Image on front page retrieved on 16/05/2017 from
https://www.facebook.com/zerowastelab/photos/a.733671330119544.1073741827.733665276786816/73367123 0119554/?type=1&theater
"Declaration: I have read and understood the University of Amsterdam plagiarism policy [http://student.uva.nl/binaries/content/assets/studentensites/uva-studentensite/nl/a-z/regelinge
nen-reglementen/fraude-en-plagiaatregeling-2010.pdf?1283201371000]. I declare that this assignment is entirely my own work, all sources have been properly acknowledged, and that I
have not previously submitted this work, or any version of it, for assessment in any other paper."
Introduction: Food for Thought
It is wonderful to live on this small island east of Amsterdam, where there are buildings popping up like mushrooms. It is the upcoming neighborhood of Zeeburgereiland: a once quiet place is now making room for thousands of people. Inspired by all the change going on around us, a few neighbors and I have decided to pimp up the terrain of an old asylum center turned into student housing by setting up a communal garden. Visiting my neighbor to discuss how to do this, I was perplexed when he told me that he every now and then goes to this organic supermarket called Landmarkt to skip.
Skipping means going through the trash in search for edible food that has been thrown away. “One time I found a pile of meat. The next day I organized a barbeque for my friends”, he told me. I was completely surprised: food is being thrown away? On my mind’s eye appeared the image in the news of a graveyard for children that died of famine in Somalia. In the outskirts of Garowe, they already had to bury thirty-two children in three weeks. Half of the population of Somalia does not have enough food because the drought ruined the harvest and as a result the dessert is full of bleached carcasses of herd animals. How can it be that 1 here in Amsterdam perfectly edible meat is thrown away while half the population of Somalia is suffering from famine?
The drought that hit Somalia is unlike other droughts, affecting the whole country. 2 Last year was the hottest year recorded since 1880. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate3 Change (IPCC) already reported in 1997 that increasing global temperatures lead to water evaporation from soil and open water in the horn of Africa. Global warming is since the 4 industrial era anthropogenic caused mainly by emissions from fossil fuels. The production of livestock worldwide is the biggest contributor to global warming. It’s contribution to the total greenhouse gas emission is 18% which is more than all the transportation together (Jarosz 2009: 2072).
1 Gianna Toboni (2017) Famine in Somalia: VICE News Tonight on HBO. Vice News, March 16, 2017
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LGUq6cBYy3E (24/03/2017)
2(ibid.)
3 Sean Potter & Michael Cabbage & Leslie McCarthy (2017, January 26) NASA, NOAA Data Show 2016
Warmest Year on Record Globally.
https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-noaa-data-show-2016-warmest-year-on-record-globally (10/05/2017)
4 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (1997) The Regional Impacts of Climate Change: African
Climate Trends and Projects https://www.ipcc.ch/ipccreports/sres/regional/index.php?idp=11 (26/03/2017)
Part of the Amazon is being cut down so instead monocultures of soy can be grown to feed the livestock for an international market including Europe. Not only is the Amazon being cut down for agriculture, land of small farmers around the Amazon is being grabbed by big agribusinesses, forcing these people off their land. Somehow, ironically, with all of these5 environmental and social costs, here in the West we can afford to waste meat. The production of meat is thus one of the main causes of famine in Africa, yet here in Amsterdam it is being thrown away as if it is nothing.
There seems to be a discrepancy here. There is more than enough food being produced, but one third of the global food production is wasted and lost (Gustavsson et al. 2011: 4) resulting in people going hungry. Strangely, we are living in a time where there are more overfed people than malnourished (Henning, 2014: 68, Steinfeld et al. 2006: 10). Apparently, food waste is a complex problem connected to famine, poverty and climate change and should extensively be studied. Therefore, I will take it upon myself to contribute with a comparative literature study in anthropological insights into food waste. Now I wonder how the problem of food waste can be solved and since I am a student of anthropology, I am especially interested in how anthropology could contribute into finding a solution. My main question will therefore be: How can global processes of food waste be studied without losing the anthropological view of the local? To help answer this question I have set up sub questions, namely: How do global power structures influence food waste on both global and local level? How can individuals and local initiatives influence food waste? How can anthropological insights contribute in the search for a solution to food waste?
There appears to be much to gain in solving the problem of food waste, because its solution could also be a contribution to the solution to famine, poverty and climate change. These are in my eyes the most urgent issues of this time. Solving the problem of food waste doesn’t only contribute to solving these issues but can also improve the livelihoods of many people around the world. Now that I have introduced my topic, the research questions and relevance, I will proceed to explain the method of research in the next section.
5 Vidal, J. (2017) Amazon rainforest final frontier in Brazil under threat from oil and soya. The Guardian.
February 16, 2017.
https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2017/feb/16/amazon-rainforest-final-frontier-in-brazil-under-threat-from-oil-and-soya (26/03/2017)
Methods: Comparative Literature Study
Intrigued by the image of an abundance of edible food that is free to take, I decided to give Landmarkt a visit late at night with a friend who had skipped before. Sneaking to the back of the supermarket, through drizzles of rain on a winter night, had a hint of an adventure. It was risky because the restaurant that is connected to it was only just closing up and employees could come outside to throw away trash any time and find us there.
It ended up being a disappointment; there was trash but no food. A frequent skipper recommended us BROODD, a bakery and lunchroom, at NDSM-werf, where apparently there is a trashcan full of bread at the end of the day. Again, nothing! To still try to make a success out of this trip, we checked out the trashcans of the hospitality companies around BROODD, only to find out that the trashcans were locked. I was baffled; why would you put a lock on your trash? I thought trash is something that is thrown away because it has no value to the user anymore, but making it inaccessible for everyone else gives me the impression that the trash is being valued. The Food and Agriculture Organization (2013) published a report estimating the global food wastes and losses at one third of the production. Where is all of this wasted food?
The next day I decided to pass by the Blije Buren: a community center close to my house that picks up food from supermarkets and redistributes it to people that come by. The community center is a small, old building of approximately thirty square meters that looks as if some amateurs built it. When I step inside I am met with the smell of fresh brewed coffee. The smell comes from behind the counter on the right where there is also a kitchen with a woman stirring in a big pot of soup on the stove, enough to feed at least twenty people. On the left are a whole bunch of fruits and vegetables stocked up. Two ladies are sorting the food, throwing away the pieces that really cannot be eaten anymore. The lady with the headscarf is in charge of handing out food.
