Abstract
Anthropocentric thinking produces fractured ecological perspectives that perpetuate destructive, wasteful behaviours. Recognition of the relational entanglements of humans and more-than-humans, particularly through our everyday visceral encounters with food, may be able to encourage ethical ecological thinking and practices that lay the foundations for more sustainable lifestyles. This paper explores possible ways embodied, convivial and experimental interactions with food waste and its avoidance – along with the various assemblages through which it both acts and is enacted – can support recognition of the entangled relations in which humans and more-than-humans co-become. Excess food, its prevention, reuse and disposal, requires management through intimate human bodily engagements where the very vitality of food is inescapable. The affective force of these necessarily multispecies interactions –which can prompt desires for both attachment and detachment and manifest in a myriad of forms of togetherness – exposes mutual vulnerabilities in living together. Through analysis of ethnographic data gathered from 38 food-producing gardeners and Alternative Food Networks (AFNs) participants in the Australian Capital Territory, this paper maps out how experimental, playful interactions with leftover, surplus or wasted food could contribute to the development of the skills and competencies necessary for adapting to our contingent futures. Encounters with excess food are shown to be capable of assisting in training sensitivities to become attuned and responsive to our more-than-human entanglements and mutual vulnerabilities. This responsive attunement can induce and support ethico-political beliefs and practices that have the potential to disrupt anthropocentric thinking.
Introduction: re-imagining the Anthropocene
Uncertainty is the hallmark of the Anthropocene. As we move from the relative climate stability of the Holocene, irrevocably altered by human actions, the nature of our future survival depends on our capacity to embrace flexible, responsive and entangled human and more-than-human relations. We need new, renewed or repurposed ways of living together in the Anthropocene. Such ways of living need to be supported by both narrative and practice-based shifts that move us beyond what Plumwood (2002) calls ‘old humanism’ and its central concern with a mode of being human that is short-sighted, exploitative and centred on notions of hyper-separation. Our key challenge now, as JK Gibson-Graham writes, is to learn ‘how to live differently with others on the earth’ (Gibson-Graham, 2011:1). These learnings require us to eschew belief in human exceptionalism and to adopt a willingness to attune ourselves to the entangled forms of togetherness that make life possible. There is no blueprint for where these forms of interaction will occur, nor how we can best propagate them. To contribute to the exploratory research in this area, this paper focuses on how visceral encounters with food, and the avoidance of food waste, of food-producing gardeners and Alternative Food Networks (AFNs) participants in the Australian Capital Territory can heighten awareness of mutual vulnerabilities that encourage reimaginings of the Anthropocene. While the central concern in this paper is with waste, I refer to the research participants as eaters. While they (like all of us) are much more than this, desires for certain modes of eating motivate their food-related practices. Before exploring this fieldwork data, and the potential for alternative forms of ethico-political engagement that I identify therein, I first map out the theoretical terrain in which this paper is grounded to highlight the generative potential of interactions with food waste in a multispecies, materially and discursively embedded world.
The multispecies realities of eaters
To eat is to enter into multispecies relations: Derrida states that ‘one never eats entirely on one's own’ (Derrida, 1991: 115); Tsing observes, in her work on fungi, that ‘we eat for ourselves and for others’ because ‘neither is capable of eating alone’ (Tsing, 2014: 229); while Haraway writes that, as eaters, we must enter into a ‘conversation with those who are not “us”’ (Haraway, 2008b: 174). As we chew, swallow and digest, food shifts in form and shape in response to a multiplicity of responsive actors, from bodily organs to gut bugs. Close attention to eating unsettles the perceptions of a clear divide between humans and more-than-humans. As Bennett notes, in digestion ‘all bodies are shown to be but temporary congealments of a materiality that is a process of coming, is hustle and flow punctuated by sedimentation and substance’ (Bennett, 2010: 49). When paying close attention to the human as a ‘metabolic body’, we are confronted with the blurring of binaries and boundaries of inside and outside, other and I, human and more-than- human (Mol and Law, 2004). The necessary response, Haraway writes, is ‘…to strike up a coherent conversation where humans are not the measure of all things and where no one claims unmediated access to anyone else’ (Haraway, 2008b: 174). However, the potency of such conversations may be lessened by the obscured nature, well hidden beneath our human forms, of the internal entanglements of the human as eater. Food often seems to disappear within our bodies (marking it in certain ways over time). The elements that are not extracted by our metabolic processes are expunged and, once externalized, are almost immediately removed (in the minority world) through intricate sanitation systems.
