Creator,saviour,garburator: (Re)imagining the human role in the world through a case of food waste

Abstract

The contemporary food system relies on a paradigm of human exceptionalism. But living well together with all forms of life would require that we imagine humans’ place in the world as embedded, not as separate. This study explores food waste as a case for how to reimagine humans’ place in the world. Drawing from individual and group interviews conducted in Canada and Finland, I trace the roles that ordinary people assign for themselves when talking about food waste. Humans see themselves as both creators of food waste and as saviours of food that is in danger of going to waste. These images uphold the division between humans and the nonhuman world. As a way of troubling these anthropocentric notions and re-embedding the human in the analysis in a way that transcends hierarchical subject positions, I identify a third role: that of the garburator. This role takes humans seriously as material, embodied, and eventually decomposing beings.

Prologue

In her encyclopaedia entry on waste and food, Philosopher Elizabeth V. Spelman (2014) recounts John Milton’s (1991[1667]) poem Paradise Lost and its version of the fall of Adam and Eve. In Spelman’s analysis, the story of lost paradise is also a story of the origin of food waste.

In the beginning, there was no waste. Food waste only originated with the first sin: ‘In Paradise Lost, the very idea of waste in the Garden does not arise until the serpent successfully tempts Eve to eat the fruit of the forbidden tree’ (Spelman, 2014: 1824). Importantly, this is not to suggest that before the fall, waste was not a problem. Before the fall, there was no waste. There was ‘glorious excess, and yet nothing spoils’: it was ‘as if God’s fruits have a kind of built-in preservative’ that prevented them from decaying (Spelman, 2014: 1824). Food waste originates in the human act of desiring and eating the forbidden fruit. With their misconduct, by following taste and desire, humans create food waste.

Importantly, it is not only the act of eating the forbidden fruit that creates the problem of food waste. In Paradise Lost, Eve asserts that the fruit hangs on the tree of knowledge without purpose. It would be wasteful not to eat it. Food started to decay as a result of ‘the emergence of human claims to know waste when they see it: surely unused fruit has a purpose that goes unfulfilled unless it is eaten’ (Spelman, 2014: 1824). In other words, the fall is not only about eating but also about claiming a position of authority to judge what is edible, inedible, and waste. Human sin because they ‘fail to honor the splendor, power, and authority of God when they insist that they know what is useful for humans and what is not’ (Spelman, 2014: 1826). As soon as the first humans realized that the fruit had potential that was in danger of being wasted, ‘the world became a wasteland, and the threat of scarcity entered into human life’ (Spelman, 2014: 1825).

Yet, following Spelman’s analysis beyond Paradise Lost transforms the sin of judgement into a virtue. After analysing Milton’s poem, Spelman discusses John Locke’s (1980[1690]) Second Treatise on Government from the viewpoint of food waste and its connections to property rights. Like Milton, Locke, too, sees human cognitive capacity to judge food as edible or waste as important. But in the Second Treatise, utilizing this capacity is not considered a fault, but an act of responsibility. Unlike Milton, Locke maintains that humans have the capacity to know waste, and they should use it. To cite Spelman (2014: 1826), ‘in the Second Treatise, we are instructed that the capacity for reason that God gave humans enables us, indeed requires us, to judge what is wasteful and what is not’. Here, the precarity of Earth’s products is considered a self-evident and well-known fact that can be grasped via human reason.

It is not only wasteful to fail to utilize what is available; it is also wasteful not to harness the Earth itself to produce food for human use. In Spelman’s interpretation of the Second Treatise, ‘it’s precisely when humans fail to mine the world for what is useful to humanity that they go against God’s will’: people ‘have the right, in fact the obligation, to go forth and cultivate’ (Spelman, 2014: 1826). The Lockean view problematizes both over- and underproduction of food and gives justification for both intensive land use for efficient food production, and the moral concern over food waste. With their capacity to know waste, humans are obligated both to create as much food as they can and then to save this food from being wasted.

As Spelman’s analysis shows, in the moral imaginary of Western religious and philosophical thought, humans are at the centre of food becoming waste. With our everyday act of eating, we inescapably tie ourselves to the material world. With our everyday act of choosing what to eat and what to disregard, we inexorably tie ourselves to the web of sins and virtues. But Spelman’s analysis also shows that the moral storyline is not unequivocal, and the role of humans in this story is far from clear.