Finally I found wasted food. This place was full of food that was wasted at the retail level, given for free to anyone who passes by. I was shocked at the amounts of food they collect each day. Somehow here in Amsterdam we are ending up with a massive amount of edible food in the bin devalued by the industry, while there are places in the world where there is a scarcity of food and people are going hungry. I am cheerful that places like Blije
Buren exist, because I feel welcome and it gives people an opportunity to save money on
food. However, I cannot help but feel that this initiative is a treatment of the symptoms of food waste and poverty, not solving the root of the problem. I want to find out if my gut feeling is wrong by looking for the solution to food waste.
To do so, I first want to find out what the main facts about food waste are to have an idea of the scope of the food waste problem. For this I will turn to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations because this is an intergovernmental organization of which 194 nation states are member of, making it the biggest political entity with a lot of power in the production of knowledge and decisions regarding food and agriculture. To have an impression of when the problem of food waste became known to the FAO, I searched on google with the query “food waste:fao.org”. I configured the search results sorting by date, meaning that google would show the results of pages about food waste on the website of the FAO and sort them by date, starting with the most recent articles. Luckily there were not many results, and the last result was an article summarizing the results of “the first study to analyze the impacts of global food wastage from an environmental perspective” . The report, 6 Food Wastage Footprint: Impacts on Natural Resources, published in 2013 referred in the introduction to a report which was the first study published by the FAO to estimate the extent of global food losses and food waste in 2011. From this I can conclude that the acknowledgement of the problem of food waste is a recent one. Because of this I have decided that for information on food waste to only use publications from the last ten years, so from 2007 onwards.
The problem of food waste lies within the food system, a globally connected system. Since the main research method of anthropologists is ethnography of which the site of research is traditionally locally bounded, I will look at ways in which global processes can be studied without losing the anthropological view of the local. To do so, I will compare anthropological literature on the relation between local and global processes. The literature on this topic is quite extensive, which is why I will use the literature that has been handed to me throughout my study.
Solutions inherently demand change. To understand how to solve a problem, it is
6 United Nations News Service (2013) UN report: one-third of world’s food wasted annually, at
great economic, environmental cost. UN News Centre, September 11, 2013.
http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=45816#.WSLHAeF969K (27/03/2017)
necessary to fathom change. Change demands action which is based on agency that has to be analyzed in the context of the structure of the system that the agent is part of. A change that lasts is a structural change. In this essay I will explore how individuals and local initiatives act towards food waste and analyze how it affects the structure of the food system in which food waste is produced. The initiatives that I will be studying and comparing are Blije Buren and Taste Before You Waste, two initiatives in Amsterdam, together with the Ketchup Project in Kenya.
In sum, I will start by reviewing the historical context for wasteful behavior followed by an analysis of ways to approach the global phenomenon of food waste in which the emphasis will be put on the relation between the local and the global. Then I explore three initiatives working to reduce food waste by comparing them to each other and the literature I’ve read to conclude what kind of change they bring, in which I will particularly pay attention to the relation between structure and agency. I will conclude the essay with some propositions for future anthropological research into food waste. In the next section I will outline an historical context of wasteful behavior. I will cover how science and Western societies have viewed waste over the last century and how they behave according to those views.
Historical Context of Wasteful Behavior
Before going into the historical context of wasteful behavior, it is necessary to discuss what is actually meant with ‘waste’. Evans, Campell & Murcott (2012), a team of sociologists and social anthropologists from the United Kingdom, explore how waste has been conceptualized in the social sciences. In waste scholarship, there has mainly been a focus on questions about the governing, policies and recycling of waste (ibid:6). These questions are based on the assumption that waste is “the redundant afterwards of social life” that needs to be managed. Waste is then treated as a fixed category that is located at the end of the chain where it is discarded as something worthless unless it can be transformed into value through innovations. (ibid.: 6) What is interesting about waste and the study of it, is that it is an anomaly in the sciences, existing “somewhere across traditional divisions between the social and environmental sciences, between production and consumption, between spaces and non-spaces” (ibid: 7). Waste is imagined as existing outside of the social realm, making it a
topic, which has been under-researched within the social sciences.
The assumptions about waste are being contested by Evans, Campbell and Murcott (2012) who approach the topic as:
[…] a dynamic category that needs to be understood in relation to the contexts (social, economic, historical) through which it has been put to work, the relationships in which it is embedded, and the complexity of meaning attributed to it (ibid: 8).
Key contributors to this approach are Martin O’Brien, a sociologist connected to the University of Lancashire and Zsuzsa Gille, an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Illinois (ibid: 9). As a student of anthropology I endorse this conceptualization that shows the interconnectedness between the social, economic, political and historical contexts of food waste.
My interest in food waste is not something new, unique or unusual and is connected to the public and political attention that has been given to food waste during recent years. Local initiatives fighting food waste are popping up like mushrooms. In Amsterdam examples of local initiatives battling food waste areBlije Buren founded in 2010, Taste Before You Waste founded in 2012, Buurtbuik founded in 2014 and Guerilla Kitchen Amsterdam founded in 2014 . Also a growing number of scholars are researching this topic. The problem of food7 waste seems and is according to Evans, Campell & Murcott (2012) very often treated by non-academics as a topic that has only recently been made visible. They debunk this by analyzing the history of behavior towards food waste, drawing their evidence from cookbooks published before, during and after the World Wars. The visibility of food waste is demonstrated in the calls to prevent it. Prevention of food waste was a main part of cookbooks published before the World Wars whereas that chapter was increasingly left out in cookbooks published after World War II. The authors go further by examining why food waste went from visible to invisible, and recently has become visible again, not only to the public but also to the social sciences. (ibid.: 11-13)
Evans, Campell & Murcott (2012: 11-22) identify the shifts in visibility as the two
7 Stichting Blije Buren (n.d.) Over Blije Buren. http://blijeburen.nl/index.php/achtergrond-info/ (16/03/2017)
Taste Before You Waste (n.d.) Serving Consciousness on a Platter. http://amsterdam.tastebeforeyouwaste.org/ (16/03/2017)
Buurtbuik (n.d.) About. https://www.facebook.com/pg/buurtbuik/about/?ref=page_internal (16/03/2017) Guerilla Kitchen Amsterdam (n.d.) About.
https://www.facebook.com/pg/guerillakitchenamsterdam/about/?ref=page_internal (16/03/2017)
main transitions in the history of food waste. The first transition was from food waste as a visible problem to an invisible one that occurred around the 1950s after World War II. It coincides with the global food relations shifting from scarcity to surplus. The assumption the authors make is that because of ”rising incomes, full employment and the spread of refrigerator ownership”, access and storing food was hardly a problem, making food waste less of a problem as well (ibid.: 11). The people that have consciously experienced World War II and the famine of that time are more conscious about food waste than people that have not experienced scarcity. I stumbled upon an example of this when talking about food waste with a friend on a visit to the Blije Buren. His grandma lives in a nursing home where she always gets mustard with her meal. She dislikes mustard, but because she experienced the Dutch Famine of 1944-45 she couldn’t bring herself to throw it away so she collects and sends the packages of mustard to her family. 8
The second transition was from food waste as an invisible problem to a visible one that occurred around 2007-8, the year of the global food and financial crisis. There is not a single factor that is responsible for this transition but ”a complex congruence of seemingly quite different and recently aligned dynamics” (ibid.: 16). The authors identify four main dynamics that make food waste visible again. The first sort of dynamics are “sudden events and crises” that shake our assumption that food prices are getting cheaper. The food crisis of 2008 was pivotal because the food prices rose, making it economically advantageous to waste as little food possible.
