Abstract
Drawing on ethnographic research with organisations redistributing wasted food, this paper explores potentials for political and ethical learning by comparing different approaches to food handling and teaching. Food acts as instigator and tool for learning about ecological impacts, wellbeing, provenance, health and pleasure. Re-learning wasted food challenges accusations of its stigmatising potential while attempting to address serious material issues of food insecurity and food access. Taking seriously the charge that ‘community-level’ approaches might depoliticise and individualise food distribution at the expense of structural critique and action, these pragmatic and polysemic enrolments of food waste can nevertheless embody a teleology of change, through changing practices of food handling and fostering critical understandings of food system issues. While acknowledging the spatial, temporal and technological mediators of food’s journey from bin towards mouth, attention is paid to the sensorial, embodied and affective means by which the food/waste distinction is known and taught/learned. A political ecology of the body framework is used to explore the ‘visceral realm’ of food access as always part-situated in learners’ diverse foodscapes. These visceral pedagogies of knowing food sit alongside the power dynamics of regulatory food governance in the form of, for example, expiry date labels. In short, these practices, albeit rooted in environmentally damaging and unequally distributed foodscapes requiring systemic transformation, can nevertheless foster more vibrant sympathies between people and food, more careful connections between learners and their food futures.
Keywords
The growing prevalence of schemes to intercept and redistribute food wasted by producers and retailers has responded to, and further problematised, not only the extent of food wastage in wealthy food economies, but also the uneven distribution of wealth and food access manifest in growing evidence of ‘household food insecurity’ (Midgley, 2013). Attention to food insecurity in UK media, civil society organisation (CSO) and policy discourse has renewed concerns over its prevalence in schools (e.g. All-Party Parliamentary Group on School Food, 2015). As charitable foodbanking in the UK has expanded, so has provision of school holiday food assistance. Additionally, the growth of school breakfast provision suggests schools’ widening role in children’s foodways. This paper highlights ambiguous implications of a food waste activism network’s school food programme. Its pedagogical practices raise questions around a two-fold concern. Firstly, the role of community organisations in responding to systemic problems, namely food insecurity and food wastage. Do locally grounded charitable and activist responses to food inequalities risk depoliticising or deflecting structural causes and solutions? Secondly, surplus food redistribution in schools raises questions about children’s responsibilities over their own food choices. How does the summoning and cultivation of children’s embodied and sensory capacities to know food differently affect, on the one hand, their health and food access and, on the other, their responsibilisation for systemic issues lying beyond their control? Through the framework of a ‘political ecology of the body’ (Hayes-Conroy, 2015), and specifically the notion of ‘visceral access’, binary notions assumed by these questions will be challenged: charity/activist frames of surplus food redistribution, and agency/structure binaries assumed by the question of whether food waste pedagogies empower or responsibilise young people (the verbal form ‘wasted’ rather than ‘surplus’ food is adopted, conveying human-induced processes by which food is rendered waste). These questions will be explored through two empirical cases; primarily, a school programme using wasted food intercepted by a network of redistribution activists, and a charity that redistributes food similarly to a US-style foodbank. First, literature considering the political implications of food provision and pedagogies in schools is explored.
Knowing food as more-than-food
Food is an ontologically multiple medium for learning about the politics and ethics of food systems. Biltekoff (2016) analyses framing contests at play in the design of school curricula by food activist and food industry bodies. These aim to shape “different kinds of consumers” but also to “stabilize different versions of what food is” (2016: 55). Biltekoff compares polarised articulations of processed food, where ‘Real Food’ (a discussion guide by sustainable food activists) frames food as “connections across natural and social systems” (2016: 53), while ‘Real Facts’ (a food trade association’s education materials) frames food not as systemic and political but as ontologically singular: a commodity delivering consumer needs and producer profits. Biltekoff distinguishes ontologies of health inhering in the curricula: Real Food “decentres the individual” and highlights issues of access and policy (2016: 52–53), while Real Facts’ “anti-politics of health…frames and enables health as the result of individual biology, personal responsibility, and information” (2016: 54). Advocating dialogic research that recognises food system problems and solutions as technical and social, this analysis highlights how food pedagogies differently construe, responsibilise and/or empower children and their ‘foodscapes’. The following section introduces another approach to understanding foodscapes (Brembeck et al., 2013) as ontologically multiple.