A call to reimagine the human role

Food is probably the most ordinary and intimate way that humans engage with nonhuman others. Eating is a material practice that is intimately involved in constituting relationships in everyday activities. Through the necessary daily practice of eating, we both engage in relations of care and negotiate and embody violence and harm (Harvey, 2013). But not all food is eaten. In rich societies of the global north, the contemporary food system routinely produces more food than can be consumed (Lang and Heasman, 2015: 106; Katajajuuri et al., 2014). Food waste cuts across several social evils: it is considered reprehensible in terms of persisting poverty and food insecurity; it is seen as contributing to anthropogenic climate change; and it can be considered to invalidate the sacrifices of many food animals. Food waste is for many reasons one of the most pivotal ethical and ecological problems of our time.

The unprecedented amount food waste that we witness today can be considered as one illustration of an abusive and objectifying relationship that humans maintain with the rest of the Earth. The contemporary food system relies on a paradigm of human exceptionalism and productivism. Underlying it is a notion of humans and the economy as separate from nature and a belief in human omnipotence as a species that can solve all problems it faces by rational choices and technological means (Braidotti, 2019; Helne and Salonen, 2016). This paradigm has roots in Christianity, as it resembles a Christian theology of dominion where humans are positioned as users and abusers of Earth’s resources (White, 1967). Yet it still resonates in growingly nonreligious societies. Human-centredness is part of the collective imaginary of the traditionally dominantly Christian cultures, and thus even nonreligious people tend to be socialized to it.

Criticizing this existing condition is important, but not sufficient alone. Unravelling severe ecological and social entanglements such as food waste requires a dramatic change in how we imagine human role in the world. Humans need to reposition ourselves in the world in a way that respects planetary boundaries and recognizes our interdependence with other species (Helne and Salonen, 2016). Theologically speaking, this is a call for reconciliation (Salonen, 2019; Warners et al., 2014). Sociologically and philosophically, an attempt to reimagine humans’ role borrows from the method of thinking of utopian alternatives to current society (Eskelinen et al., 2020: 9; see also Bennett, 2010: 15; Perrin, 2006: 2).

Recent social scientific studies of food waste point to one direction such reimagination could take. A growing body of research calls us to question human-centredness in the process by which food becomes waste. Drawing from practice theory, feminist care ethics, actor-network theory, and new materialism, food waste researchers have demonstrated the need to steer the focus away from individual consumers. Instead, they emphasize that our societies are organized to generate food waste and that nonhuman agents play a role in this (e.g. Alhonnoro and Norrgrann, 2018; Evans, 2014; Koskinen et al., 2018; Lehtonen and Pyyhtinen, 2020; Mattila et al., 2019; Watson and Meah, 2013). These studies suggest that producing food waste is a complex process involving the routines and structures of everyday life, both human and nonhuman actors, and the material faculties of food itself.

In this article, I refer to these studies in order to trace how ordinary people reimagine their role in food-related talk. The study design is overtly humancentric: I maintain that living well together with all forms of life requires more than merely decentring humans from the analysis or including nonhuman agents in it. We need to assess the subject positions that humans themselves claim concerning the nonhuman world. Perhaps we can find cracks in the surface of our anthropocentric imagination if we stay attuned to people’s everyday experiences. I suggest that we use these potential cracks to re-embed our human role in the world, instead of explaining it away. Perhaps we do not need to do so much decentring as reimagining.

Research design, data, and methods

In this article, I explore what roles and responsibilities ordinary people assign for themselves when talking about food waste, and how this imaginary reflects and/or challenges anthropocentric notions of human exceptionalism and superiority. To address this problem, I analyse people’s food-related talk as an ethical narrative that articulates moral subject positions in food waste relations.

By ordinary people I mean people who are not necessarily or primarily particularly invested in food-related social action and do not consider themselves as ‘ethical consumers’ (cf. e.g. Schoolman, 2016). This is an important extension to research on human–nonhuman relations that often focuses on activists and alternative movements. Studying ordinary people with their routine practices can reveal both barriers to and potentials for social change. Further, by ordinary people I also mean people who might or might not be religious. As noted above, the abusive relationship that humans maintain with the rest of the world is said to resemble the Christian theology of dominion. However, in the contemporary world, people with various religious backgrounds and outlooks on life participate in this abusive culture and its critical reflection (Salonen, 2019). By refusing to draw linear conclusions between people’s religious identity and views concerning the nonhuman world, this study contributes to scholarship on lived (non)religion that goes beyond the binary of religious versus nonreligious people, and seeks creative ways to reimagine multispecies relations (Salonen, 2021).