The second dynamics are “the national and international governance and policy shifts”. National and international governance create policy to reduce waste. In 1999 the European Union created the Landfill Directive to prevent waste ending up on the landfill. The focus of these policies is mainly on household waste, mirroring the tendency to represent waste as located at the end of the chain.
The third set of dynamics is “activist and cultural politics”. Popular (academic) books are increasingly given a platform. These books are linked to freeganism, a set of practices that tackle food waste as a political act and are way to provide for yourself. NGOs like Blije
Buren, Taste Before You Waste, Buurtbuik and Guerilla Kitchen redistribute food wasted by retail to primarily the urban poor.
8 Fieldnotes from my visit to the Blije Buren on march 16, 2017. He told me this after lunch around four o’clock.
The last dynamics are “longer-term technological and environmental trends”. Discourse about environmental problems like climate change makes thinking about waste desirable. Information and communication technology (ICT) has made knowledge sharing easier leading to this discourse of environmental problems being more accessible. Lastly, there is changing technology to turn waste back into value by for example converting food waste into compost. (ibid.: 16-22)
Surprisingly, in the historical context that Evans, Campell and Murcott (2012) have sketched, the developing countries are absent. The dynamics in these parts of the world have to be accounted for if we truly want to understand food waste as a global phenomenon This means more research should be done on this subject.
Hungarian-American sociologist Zsuzsa Gille (2012) engages the dynamics in developing countries by telling the story of Ethiopia, as one of the poorest countries troubled by famine that also produces a lot of food waste. The food aid that is brought in from the United States makes it really hard for the local farmers to sell their products on the market, resulting in food waste on the farm. Quite a bit of the historical context that Evans, Campbell and Murcott (2012) is based on assumptions and comparative literature research. While these assumptions seem likely to be true, they should be tested and supported by more evidence. This is where anthropology can contribute using qualitative methods to research people’s experiences of the pivotal time periods, namely the World Wars and the global food crisis of 2008. Ethnography, as the main research tool of anthropologists, can give unique insights by giving rich accounts of people’s experiences and their culture. It would be interesting to compare how old and young people conceptualize and behave towards food waste. The grandma that collects packages of mustard to send to her family is just one example.
Next, I will conceptualize the problem of food waste before I go into ways of studying this global phenomenon and exploring solutions through the comparison of three initiatives battling food waste.
Conceptualizing Food Waste as Global Politics
In this section I will discuss the conceptualization of food waste since 2010 in both anthropology and sociology, because the solution is dependent on how the problem is formulated. This way I hope to show how important the formation of theory is in the search
for solutions.
Gille (2012: 27-28) shows how the problem of food waste nowadays is the construction of the problem as a fixed category that needs to be managed and proposes an alternative way of analyzing the food system, namely with “the concept of waste regimes” which I will go into shortly. Gille sees the economy not as a value chain but as a waste chain, rightfully arguing that “without waste there is no value” (ibid.: 28). Waste is closely related to value and is by no means a derivative of value.
British sociologist Martin O’Brien (2012) argues that waste is actually not waste in the traditional sense of discarded products that have no value. Capitalist surplus management creates valuable resources out of waste and institutions dictate who profits from these resources. For this reason, citizens that take waste from companies’ trash cans have been successfully sued by companies in the United Kingdom. In this sense O’Brien argues that NGOs like the Blije Buren, Taste Before You Waste, Buurtbuik and Guerilla Kitchen can only stay marginal.
Gille (2012: 37-40) criticizes the distinction made between food losses and food wastes and the linear model used to analyze the food chain among others like the FAO. Food loss is interpreted as caused by hazards of which humans have no control over. Food loss happens between post-harvest and pre-consumption and according to researchers from the Swedish Institute for Food and Biotechnology (Gustavsson et al. 2011: 7) it happens mainly on the farms in the Global South because of a lack of proper storage. Food waste happens post-consumption and is the highest in the Global North (ibid.: 10-14).
Linear models give insight into food waste as something that happens in stages. As a result, policies have mostly focused on producers and consumers, leaving out the responsibility of processor, packaging and retail companies in between. Also because food loss is seen as problem caused by non-human factors, the solution is sought in technological innovations. This distinction between food loss and food waste mirrors the risk avoidance strategy by the processing, packaging and retail companies. (Gille, 2012: 37-40) For this reason, I will just like Gille, not make a distinction and refer to both as food waste.
Gille (2012) luckily doesn’t only criticize popular views on food waste but also comes with an alternative. Waste is not a fixed category but a dynamic one that “constitutes a social relationship” (ibid.: 29) and should be studied as such. This is where the concept of “waste
regimes’’ comes in, which “consists of social institutions and conventions that determine what wastes are considered valuable and regulate their production and consumption” (ibid.: 29). The concept of risk is very important in this analysis as it is a “key aspect of power” that links different geographical scales, deconstructing the national boundaries (ibid.: 30-31).
Risk is based on uncertainties. Risk is the “organization of uncertainty”, meaning that an uncertainty becomes a risk when it is managed. For analytic purposes risks are categorized in economic, legal and technological risks along with “threats to subsistence”. (ibid.:31-32) Shielding oneself from risks makes a business successful. The risk of losing profit from the surplus grown by US farmers is prevented by the international food aid. The US government buys the surplus from US farmers, sends it over to poor countries like Ethiopia, resulting in local farmers unable to sell their produce and thus goes wasted. Hence the conclusion of the Gustavsson et al. (2011) that food loss happens mainly on farm level in the Global South.
