Lingering with food: Attending to waste temporalities in early childhood

Abstract

This article responds pedagogically to today’s interconnected temporal and waste crises. Theoretically, the article focuses on lingering as a practice that disrupts both modern notions of time and humans’ relations to waste temporality. Suggesting that modernist temporal frameworks separate humans from the world (including from waste), the article argues for the importance of creating early childhood pedagogies that attend to how waste endures across time. Narrating an inquiry in an early childhood education centre in Canada, the article shows how young children experiment with food waste by lingering with waste temporalities.

Human-waste-time relations

Lingering with carrot peels

During the morning meeting, the bowl of food scraps travels around the circle from child to child. Carrot peels are gingerly pulled from a pile and move through children’s fingers to be flattened into long, thin strips. The peelings create different forms and designs as fingers flit across them. Peels are wrapped around fingers, hands, and arms. Some are stretched to become doll blankets. The carrot peels are meant to stay in the classroom with us. We have chosen to linger with carrot peels.

We invite the children to follow the lines and designs they created with the peels. To offer them materials to think with, we pull together photos—long and tiny strips of carrot peels; peels stretched over dolls and placed end-to-end together with the pile of new carrot peels—and a large piece of paper and pencils.

Peels and pencils converse and shift back and forth as pencils trace peels and peels follow pencil lines. Stories emerge. Lines blur. In this moment of who/what follows, one child offers something curious.

“The line follows the carrots—no, the carrots follow the line, because the carrot comes together on the line.” – Sarah

We bring pictures of the carrot-line followings to the large group. As the children share ideas about the carrot peels and pencil lines, another child notices that one of the pencil lines made a circle, not a line.

“How do you make a circle with the carrots?”– John

Shifting from lines to circles is not an easy task! Can carrot peels follow circles, or do the circles follow the peels?

“If you break the peels into smaller pieces and lay them out on the ground side to side, you can make a circle.” – Laura

“When the peels stand on their sides and are placed close together, they curl up and create a circle.” – Laura

To share the difficult task of thinking collectively about creating a circle with carrot peels, we draw a big circle using carrot peels. The peels are stretched flat and placed end to end. As one child carefully places a peel, another moves in another peel. Children struggle with joining peels end to end in a closed loop.

“We draw a circle with a pencil first.” – Sarah

“The pencil circle stays, but the carrot circle won’t. There are gaps.” – Charlotte

“It’s not a 100% circle.” – Sarah

“We could take little pieces of carrots and use them to fill in the holes, because that way the carrot pieces then touch.” – Sarah

We try Sarah’s suggestion, but the carrot peel ends do not stick together. The problem intensifies as the paper moves. The carrot peels won’t stay put. They curl and separate from each other. The big circle is lost.

Brainstorming how to join the carrot peels to create a big circle, we decide to sew the peels together. Slowly and delicately, the children push a needle into a peel and reach underneath to pull it through.

“The trickiest part is stopping before the thread is pulled all the way out.” – Charlotte

“Sewing will take a long time.” – Sarah

Each day we return to the connected carrot peels, adding more peels and still trying to sew a big circle. After a week, we notice that the peels left on the counter have dried and become crunchy. Their transformation affects the sewing process, making it almost impossible to create a big circle.

Given the fragility of the dry carrot peels, Susan suggests that we bring other food scraps. We add thick lettuce leaves, hoping they won’t dry like the carrot peels. But with each passing day, we notice that the lettuce, like the peels, changes in shape and size.

“The circle keeps changing and the circle becomes smaller and smaller.” – Susan

Focusing with intention on the changes taking place, we bring large pieces of tracing paper. Every day we trace the circle, and each mark shows the circle’s movements. After a few weeks, we have several sheets of paper with records of the shrinking circle. Carefully, we place one sheet on top of another to compare the daily transformations of the food scrap circle. An unexpected protagonist is revealed in the lettuce and on the paper…

Mould!

“It was old, so it got mould. You can’t still use it.” – John

“The carrots weren’t made of from the mould.” – Anna

“The mould was coming from the jar.” – Cory

“It came from the compost because it’s stinky.” – Cory

“You can just wash it off.” – John

When trying to wipe off the mould doesn’t work:

“We should untie the lettuce from our circle by cutting the string.” – Susan

“We should put it into a jar, like the onion group did with the big onion.” – John

Day after day, we monitor the mouldy lettuce in the jar and the carrot circle. The mould stays with the lettuce, but it doesn’t stick to the carrot peels. Still, the circle continues to break apart and shrink on its own, leaving us to wonder how we sew the circle back together if it keeps on breaking. Materials that continually transform are difficult to think and do with.