The data consist of individual interviews with 24 people living in Ottawa, Canada, and group interviews with 18 people living in Helsinki, Finland. I conducted the interviews between spring 2019 and spring 2020. I selected regional samples, because place has been found to have a significant role in producing and maintaining food-related meanings (Johnston et al., 2012). I recruited the participants via local social media sites and community events, snowball sampling, and purposive sampling to gain informants from various income, gender, age, and ethnic groups. The interviewees are between 25 and 84 years old. The majority are women (27 out of 42 interviewees) and belong to the middle class. ¹ The interviewees are referred to using pseudonyms. The data were collected as a part of a wider project that aims to understand moderate food consumption in the context of an affluent society. ² The questions in the interviews covered a wide array of themes related to ordinary food consumption, such as the participants’ daily food related practices, priorities in food choices, and food waste. The data collection methods were based on qualitative attitude research (Vesala, 2007) and group interview methods (Hennink, 2014).

In the analysis, I treat these interviews as efforts to articulate ethical dilemmas and subject positions regarding eating and wasting food. I pay particular attention to how the human role is portrayed in the ethical narrative where food is potentially wasted. I understand ethics as a situational and socially produced and reproduced conduct that is inherent in speech and action (Lambek, 2010; Sayer, 2011). In this view, everyday life is filled with ethical perspective-taking that is often implicit but becomes explicit in the situational contexts that require explanation of or reflection on ordinary routines and practices, such as in interviews. This situational approach to ethics adheres to a pluralistic moral ontology which avoids essential distinction between good and evil. Instead, it acknowledges that there are often competing and even contradictory moral projects that work simultaneously and that engaging in doing good does not necessarily exclude suffering and failure (Ezzy, 2016: 268–269).

The analysis started with close reading and inductive coding of each interview. I first focused on how my interviewees talked about food waste and then compared their views with each other and with findings from previous research on food waste, particularly empirical case studies that emphasize materiality and everyday life (Alhonnoro and Norrgrann, 2018; Evans, 2011, 2014; Koskinen et al., 2018; Lehtonen and Pyyhtinen, 2020; Mattila et al., 2019; Watson and Meah, 2013). During the analysis, I faced a difficulty: how to understand and fit together the scholarly efforts to decentre humans from the processes whereby food becomes waste when humans constantly popped up as central actors in my interlocutors’ accounts. Instead of trying to forcefully remove humans from view, I decided to follow their lead.

Bringing food waste into being: the creator

The first set of questions that caught my attention as I went on with the analysis was related to the role of humans in how food waste is created. I started wondering how to make sense of the emphasis on personal, individual responsibility for food waste narrated by my interlocutors, on one hand, and the call to move beyond ‘blaming the consumer’ in food waste research on the other (Evans, 2011).

In the early 2019, I sit in a café with Beatrice, a Canadian woman in her fifties. She works as a consultant and lives with her two teenage children. I ask her what she thinks about the fact that Canadian consumers are one of the biggest wasters of food on the planet. She answers:

We just buy too much food and that’s a function of poor planning and having eyes bigger than our stomachs. I’m guilty of that too, mostly the poor planning because I’m more of a spontaneous food planner. I don’t know what I’m cooking tomorrow but I’ll just go to the store and I’ll buy whatever looks good, whatever strikes my fancy.

Many contemporary food waste scholars would argue that my informant is wrong: It is misguided, if not dangerous to blame individual consumers for a problem that is so deeply embedded in the routines and structures of everyday life. Evans, for example, has shown that food waste is a consequence of the complex demands of everyday life, mediated by various social and material factors. Food’s transformation into waste is not straightforward or linear, but happens in spatial, temporal, and social processes. Evans avoids recourse to explanations that blame the individual consumer. Instead, he positions them as one of the contextual factors of food waste (Evans, 2014: 92).

But Beatrice does not consider herself a contextual factor. People tend to inscribe themselves as active agents in food waste creation. My interviewees’ stories about food waste were full of humans at the centre; buying too much food, failing to plan and manage household food flows, and ending up wasting food. In these stories, the moral burden is on the individual consumer. This resonates in interviewees’ expressions of their emotional reactions to wasting food. Stories of food waste were filled with hate, annoyance, guilt, regret, nervousness, anger, and shame.

Instead of trying to steer the focus from individual consumers to structures and contexts, in order to understand this persisting articulation of individual responsibility we ought to interpret people’s talk about food waste as articulations of moral subject positions. The account given by Beatrice is illustrative, if we read it in an explicitly moral frame: as an articulation of moral accountability. There is a pervasive historical and cultural repertoire that sees waste as a result of misconduct, transgression, or even sin (see, for example, Love Food, Hate Waste, 2022; Raunio, 2014). Ordinary people readily utilize these repertoires.