Avoiding technological risks is seen in the aesthetic values of food. A lot of food doesn’t end up on the market because it doesn’t fit retail standards and thus gets wasted at farm level. Again farmers bear the risks not the retailers who impose these rules on them. Avoiding legal and political risks is reflected in the dates on the packages. Retail and consumers will throw away edible food because of these dates and they’re purely there to shield retail, packaging and processing companies from any liability. (ibid.:33-37)
Looking at the global food regime through the lens of risk avoidance strategies cuts through the traditional scales of local and global and the linear model of the food supply chain. Risk avoidance strategies lead to food waste, making the processing, packaging and retail companies responsible for the problem as well. Gille (2012) sees a solution in alleviating risks for farmers in the form of an effective risk pool for farmers.
In short, global complexities of world economy and inequalities between the global South and global North indeed influence food waste. The management of avoiding risk used by companies to survive in a capitalist system results in food waste. These global structures explain why the individual could be powerless to stop food waste. But there is more. Ideologies on “consumption” and “desire” also play a part in the structures and possible change of food waste. In the next section I will discuss an approach to food waste as a rethinking of the concepts “consumption” and “desire”.
Conceptualizing Food Waste as Consumption and Desire
British sociologist Martin O’Brien (2012) also has an interesting view on waste, arguing first of all that waste is not a consequence of overconsumption but of underconsumption. The inherent tendency of capitalism to increase production has resulted in production far surpassing consumption in terms of growth. O’Brien’s view matches American Anthropologist David Graeber’s (2011) critique on consumption.
David Graeber does not give yet another critique on what is deemed the practice of consumption, but questions what consumption actually is and critiques the consumption society in which consumption is used to construct identities. The word dates back to the fourteenth century in which it meant to “eat up, devour, waste, destroy or spend ” (Graeber 2011: 491). Interestingly in that time consumption was often “synonymous with waste: it meant destroying something that did not have to be destroyed” (ibid.: 450). Recently the concept of waste has been subjected to change through critiques of authors like Gille (2012) and O’Brien (2012). The original concept of consumption to its contemporary understanding already changed three centuries ago.
The contemporary use of the word ‘consumption’ dates back to the eighteenth century when Adam Smith, also known as the father of modern economics, used it as the opposite of production. Production and consumption were seen as different spheres, one in which things were created and another where those things were destroyed. (Graeber, 2011: 492) This dichotomy is reflected in the traditional distinction between men and women. Men belonged to the sphere of production whereas women belonged to the sphere of the household and thus consumption. (ibid.: 498) The ever growing production of capitalism can only be leveled out by the ever growing consumption, effectively meaning that “there is no end to what one wants” (ibid.: 498).
Desire is thus core to our contemporary understanding of consumption. Desire has always been central for how human nature is conceptualized. The common understanding of desire since Plato has been the everlasting craving for what you don’t have. There is a constant lack of; a void that needs to be filled. Since then scholars like Spinoza and Lacan have tried to establish a theory of desire. When probing through the differences in views that desire is a result of an absent object or desire as fundamental to social relations, it becomes clear that all these definitions have a common ground. (ibid.: 493)
First of all, what one desires necessarily involves the imagination. The desired object
is never present and the imagination presents what it would be like to have that object. Secondly desire is not individualistic, but arises within social relations. For example, when desiring that villa or expensive car, it is not because property is so eagerly wanted but because of the social status it represents. Humans thus seek recognition from one another. This is because we are self-conscious, meaning we are “able to look at ourselves from an outside perspective – that must necessarily be that of another human being” (ibid.: 494). As a result we can even desire “to be the object of another’s desire” (ibid. 494). When recognized by another it helps us reconstruct the image of the self, affirming that which we think we are. Thus desire is grounded within the imagination that is directed to social relations in which we seek recognition.
Desire used to be a concept mostly applied to romantic and erotic fantasies in the medieval times and has now become more closely connected to the concept of consumption through the metaphor of eating food. (ibid.: 495-6) The contemporary understanding of consumption relies on a relation between a person and an object. This is a result from “one of the processes” that set capitalism in motion which Graeber (2011: 498) names the “privatization of desire”. This relation is held up by the “logic of sovereignty” and is quite paradoxical. The ultimate proof of sovereignty over an object is destroying it. Here comes the paradox: “If one does destroy the object, one may have definitively proved that one owned it, but, as a result, one does not have it anymore” (ibid.: 499). The metaphor of consumption solves this paradox. When consuming food, it indeed gets destroyed but it also becomes a part of you. Thus “eating food […] became the perfect idiom for talking about desire and gratification in a world in which everything, all human relations, were being reimagined as questions of property” (ibid.: 499).
Waste in the traditional sense of discarded things of no value used to be synonymous with consumption. Since the eighteenth century the definitions have diverted to consumption being the opposite of production and its main metaphor changed from a romantic and erotic one to one of eating food. Waste has only recently been liable to change by critiques of authors like Gille (2012) and O’Brien (2012). They see waste as a dynamic category that is embedded in social relations and should be studied as such. Studying food waste by looking at the global food regime through the lens of risk avoidance strategies cuts through the traditional scales of local and global and the linear model of the food supply chain. Food
waste is not mainly caused by producers in the Global South and consumers in the Global North but by risk avoidance strategies of the companies between the producers and consumers namely the processing, packaging and retail companies.
With this conceptualization of food waste it is time to go to the next step which is to explore ways to do research on this topic with the goal of solving this problem. Since food waste is a global phenomenon that is locally manifested and is under-researched in the social sciences, I will explore how to give form to ethnographies that appreciate the complexity of the problem of food waste. The focus will lie on the relation between the local and the global.
Studying the Global
Ethnography, the main tool for research for an anthropologist, is a method of inquiry that is traditionally bounded to location, a community and its culture (Barth 1959, Harris 1966 & Geertz 1973). I stumbled upon the subject of food waste because I feel worried about global warming and I want to tackle this. Unfortunately, the more I dive into the subject of climate change and food waste a solution seems to become more complex.
There is a global consensus with scientists that climate change is caused by humans (Sayre 2012: 58). Therefore, global warming is not “natural” (ibid.: 58) and the problem and thus the solution lies with us as humans. The effects of climate change also alarm fossil fuel companies, like Shell and ExxonMobile. Shell published an internal research document in 1989 warning for the harmful effects of an increase of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere. The researchers working for Shell even made a documentary in 1991 calling for action now. 9 Even though Exxonmobile and Shell knew, they invested in Cold War scientists and politicians that deny climate change instead of sustainable energy sources. As a result, confusion was created in the public discourse about climate change, successfully resisting a transition to sustainable energy. (Sayre 2012: 64-65)
The food system has the biggest share in the economy and is currently reliant on fossil fuels (Thu 2009: 14). To then find out that one third of the total amount of food produced is wasted (Gustavsson et al. 2011), doesn’t only induce images of mountains of food going
9 Jelmer Mommers & Damian Carrington (February 28, 2017) If Shell knew climate change was dire 25 years
ago, why still business as usual today? De Correspondent.
https://thecorrespondent.com/6286/if-shell-knew-climate-change-was-dire-25-years-ago-why-still-business-as-u sual-today/710850336196-96d51f0d (5/04/2017)
wasted but also the amount of fossil fuels and other inputs like water, pesticides and fertilizers. Within the context of global warming, food waste is a pressing issue. Reducing food waste might not be the solution to global warming but it sure will be helpful in working towards one (or several). How does an anthropologist study an urgent global issue like global warming and its interconnections to other issues like poverty and food waste?