Political ecology of the body
Hayes-Conroy’s (2015) political ecology of the body (PEB) framework encompasses analytical attention to structural, discursive and material dimensions of health and wellbeing. Its hybrid foci mirror shifts in political ecological thought from situating ecological struggle within political economic constraints towards embracing post-humanism (Heynen, 2013). PEB builds on feminist critiques of social constructivism in highlighting affect, materiality, embodiment, emotion, performativity and non-representational methodologies for grasping life-as-lived. Bodies and eating offer vantage points for understanding food as the material grounds of survival, the structural enabler and constraints of this, and discursive practices mediating food access at multiple scales. Considered through a PEB lens, everyday work of food redistribution involves agentic encounters with food items, ideas about that food and more or less explicit engagement with structures that both enable and constrain practices.
Visceral food access
Hayes-Conroy (2017: 51) writes that theoretical attention to the visceral realm seeks to understand political agency “from the body out”. By ‘visceral’ she denotes the “state/feeling of bodies in interrelation with environments/space”. As a specifically political pursuit, we must follow not only bodies but also “experiences of social position(ing), norms and difference”. This includes methodological reflexivity in research praxis, including attending to race, class and gender. Hayes-Conroy and Hayes-Conroy (2013) apply the framework to school cooking and gardening programmes. They acknowledge diverse ‘visceral topographies’ that individual learners bring to learning encounters. Bringing students into relation with new foods and ideas can “widen the scope of emotional possibilities” (2013: 84) and (re)shape material sensitivities, identities and relationships available to them. However, learners’ different backgrounds and experiences may engender frustration or resentment towards programme interventions: hoped-for outcomes depend on contingent and haphazard encounters between teachers, learners and more-than-human mediators. The authors’ notion of ‘visceral access’ acknowledges bodily senses and motivations as micro-spaces of encounter. Children’s “specific bodily histories and prior and current affective/emotional relations with alternative foods” (2013: 82) comingle with embodied sensations of food handling and eating to (re)shape visceral access, body–food relationships and encounters whose consequences can stretch beyond the classroom.
PEB’s attention to children’s life-assemblages highlights school as just one node in foodscapes and the importance of recognising food choice as a more-than-individual matter comprising families, homes, shops and sensory experience. This takes us beyond the precepts of ‘sensory education’, which aims to teach children to eat healthily through making novel/healthy foods sensorily familiar (e.g. Reverdy, 2011). By critiquing socio-environmental change premised solely on “attitudes, behaviours and choices” of individuals (Shove, 2010), PEB can attend to micro-level food–body assemblages as well as how food redistribution organisations address, or neglect, broader issues of political responsibility for hunger and waste. I now turn to consider political modalities of such redistribution.
Community feeding programmes: revolutionary possibilities
Ethnographies of wasted food redistribution, and community feeding programmes more broadly, reveal its complex ethico-political implications, often relying upon a binary distinction between activism and charity. Heynen (2010) contrasts the political containment functions of charitable food with radical forms of food redistribution that, historically, have contested uneven ‘geographies of survival’.
Patel (2011) analyses the politics of food assistance by the Black Panther Party (BPP). The BPP exemplifies political possibilities in everyday, material mechanisms of social reproduction, including community food programmes. Its Free Breakfast for Schoolchildren programme was launched in 1968, feeding thousands of children across America at its peak (Heynen, 2009). It addressed corporeal realities of uneven urban food access given state failures to meet basic biophysical needs of African Americans. Importantly, such ‘survival programmes’ were explicitly recognised as “not solutions to our problems“’, but to nourish “survival pending revolution” (Huey P. Newton Foundation, 2008: 4). Grounding politics in everyday bodily survival and creating spaces/relationships of mutual aid, Heynen argues, was necessary for broader solidarities to emerge. Neighbourhood care networks could extend to national–global assemblages of solidarity, stretching the concept of ‘community’. This challenges binary interpretations of whether community-level praxis enables or constrains systemic political change at multiple scales.
Patel distinguishes the BPP’s vision for social change from charity: By bursting the idea of food as…charity bestowed by rich to poor, setting in its place the notion that food is a right- and…that an order might be composed without private property- the act of feeding children was transformed from pacifying to revolutionary. (2011: 125)
Eating waste as affective activism
Critical food waste scholarship analyses the commodification of food’s cosmetic qualities as an aspect of systematic wastage. Commodification facilitates wastage if foodstuffs’ exchange value is not realised. Giles (2016) analyses ‘postcard-perfect’ rows of produce in Seattle’s Pike Place market as ‘meta-signifiers’ of world-class consumption, exuding an “anthropocentric cosmopolitanism, diametrically opposed to the contingency of a natural world which resists the ontological standardisation of form and function inherent in the commodity” (Giles, 2016: 84). Theories of affective politics, such as Thrift (2004; 58) on “the manipulation of affect for political ends”, can help to account for wasted food’s materiality, including the moral discomfort and visceral feelings its presence often prompts. What matters in food’s aesthetic fetishisation is not the capacity of food commodities to nourish bodies and uphold subsistence rights, but the logics of capital accumulation, premised on the routine expulsion of “ex-commodities” (Barnard, 2016). Understanding food’s wastage for commercial reasons regardless of its edibility leads social movement activists to acknowledge, articulate and challenge this logic, demonstrating use values by eating recovered food and bequeathing it an alternative biopolitical trajectory from its commodity form.