In autumn 2019, I present figures of food waste in Finnish households to Kaija, a woman in her late 40s who works as a secretary and lives in Helsinki with her husband and three teenage children. Kaija says that she feels pride about the fact that in her household, very little food is wasted; for instance, they eat potatoes with their peels on. This pride is coupled with her fierce disapproval when she notes that her children waste food:

Sometimes I yell at my kids if they have, for example, eaten an apple so that they have cut it like this, and they have not eaten the remaining part which is still pretty good pulp. So even sometimes I might overact a little.

What we witness in this example is a negotiation of what counts as waste. Kaija and her children seem to disagree what parts of an apple are edible and what can be tossed away.

The question about creating food waste is not only who, but how. Recent research has emphasized that food becomes waste as a result of embodied practices and material capacities, not cognitive judgement. For example, drawing from Roe (2006), Watson and Meah (2013: 104) state that food and waste are not food and waste because they are described and named as such; they become what they are through how humans handle them. More recent research showed that food waste arises not only from cognitive classification, but from material practices (Lehtonen and Pyyhtinen, 2020), and ‘a discrepancy between the biodegradable, perishable materiality of food and the rhythms of consumer everyday practices’ (Mattila et al., 2019: 1620; see also Evans, 2011, 2014).

However, Kaija’s story shows that embodied practices of wasting food are accompanied by claims to know what is waste and what is not. Classification of food as edible or not is an articulation of moral authority. My interlocutors claimed authoritative positions in determining food waste; they did not create waste only by their deeds, but also by their words.

Fighting food waste: the saviour

Another set of questions that I encountered during the analysis related to my interlocutors’ efforts to fight food waste. Interestingly, in my interlocutors’ ethical narrative of food waste, humans appear as both culprits and heroes: they not only waste food, but also engage in manifold efforts to prevent food from being wasted. In other words, humans serve as both creators and saviours in the moral narrative of food waste.

The everyday efforts to save food are vividly narrated by many of my interlocutors. One, Danielle, provides a particularly illustrative case. Danielle is a Canadian woman in her early 30s. She works as a researcher and lives with her partner. When talking about food and eating, she distances herself firmly from being ‘an activist’ or ‘extreme’. However, my interview with her is filled with stories where she displays moral zeal in her efforts to save food from being wasted. She connects her devotion to saving food to her upbringing: ‘Wasting was a big issue. We had to finish our plates all the time’, she recollects. She explains how food was treated in her childhood home: ‘if my plate was not empty, I would have it for snack time at 4 o’clock and then I would have it again for dinner if I didn’t finish it’. In Danielle’s life, wasting food has never been an option. The only option is to consume it.

Danielle has carried this imperative to eat all food into her adulthood. She recalls a time when she was living with a roommate. She first describes her frustration concerning her roommate’s eating habits:

Because we had such a big bin in our kitchen and every day it was full and he wasn’t even recycling, so he was just throwing plastic boxes with cake that he bought and in the end never ate because he was always eating outside.

Danielle did not want to address this question with her roommate, because she was only living with him for a short period of time. Instead, she was doing what she could to save the food by eating it herself:

I remember he was buying huge boxes of cereals and never eating them. So he’d open them, have it once or twice and then he would never touch them anymore and buy a new box of cereal. Sometimes I was eating his cereal to just eat them, otherwise they would be in the bin.

Danielle tells me about other incidents where she saves food. She has received leftover food from her neighbours who were going out of town for holidays, ‘because they know me and they knew that I was going to make something out of what they had’. She buys overripe fruits from a store and harnesses her creative skills to make use of them. She explains this behaviour:

It happens to me even though I have some bad looking apples or something like this, I will make something out of it. It’s just not an option for me to throw something away.

As these examples show, Danielle does not only try to reduce food waste in her own kitchen, but actively engages in saving it from being wasted by others, too.

Taking the saviour role means caring strongly about food’s ultimate destiny. It is a way to articulate moral ardour, a passion to commit to what one considers to be the right thing to do. It requires attending to the materiality and perishability of food. The ability to save food is morally and emotionally rewarding. Danielle feels good about her accomplishments of saving food from being wasted. Similarly, other studies have found that saving food is considered a morally respectable and emotionally satisfying act (e.g. Lehtonen and Pyyhtinen, 2020: 198; Koskinen et al., 2018: 24).