Waste transforms but never really goes away. . . . Landfills may be out of sight, but their contents variously resist and transform into other substances, such as leachate, which may be contained for a couple of decades. (Hird, 2021, p. xiv)

The environmental crisis the planet is confronting is profoundly interconnected with a temporal crisis. More specifically, modernist temporal frameworks that mechanized time into discrete sequences foregrounding linearity are directly linked to significant environmental degradation, including the pervasive waste challenges witnessed on a planetary scale (Allon et al., 2021; Hird, 2022). In this article, we reenvision traditional waste pedagogies by drawing from philosopher and cultural studies scholar Byung-Chul Han’s (2017) writings on time and temporality, and from the rich waste scholarship that restructures material-time relationships (Hird, 2021; Turner, 2018). Lingering with food waste and attending to the material temporalities of waste, this article considers how to respond with children to the urgency of waste challenges that Myra Hird, environmental studies professor and director of the Canada’s Waste Flows project, alludes to in the quote above. Hird proposes we attend to the temporal presence of waste beyond putting trash into a bin.

In exploring these human-waste-time relations, we expand our previous writings on time and temporality (Pacini-Ketchabaw, 2012, 2013; Pacini-Ketchabaw and Kummen, 2016) as well as our earliest texts on waste in early childhood education (MacAlpine and Pacini-Ketchabaw, 2024; Pacini-Ketchabaw and MacAlpine, 2022). While our writings on time propose pedagogies and curricula that challenge synchronized developmental temporalities (Pacini-Ketchabaw, 2012, 2013) and foreground geological times (Pacini-Ketchabaw and Kummen, 2016), in this article we expand our framings of ecological temporalities and extend our scholarship on common worlding waste pedagogies (MacAlpine and Pacini-Ketchabaw, 2024; Pacini-Ketchabaw and MacAlpine, 2022). By narrating an inquiry in which children attend to food waste’s decomposition and transformation over time, we show—through lingering practices that emphasize noticing, conspiratorially witnessing, and responding to food transformation processes—how children intimately engage with waste temporalities as a multispecies event.

We also extend our common worlding waste pedagogies, which differ from human-centered waste management approaches in several ways. To be specific, while human-centered waste management approaches prioritize efficiency and convenience, common worlding waste pedagogies emphasize ethical considerations and challenge capitalist narratives; while human-centered waste management approaches treat waste as a passive object, common worlding waste pedagogies recognize the agency and subjectivity of nonhuman entities; and while human-centered waste management approaches focus on technical solutions, common worlding waste pedagogies aim for transformative potential through alternative ways of relating to waste (MacAlpine and Pacini-Ketchabaw, 2024; Pacini-Ketchabaw and MacAlpine, 2022).

In what follows, we first conceptually address the temporal crisis and link it to the waste challenges the planet faces today. Suggesting that modernist temporal frameworks have distanced us from the world (including from the waste we produce), we argue for the importance of thinking temporally about waste pedagogies in early childhood education. We propose to create pedagogies that attend to how waste endures across time. Then, we continue the narrative we opened the article with—“Lingering with Waste” is an inquiry in an early childhood education centre in Canada in which young children experiment with food waste and linger with waste temporalities. Han’s (2017) concept of lingering comprises a theoretical framework that guides our analysis of the three narratives.

Reconfiguring modernist temporal frameworks

Han (2017) argues that we are experiencing a temporal crisis not necessarily related to an acceleration of time but rather to the dispersal of time. Temporal dispersal scatters time, leading to the perception that time is accelerating or “whizzing by” (p. vi). To account for this phenomenon, Han offers the idea of “dychronicity” where time becomes untethered from experience and duration. This “non-articulated directionless time without any meaningful before or after remembrance or expectation” (p. 8) creates the false impression that life itself is somehow accelerating. As the present whizzes by, the past escapes our attention (Han, 2017: vi). Temporal dispersal is a crisis of subjectivity where “all that endures, all that lasts and is slow” is at risk of vanishing completely or being absent from life (p. 93). Because there is no continuity in life, “things are deprived of memory to become [unattached snippets of] information and commodities” as they are pushed into this timeless, ahistorical space (p. 6). The “atomization” or scattering of time removes any hint of continuity. Moreover, the atomization of time lacks the critical temporal tensions that tether the past, present, and future—what was and what is yet to be. With this lack of continuity between memory and expectation, life “contains little of the world” (p. 11).