Barnard notes the conflation between waste’s symbolism and its visceral capacities, arguing that “we are now frequently disgusted by anything labelled 'waste'” (2016: 129). For ‘freegans’ in his study, eating ‘polluted’ food attempts to symbolically “flip the object of disgust onto the companies that created ex-commodities in the first place” (2016: 129). Freegans refracted the ‘dirt’ of wasted food by visually displaying ‘dumpster-dived’ foods on sidewalks with speeches decrying the capitalist logics and socio-ecological harm represented by food wastage to passers-by. Patel (2011) notes how the BPP obtained breakfast programme foods from the San Francisco Diggers, whose redistribution of wasted food as free public meals constituted a prefigurative politics of demonstrating alternatives to capitalism. The BPP framed its reliance on donated food as a way for businesses to express community care. It envisaged businesses lowering their prices given their analysis of “capitalist robbery”, the “ridiculously high prices that we must pay for food, which is necessary for our daily sustenance” (Huey P. Newton Foundation, 2008: 39). Contrastingly, Barnard and Mourad (2014) explore how superficially similar acts of redistributing surplus food can enact divergent political repertoires that may or may not be understood/shared by eaters. Food’s politicised redistribution bears a long history; activists’ analyses of its commodification and material possibilities suggest discursive repertoires that can be compared with the empirical cases explored in this paper.
Reconfiguring the senses
Theorising the activism of Food Not Bombs, Giles observes that food commodities’ “material agency” as ripening or bruising amounts to corrupting trajectories towards ‘matter out of place’ that renders food (commercially) waste (2016: 84). Barnard notes the dominance of the visual in determining food’s status: The fetishism of waste partly comes through our overreliance on sight and misconceptions about hygiene; by adopting new practices and norms, freegans were prefiguring a ‘post-fetish’ world. (2016: 130)
Here we see opportunities for a PEB analysis of food redistribution practices, considering multi-bodied affect as well as the politics of representation and knowledge production around food/eating. Structural forces of different natures and scales are acknowledged, for example the role of regulation. US reluctance to legislate for standardised expiry dates, Barnard argues (2016: 127), reflects corporate interests, which “make more money when consumers don’t trust their senses and throw out food that has passed a conservative sell-by date”. For freegans, challenging expiry dates and commercial cosmetic standards to distinguish food from waste involves the cultivation of embodied discernment of food via the senses. The embodied knowledge politics through which edibility is conferred by engaging sensorily with food thus serves as a means to critique government inaction and corporate greed.
Food safety as praxis
Barnard notes that freegans, ironically, actually know little about where their food comes from and that food may have been wasted because it is unsafe, such as product recalls (Barnard, 2016: 128). Food’s potential to make people ill constitutes valid anxiety that can hasten food’s categorisation as waste in homes (Evans, 2014: 47). Freegans’ risk-minimisation strategies include careful procedures for washing, preparing and cooking food. One way to compare the politics of food redistribution is thus to examine how different redistributors negotiate ideas, devices and practices for determining wasted food’s suitability for feeding to people. Rather than objectively judge food as safe and edible, the task here is to analyse redistributors’ mediations for knowing good food, and for teaching this to others, which will be later analysed in challenging binary distinctions between redistribution-as-activism and redistribution-as-charity. The next section examines literature critiquing the latter.
Charitable food redistribution
Unlike activists’ de-fetishisation efforts, wasted food provides a vehicle for ‘doing good’ by charitable organisations, not primarily to critique causes of food wastage, but to feed food-insecure people. North American literature suggests important distinctions between transient, subcultural redistribution by social movements as described above, and institutionalised charitable redistribution. Poppendieck (1998) roots the latter in chaotic origins of utilising food surpluses to provide a temporary solution to the poverty wrought by Reaganomics. This expanded to become highly resourced, integrated and professionalised foodbanking networks. These, she argues, oversimplify and depoliticise poverty through “cosmetic solutions”, redefining the retrenchment of public entitlement as individualised hunger that can be solved by gifts of food (1998: 315).
