapter presents my own action research on food wasteâit is both a conceptual and practical investigationâand contributes to the current lack of examples of innovative food waste management coming from Asia.
Expirationâmatter out of time
One hot summer evening, I came face-to-face with my research problem while grocery shopping at a 24-hour supermarket in Hong Kong. It was just past midnight when I brought my basket to the till. As the cashier scanned my items, she realised with the jump of the digits that the best-before date had passed, and the pot of yoghurt was no longer available for sale. Without wanting to enter into a discussion about food safety, I offered to take the pot of yoghurt for free, as this might relieve the supermarket of any liability should the yoghurt be contaminated, and I were to suffer food poisoning. But that option was not available either: instead the staff had to log the product and send it back to the manufacturer as per company guidelines, where it would be disposed of in the cityâs near-saturated landfill, and where it would continue to decompose and cause air, soil and water pollution.
Waste is commonly presented as a problem, unsightly and undesirable, and experienced as a nuisance through its qualities of dirtiness, untidiness and untimely presence. It is seen to pollute, contaminating and tarnishing the environment with its existence. However, as scholars have made clear, the discarded is not a fixed category (Evans 2014; Hawkins 2006; Strasser 1999), and studying waste is not just about understanding its inherent properties or its excess and management, but rather a question of apprehending classification systems that create and destroy value (Douglas 2001; Scanlan 2005; Thompson 1979). In other words, it requires an analysis of how things become rejected and why waste came to be.
The British anthropologist Mary Douglas demonstrates the structuring capacities of our classification systems through her study of dirt. In Purity and Danger, she distils from her observations on polluting behaviours the conclusion that dirt simply âexists in the eye of the beholderâ (2001, 2). Cleansing, as the ritualistic response to dirt, involves separating and classifying the pure from the impure, such that the concept of dirt, when abstracted from its pathogenic and hygienic qualities, is merely âmatter out of placeâ (2001, 36) and cleansing becomes a way of re-ordering the environment. In this conceptualisation, Douglas successfully argues that dirt is produced by categorical systems: âwhere there is dirt there is system. Dirt is the by-product of a systematic ordering and classification of matter, in so far as ordering involves rejecting inappropriate elementsâ (2001, 36).
Where value is concerned, what is deemed worthy in our classification systems is maintained by a balance of what is both accepted and rejected (Schor 1999). The economic idea of value comes from utility, but it also depends on exclusivity; the rejection of goods can sometimes be used to exchange, maintain or create value in different circuits. For example, in Marcel Maussâs study of potlatch societies, wasting, as the absolute form of expenditure, creates value through prestige for oneâs family or tribe. Conspicuous destruction, rather than accumulation, demonstrates the familyâs capacity for unproductive expenditure of time and money, and, as a display of wealth and superiority, it allows them to move up the social scale (Mauss 2002). In these societies, gifting is a form of socialised exchange, where the value of objects is transformed through reciprocity. The importance lies in ongoing circulation, which forms the basis of social relationships.
While our food system could not be paralleled with the Indigenous cultures of both Douglasâs and Maussâs studies, the ontological framing allows a different perspective from the established discourses of food waste. What the example of my midnight grocery excursion demonstrates is that food waste, much like the category of dirt in Douglasâs study, is matter out of place, produced by temporal enclosures and barred from circulation. Food, wasted as a result of time-stamped protocols, is literally matter out of time. Tackling the problem of food waste therefore requires a reconfiguration of our system so that we can extend the lifespan of food that is âout of time.â This changes our perspective on food waste, shifting it from a problem of storage to a problem of circulationâof how to keep things moving.
Temporal ontology of food waste
In our urban food system, constituting something as food is not as straightforward as equating it with edibility. The realities of what is considered food (and non-food) are shaped by practices of knowing, which in turn construct what is possible. This is what Mol (1999), drawing on a Foucauldian analytic, calls âmultiple ontologies,â where different ontological versions of the object create conditions of possibilities and lead to different ecologies of practice.
In our commercial industrial food system, food loss and waste occur in all steps of the value chain, from production, handling and storage, processing and packaging, distribution and retail to finally consumption. In general, âfood loss and wasteâ is a term that refers to the phenomenon when things that are valued as foodââthe edible parts of plants and animals that are produced or harvested for human consumptionâ (Lipinski et al. 2013, 1)âare not ultimately eaten. However, within the food industry, a further distinction is made, defining food loss as âfood that spills, spoils, incurs an abnormal reduction in quality such as bruising or wilting, or otherwise gets lost before it reaches the consumerâ (Lipinski et al. 2013, 1). Food waste, on the other hand, refers to âfood that is of good quality and fit for human consumption but that does not get consumed because it is discardedâeither before or after it spoilsâ (Lipinski et al. 2013, 1). In this conception, loss and waste are defined by intention, the former understood as the unintended result of agricultural processes or technical limitations, while the latter is the result of negligence or a conscious decision to throw food away. This particular ontology frames food waste as two distinct problems: a question of optimisation in the production cycle, and an issue of awareness on the consumption end. Within this understanding, food loss can be tackled by creating better infrastructure in supply chains, and on the other hand, improving consumer awareness and household management. A recent study found that up to 600 tonnes of food waste produced in the retail and consumer sector could be prevented, with a corresponding saving of up to $260 billion annually (Hegnsholt et al. 2018). While this may be the case, this separation between intentional and unintentional wasting does not account for the obsolescence of food loss generated as part of the normal production cycles of commercial food.