Han avoids the modern idea that this temporal crisis can be averted or recovered theologically or teleologically through a deceleration. Instead, he suggests revitalizing vita contemplativa (a contemplative life), which enables us “to communicate with that which lasts” (p. 110). In other words, he proposes contemplative lingering as a practice of revitalizing that creates continuity and “presupposes things which endure” (p. 93). Importantly, lingering differs from deceleration. Lingering gives time, while deceleration (as expressed as the opposite to acceleration) merely uses up or kills time within the accelerated production and destruction narrative. In other words, contemplative lingering re-engages being as more than just being-active in unproductive moments. Han states that “when life regains its capacity for contemplation, it gains in time and regains in time and space, in duration and vastness” (p. 113). Contemplative lingering creates the necessary continuity for being in the world where all things endure.

The creation of continuity and regaining of duration challenge modern capitalism’s mechanization of the world installed through dispositifs that seek to control both human behaviour and the physical body to optimize “temporal and labour efficiency” (Han, 2017: 11). Rather than contemplative lingerers, in modern capitalism we have become a society of consumers; excess consumption and surplus time drive human life. Said differently, any surplus time is consumed with fleeting moments and short-lived experiences, none of which endures across time. Within this context, consumed goods or experiences “are used up as quickly as possible to create a space for new products and needs” (p. 93). What counts is not an experience of duration but rather labour’s efficiency. It is “labour, independent of the necessities of life, [that] becomes an end in itself and posits itself as absolute” (p. 92). To interrupt labour time, the task, Han insists, is to revitalize “the capacity for contemplation” by lingering (p. 111).

Han’s astute analysis, in particular his suggestion to restore contemplative lingering, is significant for us in at least two ways. First, it is pertinent to our pedagogical work because education provides a generative space to nurture contemplative practices. Thinking with Han, Mario Di Paolantonio (2024) explains that, “in the shelter and withdrawal that education potentially offers, we get a chance to pause and to linger long enough with things between us so that we may come to sense and make sense—to wonder and spur a thinking—of the configurations demarcating our own time” (p. 3). By passing on what we have inherited, Di Paolantonio suggests, education helps us deal with human life’s impermanence and the world’s vastness. It is through education, he asserts, that we might emphasize elements that aim to endure and ensure a meaningful future, addressing our fleeting existence. The ability to turn the temporary into something lasting or permanent in society is a crucial part of education’s role in shaping our perception of time and enabling us to actively contribute to and enhance the significance of our shared existence (Di Paolantonio, 2024). For us, then, it is key that we engage in lingering in early childhood education.

Second, Han’s contemplative lingering proposal also invites us to reconsider education’s approach to waste. Because time and waste are intimately connected—in fact, waste is deeply marked by time (Hird, 2022)—Han’s analysis is instructive to rethink traditional managerial approaches to waste, inviting a critical analysis of the temporal dimension inherent in waste management. We turn toward expanding this point next.

Reconfiguring waste temporalities

Alternative temporal configurations that “challenge the concept of time as a straightforward, linear progression of distinct, quantifiable occurrences” are also required to think of materiality, “especially waste phenomena, whose temporality often exceeds human perception” (Allon et al., 2021: 5). Fiona Allon and her colleagues (2021) suggest that we are to attend to the interactions between waste and time because waste itself has “the capacity to actualise new temporal habits, dispositions, rhythms and routines” (p. 6). Waste not only transforms throughout time but also constitutes our actions through temporalities.