UK debates around responsibilities of government, charity and corporations in addressing poverty through food redistribution have intensified since the onset of post-recessionary austerity Conservative Party policy-making in 2010 (Midgley, 2013). Critics have questioned the quality and appropriateness of charitable food (Caraher and Furey, 2017). Power imbalances implied by Patel’s description of charity as pacification have been analysed in terms of stigma, shame and powerlessness (Van der Horst et al., 2014). While uneven emotional and affective dynamics of food aid encounters have been explored (Williams et al., 2016), less attention has been paid to the visceral realm of wasted charitable food. Critics have, however, shed light on the qualities of donated and wasted food; Tarasuk and Eakin (2005) noted the limited and variable supply of food donations as a limiting factor of foodbank provision. Van der Horst et al. (2014: 1512) note that for some recipients the “experience of poverty is heightened by the content of the food parcels”, including regular inclusion of “spoiled food” where expiration dates prompted emotional responses to “embodied taboos” around eating ‘waste’. Recipients were expected to “overcome…inhibitions” (Van der Horst et al., 2014: 1512) through volunteers educating them about the relevance of expiration dates. This contrasts with the discursive refraction by which freegan activists re-framed food as edible and desirable by challenging ‘embodied taboos’ around expiry dates as regulatory constructions, not as flawed individual knowledge.
Political food ecologies: challenging the activist/charity binary
Before turning to our methodology, we bring together some of the strands laid out in identifying a nexus of food politics, ethics and pedagogy that blur the distinction between pacifying and revolutionary. The PEB framework critiques efforts to teach ‘ethical’ food to students whose classed, racialised and gendered visceral topographies may be obscured by pedagogical programmes that aim to broaden learners’ foodscapes without acknowledging the structural, representational and material constraints affecting all teaching and learning (Hayes-Conroy and Hayes-Conroy, 2013). Critiques of the individualising propensities of charitable redistribution (Poppendieck, 1998) can nevertheless be applied to more radical redistribution practices. While dumpster diving for some provides a means to disavow waste resulting from strict cosmetic standards, conservative expiry dates and abundantly stocked shop shelves, its positing of individual practice in pursuit of more ethical forms of consumption arguably misses the “extent to which these practices are constrained by the existing organization of food production, distribution and consumption” (Mourad and Barnard, 2016).
The PEB framework, however, embraces the interactions of the structural, discursive and material operations of power, and we consider political activity at multiple levels, rather than analyse all consumption-focussed activity as embodying neoliberal strategy. We will thus explore different ways that redistribution organisations configure food qualities, especially safety and edibility, and their political implications. Exploring differences between organisations’ more-than-human assembling of food ethics is an attempt to identify spaces for debate around a key question for food justice: how should we regard/utilise wasted food?
As suggested, actors utilise wasted food for different ends, using diverse practical and discursive means for representing and handling food/waste, which translate into distinctive pedagogies of ‘knowing food’ that can then be taught to others. These range from activists’ performances revealing the extent and mundane capitalist logics of food wastage to expanding charitable movements framing wasted food as a resource for addressing poverty. While reflecting distinct political repertoires, they do however overlap and converge in important ways: their reliance on donated food, and their enabling of food access through re-diverting flows of decommodified food. The everyday work of redistribution involves agentic encounters with food items, ideas about that food and more or less explicit engagement with structures that both enable and constrain practices. Patel (2011: 129), however, argues that the difference between pacification and revolution lies in the recognition that food provision is not enough to transform food injustices, which requires envisaging and acting upon the scale of injustice through “political education and effective action”. He also notes the importance of grappling with gender, race and other intersectional vectors of inequality in the pursuit of radical change. Might UK food redistribution offer a politics of empowerment, solidarity and critique rather than pacification, the disciplinary function served by charities in the neoliberal rollback of redistributive policy (Poppendieck, 1998)?
In conjunction with theory laid out, our empirics will challenge the activist/charity binary by highlighting differing redistribution organisations’ mutual concerns, challenges and role in an expanding field of food aid. A focus on sensory praxis will draw out this challenged binary by examining pedagogies of teaching food/waste distinctions by two organisations, and by considering how organisations attempted to provide food that was appropriate, desirable and safe.