But the food that eaters don’t eat – that which is left over because we cooked too much, or we bought too much or simply decided we didn’t feel like eating – isn’t so readily hidden from view. The machinations and materiality of food waste can be much more palpable. Excess food, its prevention, reuse and disposal, requires management through intimate human bodily engagements where the foods’ very materiality – and, specifically its vitality – is inescapable. Things can get unpleasant when we are left to puddle in our excess. Surplus food decomposes, creating mess and often emitting foul odours as it becomes fuel for what many consider to be undesirable more-than-humans (think maggots, bacteria and inedible fungi). More disconcerting for many householders is the danger the transitioning of this excess represents – these more-than-human-induced alterations threaten to make us and (perhaps more potently) those we care for, sick. For many, the simplest solution to protecting the household from potential illness is to dispose of this excess into the household bin, often a conduit to landfill.
Entombed in the earth, out of sight, the very vitality of food wastes’ becomings continue unabated, most notably via methane-producing bacteria. Methane is not only a key greenhouse gas but also a primary contributor to the production of leachate, that recalcitrant substance that escapes the human-constructed confines of its earthly coffin to contaminate soil, water and eventually many other living things (Hird, 2009, 2010). As Hird writes ‘bacteria remind us that most relational encounters on earth have nothing to do with humans; nor are humans even aware of most of these encounters and assemblages’ (Hird, 2009: 108). The largely unsensed reality of these microbial relations and their significant impact on planetary existence, for Hird, exposes human vulnerabilities, attention to which, she suggests, could provide the basis for a new form of ‘environmental ethics’; an ethics predicated on responsive, attuned recognition of mutual entanglements among entities often unknown and unknowable to each other. It is an ethics that, at its heart, is about humans encountering relations that are not only beyond their control but are also centred elsewhere.
Along with many encountering materiality in forceful ways (Gibson–Graham, 2011, 2008; Harbers et al., 2002; Head et al., 2015; Heuts and Mol, 2013; Law and Mol, 2008; Mol, 2008; Mol and Law, 2004; Roelvink et al., 2015), I suggest that new forms of ethical approaches to multispecies togetherness require experimentation. While the shape these experimental forms will take cannot be known, those that are most productive are likely to involve cultivation of what Haraway designates as response-ability (Haraway, 2008a: 71), ‘a relationship crafted in intra-action through which entities, subjects and objects, come into being’ and an openness and sensitivity to Latour’s notion ‘to learn to be affected, meaning ‘effectuated’, moved, put into motion by other entities, humans or nonhumans’ (Latour, 2004). Accompanying these, I suggest that productive experimental modes may unfold through practices of ‘playful’ tinkering. My aim in differentiating these activities from a non-qualified form of experimentation is twofold: Firstly, I wish to suggest that the labour involved in experiments does not simply involve another drain on time and energies but can also induce an affect of joy and pleasure; and, secondly, I wish to further push the notion of experimentation beyond normative associations with scientific practice that link it primarily to enactment of a specific pattern of ordered, sequential, repetitive behaviours. In these respects, play may be more open and accessible than experimentation.
Play, as Haraway writes is ‘one of those activities through which critters make with each other that which didn’t exist before, it’s never merely functional; it is propositional. Play makes possible futures out of joyful but dangerous presents’ (Haraway, 2014: 260). Play, then, exceeds the sum of its parts and is itself ‘a surplus: an excess of energy or spirit’ (Haraway, 2014: 9) enabling creative reimaginings. It is, as Massumi writes, ‘inventive’, ‘a veritable laboratory of forms of live action’ (Massumi, 2014: 12). Play is only enlivened when players (human and more-than-human) are actually ‘in play’, highlighting that it is the assemblage relationships – the actors, conditions and resources – and responsive attunement to other entities that enables it to unfold. Play only happens through encounters among matter-in-relation. In this research, these relations can be conceived of as unfolding in a ‘tinkering’ mode, marked by ‘bit by bit’ adjusting and ‘trial and error’. As Mol writes, tinkering ‘suggests persistent activity done bit by bit, one step after another without an overall plan’ (Mol, 2010: 265). Such processes inevitably involve failures, but it is only through doing that these can be encountered and alternative possibilities cultivated.
