Food Waste

Home Consumption, Material Culture and Everyday Life

David M. Evans

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780857852335
• eBook ISBN: 9780857852342
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Agricultural Public Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In recent years, food waste has risen to the top of the political and public agenda, yet until now there has been no scholarly analysis applied to the topic as a complement and counter-balance to campaigning and activist approaches. Using ethnographic material to explore global issues, Food Waste unearths the processes that lie behind the volume of food currently wasted by households and consumers. The author demonstrates how waste arises as a consequence of households negotiating the complex and contradictory demands of everyday life, explores the reasons why surplus food ends up in the bin, and considers innovative solutions to the problem. Drawing inspiration from studies of consumption and material culture alongside social science perspectives on everyday life and the home, this lively yet scholarly book is ideal for students and researchers from a wide range of disciplines, along with anyone interested in understanding the food that we waste.

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Bringing Waste to The Table

Having opened with some grounded and situated stories, this chapter takes a step back to scale the heights of the broader academic debates and emerging political concerns that provide the impetus for writing (and reading) a book about food waste. I begin by discussing recent trends across the social sciences, and in cultural theory, that have begun to position “waste” as intellectually interesting before drawing attention to the neglect of food in the midst of these developments. Accordingly I make a case for paying social scientific attention to food waste, both in terms of contributing to the development of waste scholarship and engaging with an issue that is of increasing importance in the realms of policy and regulation, cultural politics, and environmental debate. With that in place, I map out how the book will proceed and the approach to food waste that will be taken here.

WASTE MATTERS

It is perhaps a little peculiar to start with the assertion that waste could in any way matter and it is perhaps more peculiar still to suggest that it could be of intellectual or analytic significance. Traditionally waste has been approached in very particular ways, giving rise to an academic division of labor in which it has long been invisible to the gaze of the social sciences. To understand this, it is important to summarize the (implicit) assumptions that have conventionally been made about waste. They are as follows: (1) that it is a fixed and self-evident category—an innate characteristic of certain things or things in a certain state; (2) that things categorized as waste are either worthless or harmful, and so in need of being separated and distanced from the societies that produced them; (3) that this separation and distancing is a task for waste management and simultaneously, that things are categorized as waste on the basis of their need to be managed (Gregson and Crang 2010); and (4) that waste is located at the end-of-pipe and so is uncomplicatedly viewed as that which is leftover, the redundant and final by-products of cultural and economic organization. Taken together, these tendencies have positioned waste as a void that lies beyond the boundaries of the social and as such, the mere shadow of processes that social scientists are interested in. So where social scientists have enthusiastically explored the production, distribution, purchase and use of things, waste has remained an afterthought, the mere afterwards of these activities, and of interest only to certain branches of the social sciences such as environmental policy and planning. This has no doubt given rise to interesting researches around the themes of governance, waste policy, and waste management (for example Davoudi 2000; Petts 2004; Chilvers and Burgess 2008), however these topics are rather niche, and tangential to mainstream social science priorities.

Of course waste can be—and has been—imagined in different ways. As Gay Hawkins points out, when waste “is used in a normative sense, as a category of judgment, meanings proliferate fast” (2006: vii). However, these perspectives have not necessarily led to serious or sustained engagement with waste, nor is their relevance to broader social scientific endeavor immediately apparent. For a start, there are approaches that conceptualize waste as hazardous or contaminating, leading to researches on risks and perceptions of risks, as well as more sociological efforts to extend Beck’s (1992) risk society thesis to analyses of waste (Van Loon 2002; cf. Gille 2013). Work in the tradition of environmental justice has demonstrated how social and spatial inequalities—typically along the lines of race and class—are marked and mirrored by exposure or proximity to waste (Bullard 1983; Heiman 1996; Martuzzi et al. 2010; Meagher 2010). More generally, various social histories (Laporte 1999; Melosi 2004) have demonstrated how (civilizing) processes of social organization and modernization rest on concomitant efforts to expel, distance, and hide wastes from the societies that produced them. Again, this is interesting stuff but these analyses continue to locate waste beyond the boundaries of the social and position it as something negative or a problem to be managed.