Methodology
Having situated our study in analyses of wasted food redistribution for diverse ends, we introduce the redistribution projects studied. The main focus is the school educational programme of a network of pay-as-you-feel cafés serving wasted food. Its initial aim was to protest food waste’s environmental hazards by demonstrating its extent and needlessness, but several participants also highlighted the network’s role in bolstering food access in deprived neighbourhoods. Food is generally acquired through local businesses donating surplus food rather than bin diving, though activists describe donations as “interceptions” in a politics of refusal to acknowledge the beneficence of the food industry, whose profit-motivated excess, they argue, causes wastage. Receiving donations also minimises risks of redistributing unsafe food, which Barnard (2016) notes is a risk of freegan practice.
The programme delivers wasted food to schools, which is subsequently redistributed to families through pay-as-you-feel market stalls manned by parents, teachers and/or children. It aims to alleviate school hunger (e.g. providing morning toast in classrooms) while raising awareness of food wastage. It was co-founded by a school in an area of high deprivation in a city in the north of England, described by the co-ordinator as a “desert” of access to both food and service provision. Organisers lead assemblies and classes to teach children about health, sustainability and entrepreneurship through handling wasted food. The programme also aims to contribute to the network’s campaign strategy, empowering children to “feel like they have the power to be an activist”, as one organiser described. Its aims thus go beyond providing inexpensive foods to families. Further, it hopes to instil changes in children’s attitudes and skills around food that it is hoped will help them prevent food waste in their own and others’ lives. Research, undertaken from 2015–2016, included a year of participant observation and semi-structured interviews with 10 members of the pay-as-you-feel café network, including school programme organisers (referred to as ‘activist-educators’ below). Ethical and time considerations precluded interviewing children/parents, so interviews aimed to capture organisers’ experiences in relatively early stages of the programme.
The school programme’s approach is compared with a national charity redistributing wasted food with the explicit aim of alleviating ‘food poverty’. It redistributes food from major industry partner-donors to local charities through an expanding infrastructure of warehousing and transportation. It must adhere to the national charity’s food safety guidelines. Fieldwork took place over one year from November 2015, with one regional depot.
Ethics approval for the research was granted by the university and informed consent granted by organisers and participants in all locations. Interviews were recorded, transcribed and analysed, drawing on tools of Critical Grounded Theory (Belfrage and Hauf, 2017), which facilitates attention to structural, discursive and relational/material dimensions. The two organisations’ distinct origins, relationships with donors and modes of redistributing food offer ways to consider the political import of differing approaches to distinguishing food from waste through embodied praxis.
School-based redistribution: depoliticising or meeting immediate needs?
The first question to be addressed empirically is whether community-level food assistance depoliticises structural issues of poverty and waste. Heynen’s (2009: 408) reminder of the under-theorised mundane, “horrifying reality of hunger” situates urban hunger “within the context of political economy, social reproduction, and poverty”. Projects attending to this can thus provide not just vital sustenance but a window onto spatial and structural determinants of hunger. The activist network expressed attention to these, as shown below. Most pay-as-you-feel café network members differentiated themselves from charitable food aid providers, highlighting their primary purpose as campaigning against food waste. One characterised the redistribution charity’s donor relationships as “so far up Tesco’s arses that they’ll never campaign to end food waste” (interview, café organiser, 19 January 2016). She nevertheless described differences between cafés’ emphases on addressing hunger locally, a point verified by other interviews, suggesting a mutual concern with the charity.
While the wider network tended to downplay its hunger relief role, the school programme (just one of the network’s multiple conduits for redistributing surplus food) cites alleviating in-school hunger as a primary aim. The founding school is located in an area categorised as in the “bottom 2% of deprivation nationally” (Joe, school staff, interview 25 October 2016). Joe described it as a ‘food desert’, with the local supermarket 2.5 miles away. With most parents lacking a car, the £5 cost of taxis and buses to the shops meant less money to spend on healthier foods. The “medium of food”, Joe suggested, was a means to engage parents in the school community, including its provision of English lessons, housing and welfare services. With over 40 languages spoken by the school’s families, he acknowledged multiple forms of deprivation affecting the school’s refugee and asylum-seeking families. Joe’s analyses reflect sensitivity of school staff to the structural determinants of hunger affecting pupils in their familial and geographical contexts. Staff have, alongside the activist network, advocated for income-based solutions by participating in national campaigns to address school-related hunger.