While small-scale actions are often ridiculed and dismissed as being politically and practically insignificant by those engaging in broader-scale political-economic analyses, Gibson-Graham (who has borne the brunt of much of this criticism) points out that engagement in diverse economies, that is activities that occur outside of mainstream capitalist logic, ‘account[s] for more hours worked and/or more value produced, than the capitalist sector' (Gibson-Graham, 2008: 617). In the face of stalled global responses to climate change, these small-scale experimentations may be fertile sites for the development of the ecological ethics, skills and capacities critical for our future survival. As Head writes, At a time when top-down intergovernmental action seems not to be up to the task, survival may depend on more localized vernacular understandings and practices. Important intellectual resources come from places understood as marginal to environmental preservation; indigenous engagements, gardens, suburbs, farms, domestic homes. We can revisit empirical evidence from these to consider capacity and vulnerability in new ways. (Head, 2016: 13)
Contextualising food waste
Approximately one-third of the world’s food goes to waste. The figure is roughly the same in the developing and developed worlds. Whereas in the former most losses occur prior to distribution due to issues with harvest, transportation and storage, in the latter most of this waste occurs post-consumption; after we have sourced it and taken it into our homes. The haziness of figures related to food waste are well documented (Gille, 2012; Hanson et al., 2016; Parfitt et al., 2010) and are commonly attributed to the inconsistencies in the terms used to describe losses coupled with the difficulties accessing accurate data – both from commercial-scale players and individual householders. Despite these challenges, the importance of food waste as a social, economic and environmental issue has come to the fore in recent years. For example, in 2015 the European Union initiated its year against food waste; in 2016 the UN announced the development of a global-standard to define and measure food loss; and, in 2017, the Australian Government initiated the development of a National Food Waste Strategy designed to half the nation’s food waste by 2030. Over the last 10 years, there have also been a number of Government sponsored and NGO designed and delivered initiatives to reduce food waste including campaigns such as the Love Food Hate Waste (originating in the UK and now implemented in two Australian states); the promotion of sale and purchasing of so-called ugly-foods to reduce farm-gate waste; and the growth of not-for-profit food rescue organisations to redistribute excess food. While such moves have raised food waste’s public profile, food remains a significant component of rubbish.
The persistence of food loss at the household level is commonly attributed to profligacy, regularly identified as an expression of our ‘throwaway society’ mentality (Baker et al., 2009; Evans, 2012). However, research indicates that householder discard of surplus or excess food tends to be accompanied by feelings of guilt (Baker et al., 2009; Evans, 2012). Waste troubles us. As Acuto asserts, it is its ‘assembled nature’, comprising ‘nonhuman and human components’ across multiple scales that ‘makes waste so wicked’ (Acuto, 2014: 351). The first large-scale study into food waste in Australia found that 84% of people reported feeling guilty when they throw food away (Baker et al., 2009). Evans’ research with UK householders suggests that ‘worrying’, or ‘feeling bad’ (Evans, 2012: 46) are key sentiments attached to the disposal of food. Consequently, for householders, the desire to escape the affective force of such guilt and anxiety often sets in motion a series of practices that, while aiming to prevent waste, may induce labour-intensive activities that tend to delay, rather than divert, surplus entering the waste stream (Evans, 2012). Indeed, Evans finds that excess food often goes through ‘a two-step’ process before its value as food is lost and people reconcile themselves with the ‘need’ to bin it (Evans, 2012: 1130). Once the what-was-once-food reaches a certain age or stage of decomposition that renders it undesirable, or worse, a health risk, its discard becomes a means of caring for self and others that is acceptable to the householder, somewhat alleviating the troubling qualities of waste. Yet, as Evans writes, ‘there is nothing inevitable’ (Evans, 2012: 1125) about the transition from surplus to waste, and thus, there are multiple points along the value chain where excess can become something else.