There is also a tendency to deploy waste as a metaphorical device and amongst other things, it has served rather well as a shorthand for the unproductive expenditure of time and money (Schor 1998), the alleged excesses of global consumer capitalism (Packard 1961) and environmental destruction (Redclift 1996). Allied to this, one might even suggest that—in actuality—the social sciences have long been pre-occupied with residual categories. As Munro (2013) describes:

This is not just to note classics of sociology, such as Street Corner Society (Whyte 1943) and The Police on Skid Row (Bittner 1967), engage […] It is to identify how modern programmes like medicine harbour designs that inevitably proceed by throwing out the chronically ill as ‘crocks’ (Becker 1993), the homeless as ‘normal rubbish’ (Jeffery 1979), and the frail as ‘bedblockers’ (Latimer 2000). So too Bauman (2004) lays what he calls ‘wasted lives’ firmly at the door of modernity, suggesting presciently that in the future the ‘outcasts’ of globalization will have nowhere to go. (Munro 2013: 221)

This signals some of the ways in which waste might be of more obvious relevance to mainstream social science research, however, work in this spirit does not place waste at the center of its analysis (although see Scanlan 2005), nor does it engage with the material reality of waste matter. Instead, waste remains an allegory that can only be used to gesture back and reveal something about the societies and systems that produced and rejected it.

In this book, I put forward an account that suspends judgment to recognize that the definition of food waste is not fixed, and that it is not an unambiguously negative phenomenon. However, I also wish to acknowledge the “concrete and socially consequential materiality” (Gille 2010: 1056) of food waste and so this requires a focus on the relationships (cultural, economic, technological, political and social) in which it is embedded alongside the various ways in which it is categorized, placed, represented, and managed. I do not conceptualize food waste as the end point in linear processes of production, consumption, and disposal insofar as waste can arise at multiple sites within the food chain, and with tangible consequences for the economic and cultural organization of food systems. Allied to this, I argue that food waste provides the generative and constitutive basis (not the mere afterwards) for the practices that shape the organization of everyday life. In order to take this position, inspiration is drawn from recent developments that place waste at the center of social scientific analyses to explore its dynamic and shifting role in the process of social organization without denying its concrete materiality. I am thinking specifically of work by Zsuzsa Gille, Nicky Gregson, Gay Hawkins and Martin O’Brien. However, before discussing these in more detail, interested readers may welcome some consideration of the intellectual precursors to these ideas.¹

To begin, there are threads of work that systematically attend to residual phenomena and so acknowledge their role in processes of social organization and social change. For example, Mary Douglas’ Purity and Danger (1966) drew attention to the cultural categorization of dirt and the analytic importance of investigating the classificatory systems that produce and reject this so-called “matter out of place.” Later, Michael Thompson’s quietly influential Rubbish Theory (1979) suggested that the process of categorizing rubbish is one part of a wider system of categorization and valuation. For Thompson, rubbish is not waste in the sense of being redundant and worthless stuff, rather it is a “region of flexibility” that resides between transient (decreasing) value and durable (increasing, or at least stable) value. Essentially, he makes the case that waste may or may not facilitate movements between transient and durable value, and is therefore central to understandings of how value is socially controlled. The decisive formulation, however, came with John Scanlan’s On Garbage (2005) that explores the connections between “the variety of hidden, forgotten, thrown away and residual phenomena that attend life at all times” (2005: 8). In doing so, he eloquently demonstrates that metaphorical garbage—the detached leftovers of separating the valuable from the worthless—is at once omnipresent and central to (Western) ways of thinking about the world. In recognizing the constitutive role of residual categories, this work places them at the center of social scientific endeavor. It also recognizes “waste” as a category that is inherently malleable as well as the complexity of meanings attributed to it. However, again, these approaches do not sufficiently acknowledge the concrete and consequential materiality of waste matter.

From a slightly different angle, there are lines of thinking that place waste—in all its brute physical glory—at the center of their analysis and use it as a route into theorizing broader cultural and economic processes. For example, Susan Strasser’s Waste Not Want Not (1999) uses changing notions of trash in order to trace a social history of production, consumption, and use. Famously, William Rathje began his work on what he called “garbology” in the early 1970s (collaborating later with Cullen Murphy [1992]) in which they applied archeological methods to the study of garbage, with the suggestion that explorations of trash yield important insights into the cultures that produce it. Central to this endeavor is the idea that waste cannot be studied “in the abstract” and that garbology requires physical contact with “hundreds of tons” of waste material (Rathje and Murphy 1992: 9). More generally a good deal of archeological and anthropological work has signaled the importance of studying discarded materials. For example Gavin Lucas’ early plea (2002) for material culture scholarship to pay attention to waste suggested that disposability and the removal of things from domestic economies might be a useful starting point for doing so. Similarly, Laurence Douny’s study amongst the Dogon of Mali (2007) focusses on the materiality of domestic waste to reveal the more positive connotations attached to things—animal excrement, bodily dirt, litter, and unwashed cooking utensils—that Western cosmologies would categorize as worthless or unclean. Further, she suggests that Western conceptions of waste—as useless and redundant—tend only to apply to “elements that stand outside domestic life” (2007: 313) in the Dogon. This work directly confronts the materiality of waste whilst also acknowledging that it is not a fixed category. Further, in a debt to Mary Douglas, it demonstrates how waste materializes otherwise intangible processes of cultural categorization. What is missing, I think, is recognition that quite aside from simply revealing who we are; our trash and garbage is constitutive of how we live in the world.