The timelines of waste are not straightforward (Bennett, 2010; Gregson et al., 2007a, 2007b; Hawkins, 2006; Edensor et al., 2019; Hird, 2022; Liboiron, 2021). As Hird (2021: 153) suggests, waste is not static but a dynamic multispecies occurrence in which millions of bacterial communities “figure out ways of metabolizing” across time. Hird’s extensive work on waste flows focuses on the way waste moves and changes, on the unexpected behaviour of discarded materials over time, and on their ability to create unforeseen effects downstream as they intra- and interact with humans and more-than-humans. Our comprehension of the magnitude, intensity, and pace of globalized processes of disposal and their geographically unequal impacts and power dynamics is constrained by an excessively linear view of time (Allon et al., 2021; Liboiron, 2021). A linear perception of time also hides the significant ways in which “discarded matter returns with the passing of time, the ways that discarded matter has the potential ‘to return to haunt’ both symbolically and materially” (Allon et al., 2021: 5; see also Liboiron, 2021).

Food waste, in particular, is in an ongoing process of becoming: It “does not ‘end’ or become stabilised as ‘waste’ when entombed in the earth. It continues to become” through time-space relations (Turner, 2018: 139). Yet, through most household waste management programs (such as separating organic waste for curb pickup), we (including children) often become habituated into speedily removing waste rather than engaging with food waste’s ongoing becoming (Turner, 2018). We rarely participate in the temporalities of food transformation, or the “vitality of food” (Turner, p. 140). We distance ourselves from seeing, smelling, and feeling food waste because these experiences evoke intense sensory interactions that trigger bodily reactions that we expect the technology of waste removal to control. For instance, we might never get to experience the smell of off milk, or witness the rotting of an apple because we find these difficult to bear (Turner). In other words, we avoid experiencing the transformation of food waste over time and, in turn, remove ourselves from the very processes of life continuity.

It is this complex, dynamic process between food waste and time that our common worlding waste pedagogies engage with. Following a brief overview of what we mean by common worlding pedagogies, we narrate how a group of young children in an early childhood centre take food waste temporalities seriously as they linger with food waste across time.

Common worlding waste pedagogies

Over the past 5 years, we have been actively working with an early childhood education centre to design common worlding waste pedagogies that attend and respond to the so-called Anthropocene’s waste challenges. We take seriously Hird’s (2021) suggestion that the majority of waste management programs, including the 3 Rs (reduce, reuse, recycle), use dominant behaviourist models based on neoliberal notions that emphasize the role of individual habits and routines in waste accumulation while depoliticizing the causes of waste pollution and absolving consumptive capitalism and colonialism (also see Liboiron and Lepawsky [2022] on discard studies). Therefore, we avoid practices that foreground how children think about waste materials or what children’s intentions are about waste materials. As we create curriculum with children, we work pedagogically with waste’s movements, temporal dynamics, transformations, and disorderings. This means that when children work with waste materials, they attend to the materials’ gestures, impermanence, relationalities, connections, transformations, and so on. Our focus is joining children in lingering with waste materials so that we can defamiliarize ourselves with linear temporal frameworks and reorganize ourselves with the dynamism and mutability of waste. In other words, pedagogically, our intention is to refigure young children’s relationships with waste by reconfiguring human-material relations.

For example, we have written elsewhere about curricular processes with children that rethink the Rs in relation to plastics (Pacini-Ketchabaw and MacAlpine, 2022). In what we call the queer synthetic curriculum, we reframe children’s relationships with plastic and explore new kinds of interactions between children and plastic bodies. The curriculum aims to refashion waste practices from children’s ubiquitous plastic relations and speculate on the kinds of response-able worlds that can be remade through these interactions. The queer synthetic curriculum embraces the mixed affects that plastic affords, including its sensorial pleasures and possibilities, as well as the guilt embedded in its toxicity. The curriculum treats plastic as chthonic queer matter and acknowledges the inseparability of fleshy human bodies from synthetic polymer bodies. In short, the queer synthetic curriculum aims to create conditions for futures other than those determined by synthetic, toxic petrocapitalist modernity and coloniality in early childhood education (MacAlpine and Pacini-Ketchabaw, 2024; Pacini-Ketchabaw and MacAlpine, 2022). By carefully exploring how the concept of excess relates to plastic waste, the queer synthetic curriculum provokes subjective transformations as children encounter plastic excess in their daily lives and create conditions for otherwise relations with plastic to emerge. In short, common worlding pedagogies highlight the potential for children to respond to plastic’s excess beyond management narratives.