Recently, studies of food waste have started draw attention to the material qualities of food, particularly how easily it spoils. Food becomes waste through its own materiality (Koskinen et al., 2018). Through various socio-material practices, humans and nonhumans contribute to how (far) food turns into waste (Mattila et al., 2019). Waste has been interpreted as ‘a potential future tense of food’ (Mattila et al., 2019: 1641).

The idea of humans as creators of food waste can be criticized for placing too much blame on the individual consumer. Many contemporary food waste researchers have found the saviour role easier to swallow. Koskinen et al. (2018: 18), for example, consider food waste reduction as a matter of care; it is about being sensitized to food’s materiality and committed to act so that as little food as possible crosses the line to become inedible and waste. They interpret food waste reduction as a form of care work that maintains and sustains life together in a relational world. In this view, since food is prone to spoil, decay, and rot, its very materiality and precarity calls for human action.

Saving food is an eschatological endeavour: success or failure in this effort determines the destiny of food. Lehtonen and Pyyhtinen (2020) articulate this embodied liminal work done by waste-saving humans in their analysis of valuation practices in dumpster diving, a practice of recovering disregarded items from trash bins. For them, food dumpster divers ‘cross the boundary from our world into that of the afterlife (of rubbish) and back’ (Lehtonen and Pyyhtinen, 2020: 198).

The saviour role resonates well with materialized practices of caring about food, which have been detected in food waste research that draws from practice theory, feminist care ethics, and new materialism (Koskinen et al., 2018; Lehtonen and Pyyhtinen, 2020; Mattila et al., 2019). However, even in these approaches there is an anthropocentric configuration at work: in my view, recent food waste studies have not explored this as fully as it deserves. While food’s materiality is important for how it is saved, the saviour view remains utterly humancentric in two ways. First, the human performs the heroic acts that save food from spoiling, whereas the food’s agentic role is limited to its tendency to spoil unless an outside agent intervenes. Second, humans determine the fate of food; it should be for us to eat, and wasting it is a tragedy. Food’s salvation is in the stomach; its damnation is in the trash bin.

So my analysis of the interviews reveals an articulation of moral accountability of causing food waste, moral authority of classifying waste, or moral ardour of saving food from being wasted. In addition, we also witness human moral ascendancy. When engaging in acts of care, humans determine the desired destination of food – inside the human body.

Embedding the human in the material world: the garburator

As I sought to identify the roles my interviewees assigned to humans in food waste relations, it was easy to detect the roles of creator and saviour. These lend themselves to discussions with previous research quite effortlessly, even with some contrasts or puzzling out some notions. But during the analysis, I encountered accounts that did not fit neatly to these two roles. Neither did they fit neatly to understanding food and waste as opposed. A third role emerged, which I call the garburator. ³

One example of this third role was provided by Carla. Carla is a woman in her 40s with immigrant background, living in Ottawa with two children. Her parents lost their assets in a war in Africa, and ‘brought that thriftiness and trauma of loss into everything’. Carla reminisces how their eating habits differed from those of Canadian children. In her childhood home,

there was no boxed anything in the house. Everything was an ingredient except for the yogurt and the peanut butter. Everything else was an ingredient or a spice or an herb […] My friends would all eat Canadian crap like Cheez Whiz and Kraft Dinner and all this sort of stuff and I never got to.

Occasionally, however, an opportunity came for Carla to familiarize herself with this ‘Canadian crap’. She tells me about her childhood memories of sleepovers at her Canadian friends’ house.

I would eat all of the processed cheese slices even though they’re not very good but back then it’s that, ‘I can’t have it’. And they would have Fruit Loops so we would eat like half a box of Fruit Loops. We would eat all the trash we were not allowed to have at home. And then the parents would come down and be like, ‘Who ate all our food?’ I’m like, ‘I don’t know. I am not an empty wasteland of a stomach who never gets this stuff in my own house’.

While there are many interesting nuances in this excerpt, what caught my eye here is that Carla talks about ‘eating trash’ and refers to her stomach as an ‘empty wasteland’. While these utterances could be interpreted as merely figurative speech, I started wondering whether they could be taken seriously. Perhaps they could lead us somewhere.