Surplus food presents as a site where the sensorially experienced entanglements of humans and nonhumans induces affective responses that can prompt engagement in new consumption and discard practices. Waitt and Phillips’ (2016) study of household fridge usage and ridding practices also finds that eaters invest time and effort in managing food circulation through their fridge to avoid waste, highlighting the employment of three key activities: placing, rotating and assessing. Such hands-on practices can produce intimate, embodied engagement with food transitions that are guided by sensorial experiences as well as institutional and scientific governance (most overtly expressed in use-by dates). As Waitt and Phillips write ‘[r]epeated moving, touching and sighting of refrigerated foods allowed embodied understandings of foods’ materialities and value’ (Waitt and Phillips, 2016: 370). Intense embodied responses to excess, such as disgust and revulsion, also function as ‘powerful political forces’ that demonstrate the ‘political possibility of affect as a response where different becomings might emerge’ (Hawkins and Muecke, 2003: xiv). It may well be that the generative capacity of these sites of becomings harbour the potential to support more productive forms of human/more-than-human engagement.
In the following discussion playful tinkering with potentially surplus food is shown to be capable of assisting the ‘training our sensitivities’ (Mol, 2009: 278) to become more attuned to the vitality and affective forces of the material relations within which we act and are enacted. This is most apparent in the visceral, embodied ways in which the eaters in this research are ‘moved by’ food, particularly in times of both abundance.
Engaging with the eaters: moving and being moved by food
The ethnographic data drawn on in the remainder of the paper come from research projects carried out with 39 food-producing gardeners and AFN participants in the Australian Capital Territory between 2010 and 2015. Participants self-selected into the research in response to emails and social media posts. The research included participants: aged from their early 20s to their late 70s; from single-person to large family households; from those residing in units to those in detached single dwellings. It also included people from a variety of socio-economic backgrounds with many identifying that they currently, or in the not-too-distant past, had to budget carefully to ensure adequate food was available in their households. Some identified their decision to grow their own food as, in part, an effort to ensure their households were food secure. However, at the time of the research, all households indicated that they were able to purchase and/or grow sufficient food. The research involved in-depth, semi-structured interviews with each participant in their home or gardens where many of their regular food routines were carried out, allowing them the opportunity to ‘show and tell’ rather than simply talk about their practices. The aim was to allow people to share their food stories ‘in their own words’ (Anderson, 2014: 58) and to provide them with the opportunity to highlight material aspects of these food practices while being immersed in their everyday realities. Food waste was a topic that arose in discussion with participants, rather than the focus of the initial research. All of the interviews were fully transcribed and analysed thematically (Boyatzis, 1998). Participants were also invited to keep a diary for a period of 1–4 weeks documenting, in text and/or images, their food-related practices.
The participants in this research tended to not only express a desire to avoid throwing away food but also an outright ‘hatred’ of food waste. The affective force of this hatred translated into a series of routines and bodily practices that significantly limited their production of food waste. The feelings invoked by imagined, potential and actual waste were palpable, visceral and prompted reflection on, and adaptation of, daily practices. Waste was seen as something that was not only avoidable through careful household management, reinforcing a neoliberal focus on householder choices, but also as something that failed to do justice to the materiality of the objects themselves. As exemplified by one eater, some experienced physical and psychological reactions to food loss: One of the other things that I hate is putting food in a rubbish bin. When I go to someone else’s house it… physically distresses me. I even lived in a town house for a couple of years and we just had this great big kind of smelly rubbish bin on the deck with worms in it and holes in the top and stuff and I eventually carted it downstairs and off to someone’s house. I just cannot put food waste in a rubbish bin.