In the case of food waste, we also engage in pragmatic yet speculative processes. That is, we play with the highly creative power of food waste in our pedagogical and curricular work. Bethaney Turner (2019) writes about the importance of playfully experimenting with the ethical entanglements of food waste in order to seek “new, renewed or repurposed ways of living together” with waste. She argues that through playful experimentations with waste, we might move beyond the modernist “mode of being human that is short-sighted, exploitative and centred on notions of hyper-separation” and acceleration (p. 771). Turner proposes playful engagements as an experimental practice that “does not simply involve another drain on time and energies but can also induce an affect of joy and pleasure” (p. 772). In our research with children, speculative processes and playfulness are crucial.

For us, play is more than a developmental goal or children’s work. In taking up Turner’s (2019) proposition that play is a space for speculative propositions “about something that is not yet” (p. 772), we intentionally move beyond the literal and linear prescribed (human-child) timescales that developmental discourses remain transfixed on. Drawing on Donna Haraway (2008), Turner explains that play is a practice through which beings, both human and nonhuman, create something new together—something that “didn’t exist before” (p. 172). It is not functional; it is instead a form of proposal. Play brings about possible futures from present conditions that are both joyful and risky. It also goes beyond its individual components to involve an overflow of energy that fosters creative reimaginations. Turning to Brian Massumi’s writings, Turner further points out that play is “inventive” and serves as a “laboratory for live action” (Massumi, 2014: 12, as cited in Turner: 773). Play comes to life only when participants, both human and nonhuman, are actively engaged, which emphasizes that it is the connections—among actors, environments, and resources—and a sensitivity to others that allow it to happen. Play occurs through interactions between elements in relation to one another. Importantly, it is through playful encounters that we invite children to linger with food waste.

In the rest of this article, we highlight our pedagogical work with food waste in a preschool classroom of an early childhood centre in a mid-size city in southwestern Ontario, Canada. The project emerged during the COVID-19 pandemic as educators became concerned about the amount of food waste produced in the classroom. Although food and eating meals are important aspects of the day in an early childhood centre, we rarely involve children in thinking/doing with food waste and the processes that take place before and after eating meals. For 9 months, alongside four educators, we invited a group of 24 children to play, experiment, and become intimate with the processes of food organic waste produced in the centre’s kitchen. We collected data that illustrate curriculum processes through the practice of pedagogical documentation (Pacini-Ketchabaw et al., 2015) using video, photography, field notes, and weekly informal conversations with educators.

Lingering with food waste

“Only being [with] permits lingering, because it ‘whiles’ and ‘perpetuates’ . . . the age of haste and acceleration is an age of forgetfulness of being.” (Han, 2017, p. 74)

“We need to keep the scraps close so we can keep our eye on them.” – Laura

Lingering with others offers a sense of collective existence and a way of being-active with others that is both intense and intimate. Within our pedagogical work we create the conditions that invite children to linger with leftover food scraps. Rather than collecting daily food waste and removing it from sight, the food scraps remain and become part of the community alongside children and educators as active participants in the classroom’s daily rhythms and flows. During morning gatherings, daily activities, meal times, and sleep time, the food scraps remain present.

As the children and educators meet each morning, the fruit and vegetable peelings join them. This day, the children sit in a wide circle around a two-metre round tablecloth, their outstretched feet land a few centimetres from the scraps that have been carefully spread out in the same circular fashion around the large metal bowl filled with fruit and vegetable scraps that Chef Kyle had brought us after lunch the day before.

The bowl of scraps from the kitchen is familiar to us. Every day since January 2021, Kyle, the centre’s chef, has offered leftover remnants of fruit and vegetables to the children: onion skins and ends, carrot tops and shavings, banana peels, pepper seeds and stems, celery root, potato peels, and more. As part of our daily routine, we take Kyle’s offering together with the scraps we accumulate (e.g., banana peels) and carry the bowl to the composter we inherited from last year’s preschool group.

Peelings are plucked from the large bowl of scraps, and encounters with onion, carrot, and banana peels provoke children to respond in particular and peculiar ways. The following vignettes offer glimpses of what emerges within intricate child-peel moments and movements that build layered stories and provoke children to respond to decomposing peelings in multiple ways.

