Abstract
This article offers a sociological analysis of household food waste and its starting point is a critique of perspectives in which volumes of waste generation are used to infer the presence of a throwaway society. Drawing on broadly ethnographic examples, the analysis illustrates some of the ways in which the passage of ‘food’ into ‘waste’ arises as a consequence of the ways in which domestic practices are socially and materially organized. Specifically, attention is paid to: 1) routines of household food provisioning and the contingencies of everyday life; 2) the social relations manifest in the enduring convention of the family meal and; 3) the socio-temporal context of food practices. Taken together it is suggested that contemporary sociological approaches to home consumption, material culture and everyday life can usefully engage with public and policy concerns about the origins and consequences of food waste.
Introduction
It is estimated (WRAP, 2009) that households in the UK throw away roughly one third of the food that they purchase for consumption. To the extent that the social sciences have addressed wastefulness in consumption, there exists – as Gregson et al. (2007a; 2007b) point out – a tendency to uncritically position so-called consumer cultures as ‘throwaway societies’ (Bauman, 2002; Cooper, 2005; Packard, 1961; Toffler, 1970). Belonging to a long and varied tradition of moralizing about consumption (Horowitz, 1985), the throwaway society thesis takes current volumes of waste generation as incontrovertible evidence for the excessive, wanton nature of contemporary consumerism as compared to an earlier time in which our thrifty forebears were (imagined to be) far less profligate (Strasser, 1999). Against this, O’Brien’s work on waste (2008) advises that moral critique should not be confused with genuine sociological analysis and demonstrates that claims about the throwaway society do not stand up to numerical or historical scrutiny. Allied to this, the throwaway society thesis betrays recent developments in consumption research that have called for grounded analysis to counter the popular and academic ‘myths of consumerism’ (Gregson et al., 2007b; Miller, 1995). Notably, these developments have shifted the gaze of consumption studies towards ordinary, domestic and everyday social practices (Gronow and Warde, 2001; Miller, 2001; Shove, 2003; Warde, 2005). These movements can be cast more generally against a turn in sociology towards a focus on everyday life (Scott, 2009), personal life (Smart, 2007) and the home (Hurdley, 2006; Pink, 2004). In spite of the glacial speed at which ‘taken for granted’ issues have been engaged with, empirical explorations of the relationships between everyday life and waste remain thin on the ground (although see Hawkins, 2006 for a theoretical treatment). The honourable exception is Gregson et al.’s (2007a; 2007b) qualitative study of household divestment and disposal which used empirical materials to critique the throwaway society thesis and suggest that it confuses the process of ridding with the act (2007a: 283). Their research deliberately excluded the afterwards of food consumption and so that is where this article takes its first cue.
In contrast to the neglect of waste in sociological approaches to everyday life; the opening up of the familiar as new terrain of enquiry was highly influential in the appearance of a named ‘sociology of food’ (for example Murcott, 1983). Moreover, ‘food studies’ has long been a fertile territory for explorations of domestic practice (DeVault, 1991; Valentine, 1999), everyday routines (Short, 2006; Warde and Hetherington, 1994), and family relations (Jackson, 2009; Murcott, 1988, 1995, 1997). To the best of my knowledge, however, these accounts have not considered waste and more generally, very little has been written about the disposal of food. Notable exceptions include Munro’s conceptualization (1995) of the conduits through which food can (or not) be physically and symbolically disposed of, and Cappellini’s (2009) analysis of consuming leftovers. Whilst acknowledging that food waste is an important issue and one that is rightly implicated in popular and policy concerns about food security and environmental sustainability, this article is not concerned with discussions of how much food is being wasted. The analysis that follows explores how and why food that is purchased for consumption comes to be wasted. To do so, I present three in-depth and intimate snapshots of the households encountered during a broadly ethnographic study of food waste and discuss some of the processes, practices and dynamics that accompany the passage of ‘food’ into ‘waste’. To conclude, I suggest that food waste is a more or less mundane consequence of the ways in which domestic practices are socially and materially organized.