Food waste is a phenomenon that is global in the sense that “they are not located in a particular place; at the same time, they are local in that they are always perceived and interpreted locally” (Eriksen 2010: 316). Food waste not only happens here in Amsterdam, but also in Ethiopia, the United States and elsewhere. There are linkages between the food waste in Ethiopia and the United States as was exemplified before through food aid. Food waste is linked to other global issues like poverty, famine and climate change. How does one study the global and what would a global ethnography look like?
To answer this question I will explore how some anthropologists have tackled this question starting with Anna Tsing’s (2000) critique on the “global” followed by a recent call from Susan Crate (2012) for a climate change ethnography and explore the utility of Crate’s proposed ethnography on the study of food waste by tracing back how Tsuda, Tapias and Escandell (2014) expansion of Burawoy’s (2000) influential theory of studying the global in terms of forces, connections and imaginations is incorporated or contested. I will go into the importance of place in global ethnography and the question of how to choose the place of inquiry with help of Gille and Riain (2002). An understanding of global ethnography offered by these authors is not complete without the critiques others have on it, which is why I will also incorporate the critique of Tsuda, Tapias and Escandell (2014). Based on these insights, I will propose a framework in which to do an ethnography of food waste.
Tsing (2000) has created an outline for doing global ethnography by first of all giving a critique on the notion of “the global”. She starts by negating what the global is not, to move towards a better understanding of what it entails. First, the global is not homogeneous and globalization is not a force leading to a global society without differences. Globalization is just like modernization, an ideology used to elaborate on the feeling that something has changed that makes the world seemingly more global. The movement of information and commodities is indeed accelerated but that is not a new phenomenon. Secondly, she contests the dichotomy between local and global. Global seems to be universal whereas the local
represents the particular. It is the global as homogeneous versus the local as heterogeneous. Contingent encounters that take place in a particular time and space seem to act as a global whole when put together. (Tsing 2000: 328-30, 352)
Tsing (2005) implemented her ideas about the global to construct a study of the global. She focusses on interconnection and then especially on the friction within those connections. Friction is the metaphor used to describe how social movements are enabled and evolve. A nice way of visualizing how friction operates is through roads: “Roads create pathways that make motion easier and more efficient, but in doing so they limit where we go” (Tsing 2005: 6). Differences create friction and encounters can thus be quite awkward. In the encounters differences are produced or at the most made clear and it is in these encounters that actors often try to overcome these differences. Those are the encounters she studies, because this is where knowledge from the local is often produced for the global community. Think of the global environmental movement that tries to support the local people affected by the logging companies while there is a language barrier. (ibid.: 17-18)
Susan Crate (2012) specifically goes into what anthropology of climate change would look like. Food waste is integral to climate change, making the outline of an ethnography of climate change a candidate for the anthropological study of food waste. Climate change is labelled a global issue and for anthropologists to study an issue of such a scale, a revision of ethnography is needed. She advocates for anthropologists “to adopt cross-scale, multistakeholder, and interdisciplinary approaches in research and practices” with a focus on “critical collaborative, multisited ethnography” (Crate 2012: 175).
The reason to adopt cross-scale, multi-stakeholder and interdisciplinary approaches is because climate change is a pressing issue that has “an unprecedented sense of urgency and a new dimensional level of reflexivity” (ibid.: 176). Climate change is a complex problem that demands “nonanthropological engagement” (ibid.: 176) and thus interdisciplinary approaches are necessary. Collaboration is inherent to interdisciplinary research and that does not proceed without problems because of the clashing jargon and understanding of terms that the different disciplines might have. The friction in these encounters needs to be studied by anthropologists.
This is where the critical collaborative, multi-sited ethnography comes in. How does this type of ethnography take form? First of all, it is a collaboration between multiple
stakeholders and other researchers. It is critical because the anthropologist has to problematize the collaboration in which meanings are not always shared and have to be negotiated. Specifically the meanings of the local and the global should be investigated and contested. Very often the global is seen as universal knowledge and the local as interpretive. Also, in interdisciplinary research to climate change, quantitative methods of inquiry are favored. (ibid.: 186, 176) Problematizing the collaboration mirrors Tsing’s (2005) study of friction in encounters. Secondly, multi-sited ethnography takes place at multiple sites. It is a time-consuming practice unless done in collaboration with other anthropologists. The advantages of multi-sited ethnography are that is allows for a comparative cross-scale analysis and a deeper analysis of how places are connected by extending the study in space and time. (ibid.: 184-5)
How to Choose the Site of Inquiry
The big question then is how to choose the sites of inquiry and its boundaries. Gille and Riain (2002) go into this question. They argue that place is “central to global ethnography” and that place-making projects are “critical sites through which global ethnographers can interrogate social relations” (ibid.: 277). Gille and Riain (2000) use Doreen Massey’s conceptualization of place as locality. Places are dynamic with a heterogeneous identity constructed by history and external connections. Its boundaries are not rigid, making a “simple counter position to outside” impossible (ibid.: 277). Furthermore, “places are unique and their specificity resides in the distinct mixture of local and wider social relations” (ibid.: 277). This definition of place could be seen as a “global sense of place”, meaning everywhere people understand place as described above (ibid.: 277).
There are so many places in the world where food waste happens and is dealt with. Often places of inquiry seem to be chosen arbitrarily by ethnographers and “what ties together fieldwork locations is the ethnographer’s discovery of traces and clues, her logic of association” (ibid.: 286) How do I choose the place of inquiry? According to Tsing (2000) and Gille & Riain (2000) it is important to study place-making projects. Even though that narrows down the possible places of inquiry, there are still many places to choose from. The decision is almost inevitable a political one.