Returning now to the new directions in waste scholarship that appear to synthesize some of these ideas. Firstly, Gay Hawkins’ The Ethics of Waste: How we Relate to Rubbish (2006) represents an important challenge to existing understandings of our relationships to waste, which had hitherto been dominated by environmental discourse and alarmist rhetoric. She argues that “disenchantment stories” and narratives of “paradise lost” have worked to position waste as emblematic of humankind’s alienation from, and consequent disregard for, the natural world—bringing about a politics based on the imperative to reform the self in the name of nature. Against this, she suggests that waste and not the environment should be placed at the center of analysis. In foregrounding waste, her approach is one of encountering its empirical—and material—reality and considering how it shapes the processes and habits through which we consume, value, classify, and manage things. So for example she demonstrates that our responses to human excrement are constitutive of the relationship between the public and the private, and generative of certain routines of self-maintenance and embodiment.

Meanwhile Martin O’Brien’s A Crisis of Waste (2007) suggests that the invisibility of waste in sociological thought is a reflection of its invisibility in popular and political imaginations, and so he sets out to rescue it, give it the scholarly attention that it deserves and develop a “rubbish imagination” that takes seriously the generative role of waste in social life. He urges that contemporary Western societies should be understood as “rubbish societies”—not in the sense that they are “throwaway cultures” but, rather, that rubbish is and always has been central to processes of social organization. He suggests that sociology might usefully focus on the practices, institutions, innovations and relations that have emerged to govern waste and its transformation into value. Within sociology, as well, Zsuzsa Gille’s From the Cult of Waste to the Trash Heap of History (2007) makes clear that waste is neither a fixed category nor the simple outcome of policies that define things as such. Rather she develops the concept of “waste regimes” to account for the institutions and conventions that determine what wastes are considered valuable and the ways in which their production and distribution is managed, represented and politicized. She highlights how these regimes vary across space and time and so highlights the contingent and relational character of “waste” whilst continuing to take seriously the physical reality of these materials. Crucially, in addition to acknowledging that differing definitions of waste are expressive of different regimes; she highlights that they are constitutive and sustaining of them.

Finally, there is work that comes ostensibly out of material culture scholarship to arrive at a similar, or at least related, set of insights. Notably, this is the work of Nicky Gregson who has—across a number of projects and with a range of collaborators—explored human relationships with waste at a variety of scales whilst attending to a number of theoretical and substantive concerns. Her earlier work on second-hand consumption (Gregson and Crewe 2003) led to a concern with how and why things pass into economies of re-use. Accordingly, her ethnographic work on the divestment and disposal of ordinary consumer objects (Gregson 2007; Gregson et al. 2007a, 2007b) shows how sacrifice and the process of ridding is generative of—amongst other things—personhood, self-renewal, and networks of relationships between person and things (see also Lucy Norris’ work [2004] on the disposal of clothing in India). This in turn led to work that looked beyond the household to recognize that waste is not simply an end-of-pipe issue. Here, she has explored the global flows of materials as things fall apart or are purposely disassembled as well as highlighting the various economies that are created and sustained by these processes (Gregson, Crang et al. 2010). Additionally, she has illustrated how the work of demolition unearths materials in transformative states—notably asbestos (Gregson, Watkins et al. 2010)—that play a vital and performative role in configuring the economies and economics of disposal.

It is instructive, albeit curious, to note that despite the vitality of contemporary waste scholarship, relatively little attention has been paid to food. Social scientists working with these perspectives have not—until very recently—paid attention directly or specifically to food waste. There have been passing references in sociological and anthropological analyses of food (for example Goody 1982; Fine 1996), theoretical consideration of the ways in which the availability of conduits for disposal govern what we eat (Munro, 1995) and more recently, work that extends (following Hetherington, 2004 and the work of Nicky Gregson) work on material culture and consumption as disposal to analyses of food waste (Cappellini 2009; Evans 2011a, 2012a, 2012b). In 2013 Waste Matters: New Perspectives on Food and Society (Evans et al. 2013b) was published, and this edited collection sought—very consciously—to extend recent developments in waste...

Table of contents

• FC
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Acknowledgments
• Prologue: The Social Life (and Death) of Food
• 1. Bringing Waste to the Table
• 2. Ordinary Domestic Practice: Conceptualizing, Researching, Representing
• 3. Contextualizing Household Food Consumption
• 4. Anxiety, Routine and Over-provisioning
• 5. The Gap in Disposal: From Surplus to Excess?
• 6. Bins and Things
• 7. Gifting, Re-use and Salvage
• 8. Conclusion: Living With Food, Reducing Waste
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright Page