First, following the small cues provided by Carla and others led me consider the relationships between bodies and bins. Above I noted that the desired fate of food is to be eaten by a human is often considered self-evident. In material terms, this means that food ought to go into human stomachs. If we engage seriously in the materialist analysis of food and waste, yet remain attentive to the role of humans, we see that the fate of food is materially mediated via two alternative ‘containers’: the bin leads to damnation; the stomach, to salvation. A processual view of food waste might lead us argue that stomachs and bins are categorially opposite spaces: food is destined for human stomachs, while waste is destined for their bins. Yet reading Carla’s notion of her stomach as a wasteland led me wondering, whether the stomach and the bin are so far from each other, after all. Instead of trying to keep these ‘containers’ conceptually apart, I started detecting ontological similarities between them.

Both stomachs and bins are liminal agents: they are both on the edge. Referring to Chappells and Shove (1999), Evans (2014: 68) notes that bins materialize waste relations on the edge of households and public waste management systems in a way that makes disposing food easy for consumers. Similarly, stomachs materialize food relations on the edge of the social and intimate: When placed in the stomach, what was once shared with other humans becomes one’s own individual property. Food is simultaneously collective and individualistic, both intimate and shared (cf. Simmel, 1997 [1910]: 130; Wirzba, 2013: 376).

Both stomachs and bins are visualizing agents: they both illuminate matter and move it out of sight. Eating or disposing of food means getting rid of it, putting it away. Placing food into a bin or into a stomach means that the matter has been taken care of. It is no longer a problem. Although we know that food continues its journey further from the stomach, and that the bin is only the beginning of waste disposal, from the perspective of ordinary consumers, the ethical dilemma of food waste is settled when either of these containers seal matter out of sight.

At the same time, these two containers illuminate the matter of food waste. When I ask a group of Finnish women to talk about waste, one starts to talk about her compost and the food items that end up there. After two other women have taken their turns in that discussion, a fourth one utters what she calls ‘an embarrassing confession’: in her household they do not have a biowaste container. Importantly, for her, this is why she does not know how much food they waste. For all these women, the biowaste container communicates the quantity and quality of food waste in their household, even though one of them has not engaged in this communication.

Similarly, the stomach does not only move food matter out of sight but brings it into view. I ask Tom, a Canadian man in his 40s, whether he has ever been on a diet or fasted. He answers laughingly that he has not, but that he should. When I ask him to specify why he thinks so, he answers: ‘Why? Because I have a big belly [laughs] and because I certainly eat too much’. For Tom, the size of his belly materializes his embodied practices of consuming food matter.

Thinking of humans as not separate but related to nonhuman agents reintroduces their agency without placing them at the top of a hierarchy. One problem with analysing the similarities between bodies and bins is that this tends to abstract and universalize bodies. This hampers the effort to take the materiality of the human body seriously. Thus, a second notion that merits attention is that not all human stomachs are the same.

Plenty of examples in my data suggest that certain stomachs are particularly like bins. To begin with, mothers often eat food that their children leave. Kaija eats food from her children’s unfinished plates, and sometimes her son, an 18-year-old ‘tall sporty boy’ eats those foods that Kaija herself does not feel like finishing. Planning her breakfast, Jeannette, a Canadian woman in her forties, considers what is left from the previous night in her household of two adults and two small children:

And then I’ll have a breakfast too which is usually just a piece of toast but some mornings if I notice there’s a lot of something left, I’ll have leftovers from the night before. I had some salad this morning for breakfast because I don’t want to waste it [laughs].

Further, men are often assigned a role of eating what is in danger of going to waste. Sini, a Finnish woman in her 40s, explicitly compares her male partner with waste disposal as she describes how they deal with food and waste in her household:

My hubby is a garburator, if there is anything that is about to be left, then [he eats it]. So that’s the last option if there would otherwise be something left.

Sini suspects that by the time her partner eats the food, it might already be past its best, not edible anymore by her standards. ‘But usually he eats it anyways’, she adds laughingly.

In addition, certain nonhuman companions, particularly dogs, are often treated as ‘garburators’. Mikko, a Finnish man in his late 30s, notes that in his household, their dog makes it easier to deal with food waste; the dog sometimes eats small bits of food that human family members leave. ‘If it looks that it is going old, then the dog tucks in’, he says. Similarly, Alan, a Canadian man in his mid-60s, thinks that dog would ease his moral pain of having to waste food. He says:

I kind of wish I had a dog sometimes. Seriously. When I had a dog, the meat got really freezer burned, you just … the dog didn’t care. They always ate it.