I visit Blije Buren regularly but I might not have found out or at the least found out
way later about their collaboration with Peter Jan Brouwer to create an underground wormhotel if I hadn’t read the local newspaper De Brug. A wormhotel is a confined place10 where worms convert food waste into compost. The collaboration between these two initiatives would be an interesting one to investigate since it is a place-making project. I think it is not a bad thing that the locations used in multi-sited ethnography are chosen by the logic of the ethnographer as long as it is elaborated well. There should be space for unforeseen events and links to be investigated which would not be the case if there would be a framework for the decision making process to choose places of inquiry. The logic I would use in choosing a place for inquiry is by examining power structures. Especially when looking for solutions, it is necessary to fathom how power operates around the subject of the anthropologist’s interest. Next I will delve into the power structure of the food system to find out which actors hold the most power to change the system. To do so I’ll use Wolf’s (1989) notion of power and Thu’s (2009) elaboration on the centralization of the food system together with Harvey’s (2004) understanding of accumulation by dispossession.
Wolf (1989) describes four different modes of power that play out in different levels. The first is an aspect of a person. The second is embedded in interpersonal relations, the power of the ego to impose its will on the other through social interaction. The third is tactical or organizational power which enables actors to influence the environment in which another finds itself. This mode of power works on the institutional level. The fourth mode of power, called structural power, “not only operates within settings or domains but […] also organizes and orchestrates the settings themselves”. This mode of power works on a global level. (ibid.: 586) It is the tactical and structural power that needs to be addressed by anthropologists according to Wolf to explain the world we live in.
The relation between the tactical and structural power needs to be investigated. This is done by providing a marcroscopical history of the place of inquiry where the units of inquiry like households, regions and nationalities are questioned and not seen as a bounded whole. Next to the macroscopical history are the processes of organization that needs to be considered. “Organization is key, because it sets up relationships among people through allocation and control of resources and rewards. It draws on tactical power to monopolize or
10 Dorrestijn, K. (2017) 4 kilo wormen onder de grond. De Brug, March 30, 2017.
https://debrugkrant.nl/4-kilo-wormen-grond/ (12/05/2017)
share out liens and claims, to channel action into certain pathways while interdicting the flow of action into others”. (ibid.: 590) Power makes people understand something different by the same word.
Applying Wolf (1989)’s idea of power to understanding food waste, it is necessary to understand how power operates on an institutional and global level in the food system. Gille (2012) has given an excellent analysis of the operation of power on the institutional level through the management of risks. What has been missing is a bigger picture, a global account of the history of agriculture. Thu (2009) attempts giving one, which I will outline, in the next section.
Power in the Global History of Agriculture
Agriculture has been extremely important in forming our societies. “[..] the way food is gathered, grown and distributed fundamentally shape human society” (Thu 2009: 13). The way of life has changed dramatically when humanity went from hunting and gathering towards agriculture as a provision of food. It has made possible for cities, nation-states, centralized political power and taxation to emerge (ibid.: 13). All characteristic for the world we live in today.
The Industrial Revolution had a huge impact on how food is grown and distributed and thus on human relations. The system of production and distribution has increasingly centralized around non-state entities that stretch over nation-state borders. These multinationals have taken the power to control land and resources from local citizens. (ibid.: 14) This is for example evident in the land-grabbing practices of agribusinesses in Brazil around the Amazon. With the start of industrialized agriculture, the decline in farmers11 worldwide began which “parallels the inverse growth of multinational agribusiness” (Thu 2009: 15). Less than half of the world population is engaged in farming and this number keeps declining.
This industrialization of agriculture has influenced the way in which peasant farmers relate to their land and subsistence. Susan Narotzky (2016) dived into the question of what it
11 Vidal, J. (2017) Amazon rainforest final frontier in Brazil under threat from oil and soya. The Guardian.
February 16, 2017.
https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2017/feb/16/amazon-rainforest-final-frontier-in-brazil-under-threat-from-oil-and-soya ( 26/03/2017)
means to be a peasant farmer today. It appears to be ambiguous because being a peasant is characterized by “dependent autonomy” (ibid.: 302). Peasants used to be defined by their autonomy over land and labor, their dependence on the market and their embeddedness in a community. Peasants have also always been subjected to powerful economic and political actors. Recent subjections have been caused by new forms of capital accumulation strategies that influence “[…] the ability of peasants to make a living” (ibid.: 310-11).
Within capitalism, accumulation is often characterized by dispossession. The mechanisms of accumulation by dispossession have changed in what is now seen as neoliberal practices: private property rights, free markets and free trade. Land has long been privatized but only recently are global environmental commons like water and air increasingly being commodified and privatized. Wherever accumulation by dispossession is successful, it triggers resistance. (Harvey 2004: 73-83) This is evident in for example Vía Campesina, a transnational social movement that contest the power of big agribusiness.
The industrialized agriculture is heavily “dependent on fossil fuel inputs such as fertilizers, pesticides, machinery, and gasoline” (Thu 2009: 14). Labor by farmers have been replaced by technology. Big agribusiness have not only economically but also become more politically powerful, having in thirteen states of the United States successfully prohibited “people from speaking disparagingly about agriculture” by passing the Veggie Libel Laws (ibid.: 17).
Contemporary forms of peasant farming reactive to the power agro-industrial capitalism entail among others contract farming, fair trade contracts and agroecological short-circuit production. In contract farming, farmers tie themselves to big agribusinesses, often processing and packaging companies, that produce for a globalized market. Farmers grow crops for big agribusiness which decides what and how crops are grown. The farmer is tied to this contract and has to deal with the risks that big agribusinesses then successfully pass on to the farmer. (Narotzsky 2016: 306-307) Even though the income of farmers increases in the beginning of the contract, the contract breaks down the autonomy of the farmer to a mere “bargaining power, often as a result of collective organization” (ibid.: 307). Fair trade contracts seems to be a “redistribution of profit” from North to South “that benefits the small farmer and local communities” (ibid.: 308). Yet with this contract comes strict regulation, making it hard for the farmers to sell their products if it doesn’t meet the
standards. They would have to find an alternative market. There are still many questions surrounding fair trade contracts and its impact on farmers and local communities in the Global South. One thing seems certain and it’s that “certification becomes a neoliberal governance procedure for small producers in the Global South” (ibid.: 308).
Agroecological short-circuit production is a move away from agriculture as an expanding business and back to household reproduction. Its focus is not on making profit but caring for the environment namely the community and the biodiversity, thus stepping away from monoculture. This move is “credited with giving renewed autonomy and cultural purpose to these peasants” (ibid.: 309). Yet they are often dependent “on other sectors of the economy through wages or subsidies to make their project viable in economic terms” (ibid.: 309). The short-circuit is a direct relation between producer and consumer without the processing, packaging and retail companies in between. Narotzsky (2016) calls for research to the perspective of these farmers to find out if they see themselves as dependent on this direct relation with “alternative solidarity consumer groups” or if they “are autonomous peasants that are coproducing an emergent solidarity economy” (ibid.: 310).