Wonderings emerge within these inquiries. Each glimpse below holds questions that the children linger with as they engage with the vitality of food waste (Bennett, 2010). How do we put the big onion back together when it keeps growing fuzzies? How do we sew the carrot circle back together when the peels dry unexpectedly? How do we roll the big banana back together when its consistency transforms? The questions shift somewhat over the 9-month inquiry, yet all reveal a provocation to attend to the transformation of food scraps over time.

Lingering with onion layers

Considered inconsumable, onions’ outer layers are pushed away and then added to the metal bowl. Soon, they arrive in the classroom, where they are removed from the bowl and added to the growing pile in the middle of the room. Lingering with the onion peels invites curiosity from the children.

From a mound of onion peels, children slowly pull out individual layers one by one and spread them on the table. Soon the mound is gone and the table is covered by wispy layers of brown onion peels, deep purple onion peels, fading red onion peels and white onion peels.

“They’re so curly—look, this one wraps around my finger!” – Leo

As tiny fingers touch the curled onion skins, the skins respond by wrapping themselves around the children’s fingers. Onion wrappings reveal surprises with onion peels inside onion peels offered as gifts. For days, wrapping and unwrapping ensue as onion gifts are offered, each with a surprise inside.

To complexify children’s experimentations, we bring a whole onion in to peel and chop. Before returning the chopped onion to Chef Kyle, we think together about the onion layers. When the onion is cut in half, Jennifer leans in and notices that the whole onion still has layers inside even if we cannot see them.

“You can see that there’s skin and then there’s another colour for the other layers.” – Jennifer

“Onion layers are layers that then become onions. The layers are all different: big, small and with shapes.” – Maria

“I want to be an onion.” – Leo

The children insist that all the layers are the same but also different.

“The whole onion also has layers, because they look like they have different colours.” – John

To get closer still to the onion, we invite children to pay attention to the layers by offering fabrics. Children experiment with fabrics’ textures, colours, and transparencies to transform themselves into onions. They become the centre of the onion. Experimenting with children’s ideas and questions, we try to embody an onion with multiple layers. Children roll: one at a time, two at a time, and as a whole group. They transform themselves into an onion using different fabric textures and colours.

“Just like an onion would be.” – John

“It feels tight to be an onion.” – Sarah

Layers are mindfully selected one by one. A child wrapped in yellow fabric becomes the heart of the onion.

“I am going to see how big we can make it.” – John

“What do you think the onion feels like being wrapped?” – Jennifer

“I have the yellow part.” – Maria

“The way to do it is to wrap onions inside each other and roll and roll another layer on top.” – John

“We’re getting bigger.” – Sarah

John suggests that they can put the onion back together:

“I can match the parts, and I am making an onion. This is the purple one and this is the red one.”

We offer John’s suggestion to make an onion to the entire group.

“We can make the biggest onion, like this big!” – John

Carefully and slowly, the children wrap the onion layers trying to make a big onion. Day after day they experiment with the texture, size, and thickness of each layer. A layer choreography emerges as layers are put into conversation with each other.

The children decide collectively to follow a pattern to create the big onion: start with the yellow centrepiece, add in layers and crunchy pieces, and finish with sticky layers in between.

“The sticky layers hold the layers together.” – John

Children pass the onion around. Each adds a new layer on top of the previous layer. The onion grows, from golf ball size to baseball size.

In putting the onion back together, the children encounter yet another problem. They quickly run out of sticky layers. We discuss how we might hold the onion together. Collectively, we decide to sew the biggest onion layer on top of layer. Slowly the onion pieces join together, creating layers of crunchy onion skin and soft flesh in between.

Stitch by stitch, the thread intertwines with the children’s stories about the big onion.

“There’s green and slimy stuff.” – Maria

“No. They are white.” – Vivian

“There’s more white stuff and brown stuff. It’s moulded.” – John

“There’s sticky, tacky stuff.” – Tommy

Maria notices that mould is growing inside the onion’s sewn layers.

“Does it feel the same?” – John

“No.” – other children

“Does it smell the same?” – John

“No, it looks different.” – John

“It also smells different. It smells like chemical candy.” – Jennifer

“The onion also changes colour, just like me.” – Maria

“The brown stuff has a smell. I think it will also attract skunks and raccoons.” – John

“Maybe the bugs are eating it.”–Tommy

“The onion is breaking.” – John

“Yeah, there’s more mould.” – John

“It is not getting mouldy, but it is shrinking and changing colours. How do we make an onion that stays the same?” – Tommy

The mould interferes with the making of the “huge onion.”