However, everyday activities raise questions about the appropriateness of surplus food market stalls, even if situated in broader political discourse. Food deliveries to schools are pre-sorted by volunteers of the café/activist network to ensure no high-risk food (bearing a ‘use-by’ date or needing refrigeration) is included. Schools receive a mixture of fruits/vegetables, bread/‘cereal-type items’ and ‘treats’. While the network has secured enough donors to allow some predictability, and families are able to choose what to take, supplies are still dependent on available surpluses and can reflect the highly processed, highly packaged products often encountered in redistribution spaces throughout the research. The market stall is not intended to meet families’ full food needs, and schools may use food internally for classroom learning or morning toast. While boosting food access, the stall nevertheless offers a partial and contingent source of food rather than fulfilling the human right to food, a challenge similarly levelled at charitable foodbanking (Tarasuk and Eakin, 2005).
The pay-as-you-feel model of accessing food was noted in some interviews to be confusing and even frustrating for certain ‘shoppers’, prompting questions around the nuances of re-marketising food in school settings. Intended as a redistribution model that does not require referrals to foodbanks and is thus available to anybody, it nevertheless reconfers an exchange value onto food where the normative mode of paying is with money (rather than ‘skills or time’, which the organisation also invites as means of paying). In line with Barnard and Mourad’s (2014) argument that food waste activists’ political repertoires may not be apparent to those receiving the food, the market stall could become seen as just one more node in an expanding network of charitable feeding. These points suggest the capacity of schools to bolster communities’ access to food and other services, but also the latent disciplinarity of this extension of pastoral care to parents and the wider community. Engaging parents in the job-searching, financial literacy and upskilling techniques of austerity Workfare-style contemporary welfare through the ‘medium of food’ suggests a need for critical attention to responsibilities of the state, through schools, in providing welfare services. Little evidence appeared from initial interviews of a coordinated political strategy that engaged families, schools and activists, without which Patel (2011) suggests food distribution can remain pacifying, leaving structural determinants of hunger/waste largely unchallenged.
How does the redistribution charity’s model compare? First, it delivers food to a range of organisations whose varied political work can be seeing as ‘flying in under the cover’ of the charity, as Henderson (2004) skilfully argued of the articulations between depoliticised charities and those they serve. Interviews revealed a diversity of workers’ beliefs about structural causes of hunger/waste, and motivations to address these. Fundamentally, however, the charity’s key priorities were upholding donor relations, expanding infrastructure and regulatory compliance priorities, not campaigning. While workers learned about problems including school hunger and geographical deprivation through their articulations and engagements with recipients, the charity’s key remit remains alleviating need through food provision, not structural change.
We now turn to examine the visceral pedagogies through which wasted food was (re)configured through experiential learning, using the PEB framework to consider such learning on the de/politicisation spectrum outlined in Biltekoff’s (2016) analysis of curricular design.
Viscerally learning food
As noted, the curation of schools’ food deliveries at the redistribution network’s warehouses yields some consistency in type/quality and may prompt questioning among children as to why visibly edible food has been thrown away, and what might be done with it. Pupils’ receiving and re-sorting food for their market stall entails visceral engagement with food. By handling and exploring its affective qualities, food’s designation as waste can thus be reconfigured. Food thus arrives at the school as ontologically plural, as not simply a commodity or nourishment, but the result of a systemic journey of wastage and recovery, as explained in tailored classes.
Activist-educator Tim designed lessons to challenge embodied taboos around, for example, past-dated food. He described a pupil complaining that the food was “just manky bananas”, so planned an initial lesson to …remove anything that children would have already thought…like for example the manky banana comment; they think that it’s just gonna be out-of-date food. (Tim, activist-educator, interview 26 October 2017) I take a squishy banana, one that’s slightly bruised…and get them to pass it around…it’s like a hot potato, like urgh, urgh, and they want to pass it on as quickly as possible. (Tim)
Fostering ‘healthy’ connections with food
Handling less-than-perfect foods was thus intended to widen children’s affective repertoires with food. Educators aimed to foster bodily habits of engaging with food to be better able to discern, sense and appreciate food’s qualities: as edible, healthy, desirable. Fruits and vegetables were frequently mentioned as suited to sensory learning, suggesting the programme’s alignment with dominant curricular concerns around ‘healthy’ eating. However, foods were re-contextualised as connective actants in food systems where health emerges relationally rather than residing in individuals (Biltekoff, 2016). During an activity where children tried to place food in familiar categories, Nik re-positioned children’s surprise at learning cucumbers as fruit within a narrative of food-plants’ teleologies: We talk about…actually what’s a fruit for…if you understand [that] then you’ll understand why it’s very nutritious ‘cause the whole point of the fruit is to feed the little seedling and so it’s all about making those connections about, actually, this is not just something that you put in your mouth and it tastes a certain way, it might grow a bit or whatever else; there’s a whole lot more to it…(Nik, activist-educator, interview 12 September 2016)
Co-creating knowledge?