In the industrial process, edible products go through cycles of becoming and unbecoming food. In other words, the conditions under which things become food (Blake 2019; Nyman 2019) and the ways edibility is maintained (Morrow 2018; Weymes and Davies 2019) are a relational process shaped by rules and regulations as much as degradation caused by human and non-human actors (Davies and Evans 2019; Midgley 2014). Here I would like to articulate the particular ontology of commercial food through the lens of time. Commercial food is defined by a series of time-bound processes. The conditions of how and when things become defined as food, surplus and waste (and what is then done with them) are all bound by temporal enclosures. In the commercial food supply chain, edible materials become viable food products only if they do what it says on the tin. This means having the right content in the right amount that matches the label on the packaging, calculated during normal speed of production. âFoodâ in this context comprises not just the edible material, but also the packaging and the production process, including machinery and labour, branding and food regulations (Blake 2019). For example, during the manufacturing process, machines need to reach a certain speed of calibrated flow; when a part of the process is faulty or when recipes or product line changes, machines continue to operate as it is more resource-intensive to reset. The interim outputs are redirected to waste, which, while edible, is not sellable as it does not meet industry standards (Blake 2018). Packaging is also part of the becoming of food: quality and appearance are maintained often by modifying the atmosphere inside the packaging, literally trapping matter in time (see also Tam and Hall 2019). Much of the debate around packaging protocols such as best-before dates also revolves around what is edible but not commercially viable. Best-before dates have their roots in the 1970s, when the British supermarket chain Marks and Spencer introduced the sell-by date as a stock control aid to retailers to ensure a certain turnover of goods (Blythman 2015). Today it is used to indicate the shelf life of a product, a manufacturerâs guarantee to ensure the appearance and texture of the food. Edibility is not part of that concern but consumer confusion around the topic is nonetheless a significant source of waste (Li and Leung 2017; Rosengren 2017; Sawa 2019).
In trying to alleviate the issue of food waste, there is first a need to distinguish between the different types of waste and where, when and how they are produced. By articulating the becoming and unbecoming of food, I am highlighting the conditions of possibility generated within the temporal ontology of commercial foods. Here, edibility is not necessarily valued as the intrinsic quality of food. Products that are edible but classified as commercially nonviableâwhich is still food but treated as wasteâare lost not because of negligence or lack of optimisation, but because a system that is geared around efficiency and viability in fact produces them as waste. In a profit-driven production line where time is of the essence, the most efficient way of using money, labour and food resources is to waste.
Food rescue: tackling temporal enclosures
Food that is fit for consumption but not commercially viable is considered surplusâtolerated losses within the normal production cycle, which occur as a result of faulty or excess production during manufacturing. At the retail stage, overstocking, slow sales or unsold goods that are too close to their end-of-life cycle are also written off as loss. It has been observed that many retailers destroy surpluses at the end of the day by pouring bleach or other contaminants onto the food itself, rendering it inedible and unsalvageable (Lo 2012). This intentional (albeit not publicly conspicuous) destruction serves to maintain the value of commercial products. As a shop manager from a local supermarket chain in Hong Kong explained to me, âIf people can come take it for free, then who would pay full price for our products?â Shop staff who are generally tasked with the destruction of food justify the act by saying, âWe donât want people to eat the food and get sick. This [pouring bleach] would discourage them [from dumpster diving].â Maintaining optimum pricing of the product or avoiding liability are common responses when retailers are questioned about such practices.
The act of wilfully destroying food can be understood as a result of proprietorship. Claiming ownership, whether via appropriation through pollution (Serres 2011), or through accumulation and stockpiling, constructs enclosures by restricting access. Although these acts of privatisation are intended to preserve and safeguard food, in fact they contribute directly to the decay of edible produce. Waste that occurs under such circumstances is not so much a squandering of resources as an expenditure, one that results from enclosure and containment (see also Tam et al. 2016). In the context of food as a carrier for potential profit (Clapp 2014), it also demonstrates the enclosure as the continuous characteristic of capital logic (De Angelis 2004). Food rescue, or surplus food distribution, shifts food away from its commoditised ontological state. Donating extends the life cycle of surplus food by facilitating its circulatio...