For some of the eaters, the avoidance of waste was directly linked to forms of political environmentalism but, for the majority, the hatred of waste was primarily motivated by recognition of the value of the food itself. It was its very materiality, expressed in relation to its capacity to ‘do things’ such as nourish and nurture themselves and others (including more-than-human entities like chickens, worms and soil microorganisms) that was consistently highlighted. As such, this ‘valuing’ was rarely discussed in terms of monetisation. Instead, the foods’ very qualities, recognized as constituted by a myriad of assemblages (primarily its taste and links to both the human labour, care and time as well as the nonhuman inputs such as water and energy) prompted the expenditure of time and effort to avoid wasting it. Such modes of valuing, also impacted upon by the discursive renderings of the food, encouraged the participants to be responsive to the materiality of the fresh foods they brought into their homes. This led to a range of actions from eating seasonally through to monitoring rates of decomposition to avoid food loss. These practices of waste avoidance were largely enacted in a playful, tinkering manner induced by embodied interactions with the visceralities of fresh food. Following Hayes-Conroy and Hayes-Conroy, attention to these sensorial and visceral encounters can enable us ‘to make a powerful link between the everyday judgments that bodies make (e.g. preferences, cravings) and the ethico-political decision-making that happens in thinking through the consequences of consumption’ (Hayes-Conroy and Hayes-Conroy, 2008: 462).
Responding to uncertainty
The householders in this study were all ‘moved’ by food. Buying and growing food induced pleasure and excitement and connected them to ‘something bigger’ including the lives of growers, climate and soil. Food was not merely a source of nutrition, nor was the provision of weekly meals talked about solely as a chore, though time pressures were often cited as having an influence on particular shopping or eating habits. They enthused about food and were keen to talk about, and show, how its materiality ‘moved’ them to cook certain dishes and gift goods, and prompted certain forms of care for themselves and their family. Uncertainty, rather than concrete plans, defined most people's approach to food flows and this manifested in a high degree of flexibility in relation to both what, and how, foods would be consumed. This uncertainty encouraged attunement to human and more-than-human vulnerabilities and motivated waste avoidance. It is important to note that, while for some households access to adequate food required careful budgetary planning (and a number of participants identified that they had had experiences of ‘food insecurity’), the uncertainty refereed to here relates to the types of food available, not whether the households were able to provision sufficient amounts of food or not.
Not knowing what food would be available to harvest from gardens or purchase from AFNs due to seasonal variation, specific weather patterns and shifts in climate, encouraged an ethos of adaptability. This was not experienced as an inconvenience but was embraced as a necessarily responsive approach to the materiality of the food encountered and was also a source of excitement and pleasure. The ‘not’ knowing tended to make food provisioning fun. The joy of the unknown and attunement to the shifting temporalities of AFNs and food-producing gardening is exemplified in the following farmers’ market shoppers’ observation … every now and then… like the apple store pops up every now and then, or come October the peaches and nectarines, like we sweat on the peaches and nectarines, and if you miss a market and they’re there, everybody tells you about it. (Laughs). Because you wait for weeks, and weeks, and weeks, thinking they must come, they must come soon, they must come soon.
The affective force of food
For the eaters in this research, openness to being ‘moved’ by food was evident in a number of key behaviours, namely: shopping without fixed lists; lack of concrete meal plans (both the former contradicting two of the key messages food waste reduction campaigns encourage shoppers to develop); intentional cooking of excess (leftovers) to be reused for other meals; embodied engagement with the quality and freshness of food (rather than strict reliance on use-by dates); and an ongoing process of monitoring (including checking on availability from gardens) and responding to food so it would not transition to the waste stream. All of these practices involved embodied, sensorial engagement with foods and were discussed, or demonstrated to be (belonging to what Carolan (2016: 147) refers to as the ‘more-than-we-can-tell’ aspects of food encounters), induced in response to the affective force of the food’s very materiality.
As Ginn writes, ‘if the Anthropocene is partly formed through “affective atmospheres” (Anderson, 2012) and ways of representing that constrain and enable political imaginaries, we should consider these as important components of socioecological transition’ (Ginn, 2015: 352). Serious engagement with affect can contribute to the necessary rethinking of forms of hyper-separation that Plumwood identifies as being manifest in conceptions of the Western ‘narrative self ’, and, as Head writes, could assist us to ‘…imagine new kind of selves’ (Head, 2016: 34). For the majority of the eaters in this research, responsiveness to the materiality of food, and its affective forces, were key to the way food entered into, moved through and left their households.