Biltekoff notes how the Real Food curriculum cast pupils not as passive recipients of knowledge but as co-creators of learning rooted in their broader foodscapes. While Tim acknowledged children’s preconceptions, Nik framed children’s prior food knowledge as lacking: “before I go into the classroom, if you ask someone where food comes from, it comes from a shelf in a shop and before that it becomes a bit of a…dark grey hole”. Learner-subject’s ‘grey holes’ suggest blank slates for the inscription of food systems knowledge. This masks somewhat the complexities of children’s prior ways of knowing food, perhaps the materiality of past shopping trips, and partially obscures the co-constructive, contestable nature of learning given children’s diverse visceral topographies. However, one organiser mentioned parents being invited to food waste assemblies, suggesting attention to children’s wider foodscapes, and the relationships that populate them.
Sensing food/waste
Foods’ changing qualities as they degrade were instrumentalised to reconfigure assumptions about food-as-waste using visual, olfactory and even auditory cues. Children were encouraged to suggest how they might use different sense modalities to determine whether food is good to eat: There’ll usually be one person who knows about tapping a melon…every sense will have a…relevant application to understanding whether the food is ripe or rotten. (Nik)
Situating food safety
Activist-educators aimed to teach food safety as a contextual matter of interpretating regulatory determinants of waste. Improving expiry date literacy has been an aim of government research and behaviour change programmes around food waste (Lyndhurst, 2008). One organiser asked children to discuss their understanding of different expiry dates: What it does is create confusion, and that’s probably the best word to describe how dates work on food in this country, confusion…(Tim, 26 October 2016) We use the example…if there’s two pieces of meat…one’s been stored in the fridge, one’s been out in the sun – they’re both still within the use-by date – can you eat them both? (Tim) …“no, you can’t, because it hasn’t been stored correctly, and actually you don’t know how your food’s been stored up to the point you get it“…we’re really pushing that confidence and use of their senses as much as they can…(Tim)
Food regulation has often followed crises of public trust in food systems following ‘scandals’ rooted in intensive production (Milne, 2012). Contra the scientific expertise congealed in expiry dates, activists’ beliefs that such technologies arbitrarily contribute to unnecessary waste prompted other kinds of knowing to take precedence in their pedagogies of knowing food: …[sensory engagement]’s also an alternative way to understand when something’s still good to eat – that if you don’t want to look at that stupid date then what do you do then? (Nik)
Charitable food: date adherence as preserving dignity?
How does the redistribution charity position food safety? It does not distribute past-date food, reflecting concerns around donor compliance but also about the quality and reputational implications of redistributed food. Following a briefing paper suggesting the “inferior choice, accessibility and (nutritional) quality” of redistributed surplus food (Caraher and Furey, 2017: 13), the charity communicated via social media that it distributes nutritious, in-date, desirable food. Staff frequently emphasised that it delivered food to organisations cooking meals rather than giving food bags, emphasising provision of commensal, familial, ‘proper’ food. Redistributing fresh produce was described as a way to provide healthy-yet-compliant food, with loose produce not requiring an expiry date. This non-requirement lends space for more contextual practice; warehouse manager Graham maximised the opportunities it afforded for removing packaging. He argued that much produce comes in “its own packaging” and can be sorted by its sensory qualities. He combined concern for preserving recipients’ dignity by providing fresh, high-quality food with skills to predict temporalities of fresh produce’s capacity to degrade: [charity clients] don’t want fruit and veg sorted to a low standard…four days later we finally get it to the customer and the next day…they open the cupboard…and go ‘why have they given me a bag of mush?’ It’s gotta be good standards from the start, and it’s respect as well. You’re feeding people in need – oh, here’s some rotten old crap for you…(Graham, interview, 14 November 2016)
Affective assemblages as politics?