Finally, the stomachs of poor, distant others are seen as well suited for eating food that is in danger of going to waste. Frank notes that ‘it burns me that they throw food away when it can go to all these places where they can serve it and give it’. In both Canada and Finland, charities redistribute surplus food from primary food markets to people in weak social and economic positions. These recipients of food assistance serve as secondary consumers who eat what others leave (cf. Salonen, 2016). This example illustrates that humans ought not to be seen only as individuals, but also pay attention to communities, cultures, and institutions that govern food and waste production. The moral facets of food waste extend beyond individual choices into public discourses and institutional practices (see Salonen, 2018).

A third notion arising from this analysis concerns the limits of the human body. Humans are not abstract, isolated, and sealed, but they are not bottomless pits, either. The garburator has its limits.

Aaron – a Canadian man in his mid-30s, living with his partner and two small children – talks about how he used to be a garburator, but has grown out of that role. He says:

I used to be a garburator and just eat everything and people still hand it to me to put the food away but I’ve also started to moderate how much I eat. I avoid finishing a plate even though it’s my habit and has been my habit for 30 odd years to finish the plate. I’ve sort of scaled back, realizing that I don’t have the same metabolism and level of activity, especially now that my job is more driving and more sitting.

In other cases, too my interlocutors explicitly resign from their role as a garburator. Ritva, a Finnish woman in her late 40s, says that she has grown out of the habit of eating other people’s leftovers, especially her children’s. She says that she has had to learn that she is ‘not anyone’s biowaste container’, as she phrases it. She changed her behaviour because she would ‘gain nothing else but weight’, which she does not wish to happen.

One of Ritva’s conversation partners, Susanna, replies to Ritva’s comment. ‘I used to do that before’, she says and then continues, ‘I was really that person who even in a restaurant finished everyone else’s servings’. Susanna explains that this habit of eating other people’s leftovers relates to her childhood where she learned the norm of finishing one’s plate. She recalls that ‘I was told, as a kid, that if you leave a potato [uneaten], the potato starts to cry there on a platter’. Susanna says that she is easily led by appealing to her emotions: ‘If I’m told that the potato cries there, then the potato cries there and I have to eat that potato for it to be with the other potatoes’. This upbringing using emotions affected her so deeply, that as an adult she still used to finish her friends’ plates if they did not. However, she says that later in life, she has been able to stop that habit. ‘But nowadays I can leave food on my plate even in a restaurant or at home. If I cannot eat then I don’t have to finish that all’, she says with relief.

What we see here is a shift from considering the fate of food to considering the fate of one’s own, material, decaying body. One could interpret that for Aaron, Kaija, and Susanna, the food and the body are competing objects of care, and here, they seem to choose to take care of their bodies. This interpretation does not do justice to the many nuances of these examples. My interlocutors do not only consider what they do to food, but what food does to them. Food is not only a passive object of care, something to be ‘put away’, but it can affect human bodies in a way that potentially entails both care and harm. Food consumption consumes humans, too.

The creator and saviour roles are clearly humancentric. They involve an idea that humans are agents separated from the material world of objects such as food and waste, and only interfere it as dominant moral figures who determine the fate of these objects. The human garburator role does the opposite: it re-embeds humans in the material world and shows that the roles and responsibilities regarding food and waste are unequally distributed between human bodies. Considering humans as garburators instead of creators of waste and saviours of food confuses the tidy separation between food and waste, and stomachs and bins, and disrupts the distance between humans and material world. For us researchers, attending to the garburator role requires taking peoples talk about both their morals and bodies seriously. Doing so gives an alternative lens to analyse how humans talk about and act upon ethically relevant questions. It aids to reimagine rather than decentre the human role in the world.

Epilogue

The human stomach has been often associated with selfishness and idolatry, but it can also be interpreted as a source of connectedness (cf. e.g. Wirzba, 2019: 6). What I have proposed in this article is a form of navel gazing; not rejecting human centrality but observing it more seriously and creatively, in a manner that does not necessarily lead to egoistic self-observation but can be utilized to accept the material human connectedness with the rest of the world. Research that wants to move beyond human exceptionalism, yet also wants to take human research subjects seriously, needs to consider that many people insist moral responsibility and refuse being decentred.

This article has been motivated by the notion that rethinking humans’ role in the world requires a more detailed assessment of the roles contemporarily assigned to humans in significant social and ecological problems. Above, I have assessed these roles using a case study of food waste. I have traced the roles that ordinary people imagine for themselves when talking about food waste and discussed how their accounts can be complicated and embedded in the material world.