The affective force of the embodied and visceral delight in the food itself, ‘its look, smell and taste’, combined with discursive manifestations of these material qualities, often meant that after an AFN shop or garden harvest, big batch cooking was immediately carried out to preserve the food for the week ahead. For some, the ‘dazzling’ qualities of the fresh food meant they often feasted straight after their weekly shop, with the food available in the house becoming less appealing as the week progressed: We usually eat really well on Saturday and Sunday ‘cause especially if I’ve bought something like seafood, we’ll often have like a cooked lunch ‘cause I’ll sort of come home and go, ‘Oh beauty we’ve got that squid’, and so you know we’ll have a kind of three o’clock in the afternoon meal on a Saturday or a Sunday and then it kinds of peters out during the week.
Having less and less fresh food in the home as the week progressed encouraged practices of ‘making do’ that enhanced attention to the vitalities of the foods in these eaters’ homes. Thus, rather than fitting into the mould of ‘profligate’ consumers, those in this research invested time and effort to respond to food’s vitalities. Echoing the findings of Waitt and Phillips (2016) and Evans (2012) a key way of avoiding waste was found to be keeping the foods visible. Excessive purchasing was commonly identified as working against effective food management and was something people attempted (not always successfully) to avoid. I don't like fridges that are packed with all these jars and things, I like a fridge that's got mainly fresh things. For a certain part of the week it's fairly empty and then it fills up again. Fridge has too much stuff in it these days and I overlook some items then they go off. Need to cut back a bit on purchases. This habit of stocking up that most of us have is a hard habit to break and a ridiculous one given our ready access to fresh produce these days. My cupboard does not reflect the fact that I can buy just about anything any time within 5 mins drive. I am going to change that.
This pleasure in the diminishing quantities of food throughout the week (with the majority of participants carrying out one weekly principal shop) encouraged practices of eating whatever was to hand, requiring playful experimentation with recipes. This is typified by one eater who, when asked how she decides what to cook, stated OK. It probably depends, yeah, if I’ve got to the shops and what’s in the fridge, because if there’s stuff that I know I need to use, I’ll just concoct something with those things before it starts to go, because I don’t let that happen. And I suppose I get ideas from recipes, but I probably will look at a recipe and then modify it depending on ... what I’ve got in my cupboard or fridge or whatever, and also what I like and how I can add my little bit to it. So I’m trying to reduce waste particularly with people being at home or not home it’s very tricky with teenagers. Trying to plan and you either don’t have enough or you’ve got heaps so you end up, you know if I cook something and she decides that she’s not going, she’s going to be out then suddenly I’m either having to eat the same thing every day to eat it all up or I’m madly trying to eat and cook and things to use up stuff before it goes off.
The affective force of the food and attunement to its vitalities meant that questions about list writing, meal planning, and following recipes were regularly met with laughter and statements from eaters that they were ‘not that organised’. However, while rigid meal plans were lacking, the food available did move the householders to act, and organize, in certain ways. These were not kitchens organized around householders’ imposition of strict eating schedules and control over the placings of food and flows of people. Instead the materialities of the food themselves also moved, or placed, the householders, enhancing their responsive capacities and flexibility. This was evident in the way meals were planned and adaptive approaches to recipes as indicated in the comment of one farmers’ market shopper and grower. (Laughs)… No, I don’t plan the meals for the week. It just doesn’t happen that way. I have a bit of a thought about what might happen, but that can turn upside down. I try and follow a recipe correctly the first time, but then I just… it morphs into whatever I want to do, and I never cook it the same twice. It just doesn’t happen.
The pleasures of abundance
While abundance in waste research tends to be viewed as problematic, for these AFN shoppers, and particularly the gardeners who participated, it was found to have the capacity to highlight human and nonhuman entanglements and thus shared vulnerabilities while simultaneously inducing immense pleasure. Indeed, managing abundance was identified as an enjoyable challenge that encouraged experimental cooking and enabled social connections to be forged or deepened. Abundance in the garden can be a thrill, as this gardener observes, Leafy greens are really easy to grow and I eat them a lot so it’s nice to just have kale growing in the garden and tomatoes as well, there’s kind of a fun thing about you know the like obscene quantities of tomatoes that get produced and then we made 12 kilos of green tomato pickle with all of the left over green tomatoes, and you know raspberries growing in the backyard like I think it’s nice to have that real connection with the food and know where it’s come from and the effort that it requires and you know I’m a lazy gardener so I’m never going to grow carrots and potatoes. It’s too much effort but you know spinach I can grow in the garden and it just grows and that’s perfect.