How might we analyse these multiple positionings of food and children politically? The activist network taught food materialities as contextual and systemic, involving visceral contact with food items and cognitive learning about food systems, safety and health. Classroom sessions constituted amalgams of images, imaginings, narratives and tactilities, glued together by the intimate group setting and atmosphere of excitement. This recalls Bennett’s conceptualisation of ‘vibrant matter’ as ‘conative bodies’, from whose mutually ‘confederate agency’ new sympathies between bodies might arise (Bennett, 2010). Bennett locates political action in the emergence of publics, “groups of bodies with the capacity to affect and be affected”, whose experience/articulation of shared harms prompts engagement in “new acts that will restore their power”, albeit with unpredictable consequences (2010: 101). Similarly, volunteers sorting food in charitable spaces expressed affective and discursive re-learnings of food with potential consequences both for eventual eaters and their own foodscapes. Politics viewed thus is immanent in the micro-encounter of intimate person–food relating as well as systemic knowledge and policy change. Crafting close encounters for children and food lends space for a processual, more distributed kind of ethics than the charitable ethic of giving/receiving based on a narrow conceptualisation of ‘need’, recalling a Foucauldian distinction between ethics and morality (Foucault, 1997).
While inferring potential for ‘vibrant encounters’ to transform children’s intimate relationships with food, different children may not experience the same “participatory” space in the same way (Kraftl, 2013: 15). Activist-educators tended to problematise children’s/families’ food choices and behaviours as sites for transformation, hoping that this might galvanise future activism towards eliminating food waste. Meanwhile, however, structural limitations upon foodscapes persist: neighbourhood deprivation, food access and immigration status, among others. Families’ capacities to join/form ‘groups of bodies’ united against the ‘shared harms’ of wasted food and hunger require, first and foremost, their acquiring adequate food and other resources to metabolise social reproduction. Bennett’s theorisation of the political promise of more-than-human confederacies challenges the instrumentalising of matter (including food) that “feeds human hubris and our earth-destroying fantasies of conquest and consumption” (2010: ix). This injects ecological hope into efforts to nurture more vibrant person–food relationships through food redistribution. However, it obscures humans’ different propensities for hubris, where such ‘fantasies of consumption’ may emerge from experiencing prolonged deprivation. PEB’s attention to political–economic structures is here recalled, in recognition of the ever-urgent task of countering welfare retrenchment and systemic inequality. The distinctive political ontology of Bennett and others’ materialism is hard to reconcile with a Marxist critique. However, embracing both, we can see wasted food redistribution as meeting bodily needs and potentially instigating political action at unexpected sites, shedding light on diverse forms of uneven urban development whose transformation might prevent growing reliance on food charity and projects dependent on unsustainable supplies of surplus food.
Conclusion
Our analysis suggests that activist-educators and charity redistributors drew upon both visceral and regulatory techniques for distinguishing food from waste. Haptic, gustatory, olfactory, visual and even auditory engagements with food allowed both activist and charity volunteers to separate food from the beyond-the-pale in an effort to redistribute ‘good’ food. Wasted food’s journey is mediated by complexes of bodies, infrastructures, regulations, practices and discourses that escape the activist/charity binary. The PEB framework acknowledges structural, discursive and material factors not as separate but as interacting. Expiry dates are determined by law and corporate production processes, but learners and educators’ knowledge and attitudes towards their relevance vary for diverse reasons. Sensual engagement with food may accompany attention to expiry dates, while embodied practices of cutting, cooking and storing food interact with such cognitive attention and regulatory rendering of responsibility for food management.
We have presented tensions between ethical possibilities opened up by close engagement with wasted foods and the risks of prioritising individual food choices as a means to address hunger/waste. While activists sought to redefine ex-commodified food as vibrant matter through which to kindle new, potentially transgressive kinds of food–body knowing, the charity’s purpose in handling food was not only based on engagement with recipients but also aimed to maintain donor compliance and justify a reputation as providing adequate food. On the other hand, the diverse organisations receiving the charity’s food could be using it for radical community work, from feeding unmet needs for food to fostering networks of solidarity at different ‘community’ scales including national and global campaigns.
Food not only is connection, but does connecting, and both activist and charitable redistribution makes such connections possible. However, the charity’s public-facing emphasis on growing quantities redistributed or people fed suggests its lack of engagement with food’s resonant qualities and affordances for critiquing/transforming food systems. The school programme, while it risks being perceived as another form of charitable food assistance, created collective spaces for reflecting upon food and its systemic transformations and possibilities. Food waste pedagogies could potentially go beyond de-fetishising food, towards interrogating human fascinations with food commodities and their consumption (Bennett, 2001) and recognising ‘reflexive consciousness’ of the ethical food consumer as a classed modality (Guthman, 2003). Ultimately, wasted food redistribution reflects and responds to deep economic imbalances. Redistribution actors’ knowledge of injustices affecting the communities they feed constitutes vital grounds for redistribution practices that nourish minded-bodies, foster public critique and, through reflexive alliance-building, transform food (re)distribution structures.
Footnotes
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) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The University of Salford provided funding for this research.