As is evident in Narotzksy’s (2016) article, a lot of anthropological research has been done around peasants that seem to be subjugated by agro-industrial capitalism. Their worldviews and reactions to changing global economic relations are well documented. What is missing in this literature and in anthropological research in general is the investigation of the powers in place: the big agribusinesses. How do power and politics operate within multinational corporations? How do the powerful actors in multinational corporations make sense of the word and make decisions?
There are good reasons for the absence of anthropological research into these questions. Multinational corporations are relatively closed off communities that the anthropologist needs permission to enter. It is even harder to gain access to the daily life lived by the most powerful actors in a multinational corporation. (Peltonen 2007: 354) The anthropologist needs to somehow persuade these actors of the value of their research and that the integrity of the corporation stays preserved. The anthropologist would have to familiarize with the discourse of value in business and form some sort of contract in which the corporation and its employees stay anonymous in publication of the research.
In case of permission to enter the field of multinational corporations, Peltonen (2007)
advocates for a global ethnography outlined by Burawoy (2000). Only a global ethnography could make sense of a multinational corporation that is geographically dispersed. Peltonen (2007) argues for an ethnography of distinct groups of corporate actors like middle managers. Many of the corporate actors in leading positions have to travel often for their work as a consequence of globalization. Instead of traditionally locating the anthropologist on a workplace, she should follow the travelling corporate actors using a multi-sited ethnography. (ibid.: 356-7)
Again, global ethnography is promoted. This brings me to the critique on all these calls for global ethnography by Tsuda, Tapias & Escandell (2014). The suggestions that Burawoy (2000), Peltonen (2007) and Gille and Riain (2002) have made that “ethnography’s confinement to the local prevents it from accessing the global” is according to Tsuda, Tapias & Escandell (2014: 213-4) not the case because ultimately globalization is grounded in localities and thus traditional ethnography is “sufficient to capture the intricacies of an increasingly globalized world”. The authors analyze three ways of doing global ethnography, namely virtual, multimedia and multi-sited ethnography. I will dive into the pros and cons of multi-sited ethnography as it is the most advocated form of global ethnography.
The first reason to do multi-sited ethnography is to enable comparison of “how macro global institutions and processes are impacting multiple locales” (ibid.: 125). The second reason is to follow “the movement and flow of global commodities, migrants, cultures, ideologies, and information across national borders” (ibid.: 126). The third is about following connections that transcend national boundaries. Arguments against multi-sited research is that is time-consuming and sacrifices in-depth analysis with breadth. A problem that can be solved by collaborative teamwork.
Tsuda, Tapias & Escandell (2014) are not principially against multi-sited ethnography. They are convinced it is a well suited method for inquiry in case of the three reasons mentioned above. They are against the assumption that it is the only method appropriate for doing global ethnography and argue that the traditional way of doing ethnography in a locally bounded place is sufficient to understand how global processes work. These global processes and macro-forces are deterritorialized but they do “manifest themselves in very localized contexts” (ibid.: 132). Global ethnography differentiates itself from other ethnographies in the scope of analysis instead of methodology. Thus, multi-sited
research need not necessarily be a global ethnography if transnational connections and macro-forces are not incorporated in the analysis of the situation of the people on the sites of inquiry. (ibid.:126-7, 132)
Food waste is a complex issue interconnected to other global issues like global warming, poverty and famine. Crate (2012) proposed a framework for climate ethnography: an interdisciplinary multi-sited collaborative ethnography. There are many actors involved in solving the problem of food waste: scholars, governments, the United Nations (UN), multinationals, NGOs and citizens. Crate (2012) argues for a collaboration between these stakeholders and to stay critical of these collaborations. In fact, the UN has worked together with scholars such as Gustavsson (2012) to research the amount and locality of food waste, which Gille (2012) has criticized for its simple representation of the problem and thus wrongly focusing only on producers and consumer for the solution. Multi-sited ethnography is suitable for researching food waste because a decision in a processing, packaging or retail company can have consequences on the way farmers and consumers relate to food waste. These actors are scattered across the globally but very much connected.
I argue for anthropologists to take the challenge to research the more powerful and thus less accessible, in this case the multinational processing, packaging and retail companies, to gain more insight in the decision making process of developing risk avoidance strategies. Gille (2012) and Narotzsky (2016) have already documented what effects these risk avoidance strategies have on farmers, consumers and food waste. I think it would be fruitful to know how these risk avoidance strategies are formed.
Keeping in mind that gaining entrance to the powerful is a difficult to get done, other options for research into food waste should be pursued which is why I will go into possible sites of inquiry in the next section. These possible sites of inquiry are initiatives trying to solve the food waste problem that I have coincidentally run into while doing research for this thesis.
Possible Sites of Inquiry
In this section I want to explore some solutions that are already employed by actors to reduce food waste. First of all I want to compare two local initiatives in Amsterdam battling food waste, namely the Blije Buren and Taste Before You Waste (TBYW). Second, an initiative
located elsewhere, namely the Ketchup Project, a project that helps local farmers in Kenya turn their wasted tomatoes into ketchup. The reason why I won’t include projects by the state is because Gille (2012) & O’Brien (2012) have already given attention to this by describing how policymakers see food waste happen in stages and thus focus policy on consumers. The questions I’ll go into for every initiative are: Why do they reduce food waste? How do they reduce food waste? Will it bring a structural change? I will conclude with proposing a framework of inquiry for each initiative and choose the research option I would pursue.
Blije Buren
“Some people are so poor, they only have money”, said Pieter , the person that set up the 12 NGO Blije Buren in 2010. The Blije Buren is a community center located on the Cruqiuseiland. Their main goal is not to eliminate food waste but help the urban poor build up a network and eradicate loneliness. The reason they reduce food waste is thus secondary to their main goal: getting people together by offering free food that is wasted at retail level. The reduction of food waste is thus a result of the effort to reduce poverty with the little resources they have. Everyone can come in for a cup of coffee, soup and a conversation At night, they organize a diner for anyone willing to join the table. This is all for free, even when money is offered for the food and work they put in, they refuse accepting it.
The core to the organization is Pieter and Frannie, the lady with the black curly hair, who oversees everything, know what has to be done and make sure people feel welcome. Pieter is the face of the Blije Buren in the media. There is a team of people with vans and cars that pick up food from the Dappermarkt and supermarkets like Ekoplaza. Blije Buren has a contract with supermarkets so that the liability is passed onto the Blije Buren. Amy , the lady13 with the headscarf, is in charge of handing out the food, which happens from three o’clock onwards. At least an hour before, she starts sorting out the food that came in that morning. They want it all to look good, otherwise people would not want it, and it is handed out to make sure everyone gets a fair share. Often Amy has help from a friend or from people from the neighborhood that like to volunteer occasionally.