The gifting of food, and thus the forging of social connections with neighbours, work colleagues, family and existing friends, was also found to be critical to the management of abundance. As Bulkeley and Gregson (2009) note, social networks are key to avoiding surplus from entering the waste stream yet not everyone has ready access to these. The necessity of forging such relations was seen to be an important way of managing garden produce with one newly arrived Canberran noting Yeah. The fellow over the fence hands over tomatoes and zucchinis when he's got a glut of them; we hand over what we've got. We're developing that but that happened a lot in [the town where they had recently moved from] because we all shared what we had too much of.
It was common for gardeners recounting stories from their initial forays into food production to reflect on their initial over-production. They would then talk about how through ongoing tinkering with the varieties and number planted, as well as the care provided (such as thinning of crops), they either gradually adjusted their practices to reach a manageable level of production or adapted their eating habits and modes of food preservation to attune to the gardens’ productivity. Often this involved the introduction of new infrastructure into their lives, most commonly in the form of a freezer as exemplified by one gardener: …the first year when I had no idea of how much of anything I had to grow, and I had far too much. So I had onions and I had sweet corn, and I had beans. I had tomatoes and potatoes, cucumbers, zucchini, capsicum. And come from midsummer on, I suddenly had this corner over here, just too much. And started making soup. And initially I followed recipes, but very soon I just sort of thought, you know, I’ve got this, this and this. …And I just made up lots of different soup concoctions and froze them. Then I had to buy another freezer. … so even if it’s something in my garden that came up wild so you know I haven’t put any effort into it at all, but it exists and it’s edible and can be turned into something it kills me to do something else.
Engagement with abundance and the need to manage it to avoid waste provides a useful training ground for the development of skills and capacities attuned to uncertainty. For the eaters in this research, this ‘training’ induced an affect of joy and is, thus, experienced as a pleasurable challenge. It may be that such knowledges and practices will be critical to our capacity to live well in our contingent futures. Cultivation of the pleasure-inducing affects experienced by the eaters in this research may encourage broader-scale engagement with these practices and support reconfigurations of multispecies relations.
Conclusion
The skills and capacities to manage both scarcity and abundance are central to being able to live in times of uncertainty, perhaps most viscerally evident in relation to a changing climate and resulting fluctuations in weather (Head, 2016). The people in this research exhibit these skills and capacities at the small-scale household level most overtly through their adaptability in response to the becomings of food. This form of response-ability and learning-to-be affected encourages movements – or placements – of food in particular ways that can reduce waste. Appreciation of the assemblage-natures of food, the very liveliness of its materiality and responsiveness seems to encourage forms of engagement marked by experimental tinkering that unfold in playful fashion. These eaters were moved by food due to their embodied, visceral encounters with it as matter-in-relation. Through these interactions the interdependencies of all life and, thus, mutual vulnerabilities were brought to the fore. It may well be that, as Head writes, ‘gardeners and practitioners will be our instructors’ (Head, 2016: 128) on how to live differently in the Anthropocene. These instructors will not be prescriptive but will share their ‘learnings’ and encourage experimental and playful engagements in ways that are attuned to the relational entanglements of humans and more-than-humans. Many in this research are already crafting these learnings through stretched human relations with neighbours and fellow gardeners and a broader sense of the multispecies communities they live in. As Roelvink and Gibson-Graham write, this is ‘[n]ot learning in the sense of increasing a store of knowledge but in the sense of becoming other, creating connections and encountering possibilities that render us newly constituted beings in a newly constituted world’ (Roelvink and Gibson-Graham, 2009: 322). The challenge now seems to be identifying how such practices can be best supported and amplified.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank my colleague Joanna Henryks and our research assistant, Nicholas Mikhailovich, for their assistance with the fieldwork carried out for this project. I also extend my thanks to the 'eaters' who shared their stories, kitchens, gardens and time with us.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.