The Study
The empirical material that informs the analysis that follows is drawn from a broadly ethnographic study that involved eight months (November 2009 – July 2010) of sustained and intimate contact with the residents and households encountered on two ‘ordinary’ streets – pseudonymously called Rosewall Crescent and Leopold Lane – in and around South Manchester. I use the term ‘ordinary’ to signal that the streets were chosen because, following Miller (2008), I had no particular reason to choose them other than attempting to encounter everyday lives as they are found without recourse to the categories of social/sociological analysis. That said I chose – based on my local and residential knowledge of the areas in which they are located – streets that I expected to exhibit a degree of diversity. Participants were recruited by dropping leaflets through letterboxes and following this up with successive rounds of door knocking (Davies, 2011). In total 19 households participated in the study (11 from Rosewall Crescent; 8 from Leopold Lane) and whilst this sample is by no means representative, the nature of the areas in which I was working ensured at least some heterogeneity in terms of income band, age, housing structure, housing tenure and household composition.
The fieldwork was undertaken to explore household food waste, however I anticipated that a blunt empirical focus on disposal would be problematic insofar as it would risk foregrounding certain identities and relations that are not necessarily easy to talk about or comfortable to confront (Hawkins, 2006). Aside from concerns about research ethics, my suspicion was that this would make it difficult to recruit and retain respondents. Accordingly, I decided to investigate food waste in relation to broader practices of household food provisioning and so the fieldwork explored the ways in which households plan for and shop for food; how they prepare, consume and eat it; how they store it; and the ways in which they dispose of the food that they do not eat. In the interests of informed consent it was made perfectly clear to all respondents that, ultimately, the study was concerned with food waste.
In terms of carrying out the research I decided – in light of sociology’s growing dissatisfaction with its ‘go to’ methods (Back, 2007; Mason, 2008; Savage and Burrows, 2007) – that static interviews would not be sufficient. Indeed, a theoretical orientation towards practice necessitates a focus on ‘doings’ as well as ‘sayings’ (Schatzki, 1996) and this commands (although seldom receives) a methodological approach that locates talk within on-going and situated action. Logically, this directed me towards participant observation but it quickly transpired that ethnography – in the strictest sense of the term – was not appropriate given the research at hand. Effectively I had decided to explore the dynamics of what people do ‘behind closed doors’ and consider the consequences of this in terms of waste. This decision was informed by the idea that the home is where ‘most of what matters to people is happening’ (Miller, 2001:1) and so the most appropriate place to direct a study of consumption and everyday life. However Miller and others (Gregson, 2007; Pink, 2004) have also noted that doing ethnographic research in people’s homes is far from easy and not readily amenable to traditional – Malinowskian – understandings of ethnography. For example it involves intrusion into private lives/intimate spaces and this means that researchers are more likely to visit their respondents than they are to live with them. Caught between the insufficiency of interviews and the impossibility of ethnography proper, the research design warranted some further reflection on how best to approach an investigation of ordinary domestic practice.
In thinking these issues through, my starting point was Sarah Pink’s (2004: 26) observation that ethnography in the home is necessarily multi-sited (q.v. Marcus, 1995) and clearly, the activity of household food provisioning incorporates sites and spaces beyond the home. In practice, I adopted a range of methodological techniques. For example I conducted repeat in-depth interviews with respondents in which we discussed the various ways in which they shop for, prepare, eat, store and dispose of food. Similarly, I retained elements of the classical ethnographic toolkit insofar as I spent a lot of time ‘hanging out’ in respondents’ homes, their streets and the areas in which the study took place. Here, my notes and observations were recorded in a field diary. Additionally, the logic of multi-sited research design led me to take inspiration from the empirical realms that have been opened up by the ‘mobilities turn’ (Buscher and Urry, 2009) in sociology. In this spirit, two of the approaches that I adopted merit further discussion.
First, I conceived of the fieldwork in terms of exploring the cultural biography of things (Appadurai, 1986; Lash and Lury, 1996). By turning my attention to food itself and exploring its passage into waste, my intention was to explore its social life and social death. This involved me following the very literal movements of food – for example by tracking it from the supermarket, to the home, to the saucepan, back to the fridge and eventually, the bin. It also involved a focus on the ways in which food moves between categories and evaluations – for example from raw ingredients, to a cooked meal, to leftovers, to ‘past its best’ and eventually, waste. The analytic thinking behind this approach was that by turning my attention to the logic of stuff (Miller, 2010) and ‘following the thing’ (Marcus, 1995) I would be able to glean useful insights into the processes and dynamics of household food provisioning. Practically, this involved sustained contact with households over time in order to trace the biographies of certain foodstuffs from acquisition through to disposal. Seeing as I did not live with the respondents, I was unable to follow every movement of every item in every household. 1 However, I developed a number of techniques – diary records, cupboard rummages and fridge inventories – in which foodstuffs could be made use of in terms of their capacity to elicit talk.