Elsewhere, I have argued that in the context of food consumption and human–nonhuman relations, reconciliation requires two attitudes: acknowledging privileges, and cultivating indecisiveness and uncertainty instead of hurrying to solve ethical puzzles once and for all (Salonen, 2019). I follow the line of that argument here and suggest ways forward.

When it comes to acknowledging privileges, the fact that humans tend to bear the moral responsibility for wasting food cannot be explained away. Humans are the creators of food waste. Morally, the origin of food waste is in the human act of desiring and eating ‘the forbidden fruit’ (as in Spelman’s analysis of Paradise Lost), or ‘whatever strikes my fancy’ (as narrated by my interlocutor, Beatrice). Articulating this moral accountability is coupled with moral authority. Humans claim the authority to judge food as edible or waste.

Humans are also the saviours of food who use their capacity to judge waste to prevent food from spoiling. This is not only a cognitive exercise, using the human capacity for reason that Locke identified, to judge what is waste and what is food. Saving food requires that humans become attentive to its material properties. In Paradise Lost, Eve does not commit the first sin of eating an apple out of a mere desire to eat, or out of ignorance or disinterestedness towards the fruit. Similarly, in a contemporary affluent consumer society, Danielle does not eat due to a mere desire to satisfy her cravings. Quite the contrary, my interlocutors not only claim to know waste when they see it, their acts of eating are based on concern that food may spoil. Yet, articulating this concern is coupled with ascendancy. Humans claim to determine the ultimate destiny of food.

My observations show that humans take subject positions concerning ethical problems that eschew clarity and coherence. Instead, these positions highlight the interconnectedness of the moral accountability taken, ardour expressed, authority perceived, and ascendancy claimed by humans concerning food waste. Human roles in the moral narrative of food waste cannot be neatly bisected into either culprits or heroes. Acknowledging accountability for producing waste and expressing ardour for saving food are coupled with claims of authority and ascendancy over the nonhuman world. Or the other way around: claiming power and superiority is coupled with taking responsibility and dedicating oneself to pursue what one considers to be right.

The images of humans as creators and saviours reflect the persisting anthropocentric tendency to uphold the division between humans and the nonhuman world. Even in increasingly nonreligious societies, it is difficult for us to let go of the idea of the Imago Dei, or human likeness to God received in creation. If we wish to meet severe ecological and social challenges, we need to look for new ways to comprehend and articulate humans’ role in the world. Perhaps the way forward is to cultivate the imaginary of human likeness to bins. Haraway (2016: 55) states boldly that we are ‘not Homo, not Anthropos’, but humus and compost. My analysis of the garburator makes room for similar reimagination.

Instead of merely turning our analytical gaze from ‘humans’ to ‘nonhumans’ or ‘materials’, we ought to extend materiality to consider human bodies. In the case of food waste, this can be done by taking seriously people who refer to their bodies, including their specificity and limits. Humans are integral material, embodied agents in the process where food can be wasted. However, as embodied humans we are not all one and the same (cf. Braidotti, 2019: 44). Some humans bear the ethical weight of embodied responsibility more than others. When it comes to food and waste, not just any body, but particular bodies – in my study, mothers, men, dogs, and poor people – are assigned positions as the bodies inside which food meets its destiny. These positions are not individually chosen. They reflect wider institutional and cultural patterns and the contemporary capitalist modes of food production alongside consumption. A more nuanced discussion of human roles and responsibilities with regard to food waste requires considering these intersections.

Reimagining the role of humans requires that we recognize the many ethical dilemmas that intersect in ordinary people’s lives. Re-embedding humans in the material world does not attenuate human responsibility but tempers the tendency to seek scapegoats (cf. Bennett, 2010: 37). It complicates the belief in the human omnipotence in making individual choices to create and solve clearly defined ecological and social problems. Dilemmas concerning food waste are enmeshed with other concerns, including one’s own impermanence and vulnerability; the societal discussion of food waste needs to be re-embedded in these embodied concerns.

Re-embedding humans in the world (and in social scientific analyses) as material beings is not a silver bullet. Rethinking humans’ role in the world does not necessarily or linearly reduce indecisiveness and uncertainty or lead to a better world, even if reimagining humanity’s place in it is essential to enable reconciliation (Salonen, 2019). Nevertheless, it is not useless to engage in such an exercise. Actions that contribute to social change must be based on more than critique of existing conditions, and fuelled with our ability to imagine positive alternatives (Bennett, 2010: 15; Perrin, 2006: 2). In other words, approaching humans as material, embodied, and eventually decomposing beings is not the end, but the beginning of critical imagination.