12 Fieldnotes from my visit to the Blije Buren on march 16, 2017. He told me this before lunch around two
o’clock
13 For the sake of anonymity, I have used a different name.
At the end of June this year the Blije Buren has to make way for a center for asylum seekers. Pieter is busy trying to convince the government that the Blije Buren and the center for asylum seekers can very well exist next to each other and even have a positive influence on integration. From what I have heard from Frannie, they have not yet gotten an offer for an alternative place from the municipality to continue their services and recently an online petition was started with goal of getting the Blije Buren a place assigned in the Southern part of Amsterdam. 14
With these tensions going on there is a chance that Blije Buren will not be able to grow and instead of opening up more locations, they will be moved from location to location like they have been since the start. It will be hard for them to make structural changes in the sense of changing laws or definitions around terms like poverty. Yet they do make a change for the people around them, connecting neighbors to each other and stimulate them to help each other. Blije Buren has also inspired and helped set up the Buurtbuik, a similar initiative. Like Pieter says: “Being alone is a choice, but loneliness is something you realize when you need help but can’t ask anyone”. 15
Blije Buren is an interesting place in the first place to study the topic of poverty, loneliness and the creation of social networks. Yet it can also be a place to study food waste. What is interesting about the Blije Buren is that the reduction of food waste is not their main goal. Are they solving the problem of food waste this way? I don’t think so, because they are not challenging the risk avoidance strategies of the powerful actors in the food chain, namely the retail companies from which they collect the food. Also, this practice results in underconsumption: when more people make use of their service, then retail companies have to throw more food away because there are less buyers. It is a perpetuating circle in which the
Blije Buren create food waste by reducing it. This is not a critique on them as an initiative, because reducing food waste is not what they are striving for.
Where I do see an opportunity in researching food waste within this initiative is their collaboration with Peter Jan Brouwer to create a underground worm hotel. This is a 16
14 Gualterus, P. (2017) Blije Buren Amsterdam zoekt ruimte. https://blijeburen.petities.nl/ (5/05/2017) 15 Quote by Peter Gualterus translated from Dutch. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=svs1qzTSM1k
(5/05/2017) at 4:04-4:12
16 Dorrestijn, K. (2017) 4 kilo wormen onder de grond. De Brug, March 30, 2017.
https://debrugkrant.nl/4-kilo-wormen-grond/ (12/05/2017)
place-making project that can transform relations of citizens to food and waste. The Blije
Buren is able to offer a lot of food waste to the worms to convert into compost, but also habitants can through this project turn their food waste into a useful product. The compost is offered to urban farmers and with that the threshold to grow food is lowered. The anthropological research into this subject has no need for a global ethnography and can instead take the form of a traditional locally bounded ethnography to find out how this place-making project influences the relation people have with food, waste and each other by also focusing on the friction in the collaboration between the Blije Buren, Peter Jan Brouwer, people from the neighborhood and the municipality.
Taste Before You Waste
Taste Before You Waste (TBYW) is an initiative that started in 2012 by Luana Carretto, who was an Amsterdam University College (AUC) student at the time. Shocked by a documentary describing the amount of food waste, she headed to the local grocery stores and asked if it was true. The shop owners said they had to, and were eager to give her the wasted food when she brainstormed out loud to find an alternative useful place for the food instead of the bin. Motivated by the shop owners’ willingness to help people instead of throwing away the products, she thought out a plan and started the initiative Taste Before You Waste. A group of volunteers, mostly AUC students, would pick up food and deliver them to initiatives that would use it. Knowing that this is not the solution to the problem but only a treatment of symptoms, they sought to bring the solution by creating more awareness around food waste under consumers. This has become their main goal and now they organize food cycle markets, educational workshops, community dinners and catering events to realize their goal. The food cycle market and community dinner is all on donation basis. They do ask for 17
money for what they do and to enable them to keep going, but it is not mandatory. 18
The problem of food waste, according to TBYW, happens in stages: the way of thinking about the problem that Gille (2012) and O’Brien (2012) criticize. Consequently, TBYW focusses on consumers that are at the end of the chain. Consumers are a very broad
17 Taste Before You Waste (2016) Taste Before You Waste: Policy Plan 2016-2021. Foundation Taste Before You Waste, August 2016.
http://amsterdam.tastebeforeyouwaste.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/PolicyPlanENG.pdf (8/05/2017)
18 From my fieldnotes of my visit to the Food Cycle Market of TBYW on 14th of March 2017
target group. The website of TBYW is written in an academic style that, seems to me, only speaks to highly educated people. Something that became evident when I once visited the weekly food cycle market on Tuesday held from two until four o’clock in the afternoon and spoke to the girl in charge who told me that mostly university students come to this weekly food cycle market.
Luckily, TBYW tries to reach other groups by standing on actual markets and handing out free food. People are intrigued by a stand on the market that gives away free food and will ask where it is all coming from. When Luana tells them it’s garbage, she sees that they are “flabbergasted”. TBYW is aiming to become a global movement by helping others to19 independently set up initiatives under their name elsewhere. There is already a TBYW in Utrecht, Bergen and Bussum and soon Germany, Belgium, the United States and Canada will be following.5
Interestingly, those busy with TBYW are mostly young people, namely students and recent graduates. On the one hand I don’t see TBYW making a structural change because they are focused on the consumer’s food waste instead of the system of risk avoidance strategies of processing, packaging and retail companies. Also their framing of the problem in stages is problematic. On the other hand I do see them changing people’s mindset about food waste by confronting them with it. It can get people to think about the problem critically. For a systematic change in mindsets, this initiative needs to go global, which they are busy doing now.
This is where global ethnography can come in to research the transnational relations being made and the friction in the encounter. Multi-sited ethnography can help give insight in the way geographically different located communities relate to food waste and each other by comparison and more interestingly how transnational social movements are formed, especially since TBYW is so young and only just about to go transnational.
Ketchup Project
In the summer of 2016, the Ketchup Project was launched after a successful crowdfund campaign. Five entrepreneurs ascertained that 40% of the tomatoes grown by local farmers in
19 Carreto, L. (2014) Taste before you waste | Luana Carreto | TEDxAUCollege. Tedx Talks, March 19, 2014.
See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nuHIAeVbJvU (8/05/2017) at 10:29-11:16