“We need to put it in a jar so the mould stops coming.” – John

“And in the fridge!” – Maria

Recognizing the problem with mould, we put the onion in a jar and propose creating a large onion using papier mâché. Day after day for several weeks, the sewed-up onion in a jar is placed on the table as we tear paper and glue it to simulate onion peels and layers. The children linger with the onion as they experience the slowness of creating an onion. As the papier mâché onion grows, the sewn onion shrinks while layers of mould slowly cover it to make another layer.

This inquiry creates the necessary space to linger with and become intimately connected to the onion and its many layers. As layers are pulled apart and sewn back together, their transformation offers something unexpected as the children try at first to embody the big onion and then to put it back together again. While the school year has now ended and the children moved on, the big onion has welcomed another group of children who are inspired by the many conversations about onions, layers, and mould, sparking new stories, ideas, and speculations about waste among children and educators.

Lingering with banana peels

Cindy’s idea that fruits and vegetables roll extends our conversations with food scraps. We pay attention to how many vegetables in the scrap pile roll. Scraps are in various stages of curling and rolling.

“This one can roll, but this one can’t.” – Emmanuel

As fingers and peels work together, tucking, folding, and rolling, we pay attention to how layer upon layer shapes the rolling lettuce. We are curious how other vegetables are shaped through layering. To intensify the idea of rolling vegetables, we become rolling vegetables ourselves. Layer by layer, we explore what it might be like to be a rolling vegetable.

Bodies, fabrics, and videos of us as rolling vegetables intertwine in the classroom.

“Look, we’re rolling lettuce, too.” – Cameron

Banana peels fill the scrap bowl, and we notice that they roll differently when the sticky part is on the outside. As hands and sticky peels move together, Chrissy offers, “Let’s put all the banana peels into a banana.” Emmanuel and Chrissy negotiate how to make the big banana. Emmanuel pulls the first banana peel from the pile, uncurls and flattens it with his fingertips and the palm of his hand.

“We lay them all flat and then put them into a pile.” – Emmanuel.

“Put all the bananas in a banana!” – Chrissy.

Emmanuel picks up each banana peel from the flat row and stacks them up one on top of the other into a column. As the column grows, individual peels slide out, refusing to stay put. Sculpting the big banana is a challenging task. The gooey banana rolls do not stick together.

Each day during the week we revisit the banana rolls through the practice of drawing. As time passes, we notice changes. Speculatively, we story how time is co-constructed across species.

Through the sketches, we return to the idea of rolling, inviting paper into the rolling to follow Roberto’s suggestion for creating banana rolls.

“We need to slice it.” – Roberto

Through the ritual of rolling paper and banana rolls, we notice that the paper stays the same while the banana changes.

“We can’t roll it anymore.” – Emmanuel

“It keeps breaking.” – Roberto

Day after day after day, the banana peels change.

“We can’t roll them anymore because they are hard.” – Roberto

“They keep breaking.” – Chrissy

“They’re all different.” – Cameron

We pay close attention to how the banana rolls are changing and study each stage of the decomposition process. As the cracking and breaking of decaying banana peels leave crumbly pieces on the table and floor, Roberto offers that they are “dead bananas.”

“The black one dies because it’s not yellow.” – Joe

“The yellow bananas are alive.” – Malik

Drawing offers us a way to attend to the decaying process; we sit with the question of what it means to be a dead banana peel or a living banana peel.

What makes a banana peel dead?

While photos of banana peels in different decomposition stages are projected onto the wall, paper, charcoal pencils, and a large sheet of paper are offered on a nearby table. Charcoal pencils invite us to create dark bananas. Making both firm and delicate markings with the pencils, we draw the other stages of the bananas.

“I made a very black banana! It’s dead!” – Joe

The stories of alive and dead bananas continue to emerge through the drawing process as the drawings on the table are moved and hung on the wall. We add another layer of paper over the “alive banana” before projecting the “dead banana” over top. Noticing how the shape changes as we draw, Chrissy remarks that it’s getting smaller.

To think more about being alive and dead bananas, we attend to the processes of decomposition in a constant-loop time-lapse video of banana peels in the classroom.

“It’s turning yellow. Now it’s turning black!” – Emmanuel

The children notice the bananas’ colour transformation but are unsure what is causing the change. They provide interesting propositions:

“Bananas die when they are black, and they turn yellow after black. Those bananas are dead and alive. Because this banana is alive and with yellow and black a little bit dead. So the yellow one is not dead. And there’s a bee in the banana that flies. The bees are right here flying in the brown banana. The bees fly in the brown banana because they’re yummy treats. So those are tiny bees, those are tiny black bees. Some of the bees are small, some of them are big. So, the yellow ones turn small then they turn big. They’re eating the banana inside because the banana looks very yummy. It’s correct right here!” – Joe

To more intimately encounter the decomposition time that bananas invite us to attend to, we create dialogues between plasticine and bananas and invite children to work through their questions and struggles with plasticine.

“This is what happens to the banana peel if we put it in the compost. We can’t unroll it anymore because it breaks. It’s made of real bananas.”

Darius continues:

“Can you see what I’m doing? I’m covering the yellow. Because when you put a real banana peel in the garbage, it will turn black. Now turn it into yellow again!”

Children create correspondences between the plasticine bananas and photos of banana rolls in various decomposition stages.

“The banana is turning brown, then it’s going to black.” – Emmanuel

“Why does it keep on changing?” – Joe

“The yellow and the black are under there. You wanna know why? Because they died!” – Roberto

“Yellow can help. Yellow can help to make it normal. Yellow is the normal colour, Roberto.” – Darius

“The yellow stops the black.” – Darius

“Black stops yellow. Yellow don’t stop black. It connects the black to this, the yellow connects the brown to this. You see. That’s how black stops yellow.” – Joe

As dialogues intensify, we notice the presence of yet another colour.

“Look! Blue on the banana! The yellow is gonna eat the blue.” – Emmanuel

Roberto points to the black banana peel covered with blue mould.

“This one is gonna be yellow again.” – Roberto

Through the correspondences and dialogues, we shape and reshape the plasticine bananas many times. Colours mix, fade, and bleed into one another. They transform each other just as the banana peels transform themselves. Through this morphing we create a hybrid, which Darius names “the banana of the future.”

In this classroom, lingering with food waste’s decomposition and transformation processes brings visibility to its vitality (Bennett, 2010). Children think with the life that decomposition creates rather than seeing food waste as garbage and no longer alive. Lingering with waste transforms children’s rhythms and their entanglements with more-than-human temporalities.

Conclusion

In this article, we argued that lingering can create opportunities to rethink our relationship with waste. Through lingering practices, young children relate to food waste in new ways. While traditional waste management approaches encourage children to put waste out of sight and out of mind, in this inquiry children lingered with waste to notice, experience, and embody its temporality. The range of impacts that waste can produce unfolds within a vastly different timeframe than what is typically defined by policy regulations and waste management practices (Hird, 2021). We playfully experimented with the practice of lingering to engage with children in experiencing the ongoing presence of waste beyond the kitchen area or garbage can, allowing them to perceive how waste persists in the world.

Mould and decomposition time invited the children to inhabit a temporal dimension that was beyond the one they often experience in the early childhood centre. It felt as if decomposition and its multispecies processes carved out a transformative space for itself in the classroom. Interestingly, the classroom became alive with the food scraps. The smells of rotting banana peels and onion skins gave the classroom a pungent aroma that the children came to love. The changing colours of the various food scraps excited the children. The classroom was not merely a space where waste proliferated but a place where alternative ways of observing, interacting, and conversing were being activated.

Children’s relations with waste also challenged what Han (2017) calls a temporal crisis of dispersal. As children lingered with waste, our pedagogical practices called into question modernist notions of temporality. Lingering with waste, children moved beyond the accelerated cycles of production and disposal, experiencing food waste not as something to be quickly discarded but as something with its own enduring presence—no matter what the children tried, decomposition continued its cycle. But rather than becoming frustrated, the children joined the processes that take place beyond their own actions. These lingering practices questioned the linear, efficiency-driven temporalities of modernity, inviting a deeper awareness of how waste endures and affects the world over time. The children experienced the continuity of a carrot peel, an onion skin, and a banana peel after they became considered waste. Staying close to food’s slow decomposition not only introduced the children to the lasting composition of waste but also fostered the world’s continuity.