Second, in order to resolve the aforementioned tensions between interviewing and participant observation, I adopted the hybrid approach of the ‘go-along’ (Kusenbach, 2003). Go-alongs involve accompanying respondents as they go about doing the things that they would be doing regardless of the researcher’s presence and interviewing them/making observations in situ. Again, the observations gathered here were recorded in my field diary. The analytic thinking behind this approach was that it would ‘thicken’ the interview data by allowing for a focus on talk as part of situated action. Additionally I anticipated that it would allow me to participate in everyday lives without intruding too far into the respondents’ homes and private worlds. Practically, this involved me ‘going along’ with participants to the supermarket as they gathered their shopping, putting it away with them, cooking with them and on occasion, eating with them. Additionally, several respondents invited me to accompany them when they were having a ‘sort out’ of their fridges and/or freezers.
The analysis that follows presents three in-depth and intimate snapshots of the households encountered in order to explore some of the practices and dynamics that accompany the passage of ‘food’ into ‘waste’. Admittedly this representational tactic is far from conventional. However it is: 1) a logical outcome of a theoretical orientation towards practice; 2) a suitable reflection of the methodological approach outlined above and; 3) the most appropriate strategy for illustrating some of the ways in which waste is the fall out of everyday life. The households discussed in each case study were not chosen because they are in any way representative of particular categories of household or respondent. They were chosen because they exemplify some of the key themes emerging from my analysis of these data (across all of the households encountered) in terms of the processes underpinning the social life and death of food within the home.
Routines of Household Food Provisioning
This section explores how a mismatch between the ways in which food is provisioned and the ways in which lives are lived results in the routine over-provisioning of food and in turn, its wastage. Tony and Kirsty are a married couple in their mid-30s with two children (two boys, one is 11; the other 9) and at the time of the study, they had been living on Rosewall Crescent for about five years. Tony is a plumber and Kirsty is a housewife who assumes most of the responsibility for feeding the family (DeVault, 1991). They are typical of the families that I encountered on Rosewall Crescent insofar as they identified themselves as ‘pretty much working class Manc’. 2 My first meeting with Tony and Kirsty took place in their home and I was there to tell them a little more about the research that I had invited them to take part in. After the obligatory small talk, it was Tony who broached the topic of my research:
‘So you’re interested in wasting food?’ he begins before quickly announcing ‘Well, if you want to know about chucking it out…’ at this point Tony laughs and Kirsty smiles awkwardly, rolling her eyes in a way that suggests she knows what’s coming next. ‘You should talk to this one,’, he goes on – gesturing towards Kirsty. ‘You could feed a family of four with the food she chucks out’. ‘It’s true,’ Kirsty notes as she fills my mug with a second cup of tea. By now she seems to be laughing more comfortably. ‘Week after week we buy all these fresh things – apples, broccoli, grapes, beetroot…’ Tony starts ‘…and week after week we chuck most of it out,’ Kirsty finishes. (Field diary: February 2010)
Immediately there is a hint that they routinely purchase more food than they eat. To unpack this, the following is a diary entry in which they kept a record of the food that they had thrown out:
Unopened bag of spinach, half a tub of salsa, hard bit of cheese, half a broccoli floret, leftover pasta sauce, 4 apples, 5 clementines. (Tony and Kirsty diary: 7–13th March, 2010)
Talking around this entry, Kirsty explained:
This is pretty typical of what we throw out each week, yeah. Bad, I know […] and the trouble is, I know it is there and I worry so much ‘cause I, I know that it won’t get eaten but I can’t just chuck it out because of that.
Why is that then?
Well, there is always the chance that I might use it but beyond that, you – uh – you just can’t throw good food out. If I wait for it to go bad, off or whatever, I feel slightly less bad about it.
The idea that good food cannot be thrown out was common to all of the households encountered in the study and they variously described themselves as ‘worrying’, ‘feeling bad’ or ‘feeling guilty’ about wasting food. It is instructive to note that whilst the vast majority of surplus food ended up in the bin, it was rarely put there immediately. More commonly it was placed somewhere else first – typically the fridge – in order to keep open the possibility that it might be eaten at some point in the future. However in the meantime, food is susceptible to rapid decay such that it was often rendered inedible before these possibilities were actualized. To give an example from my fieldwork with Tony and Kirsty: whilst going through the items in their fridge, they discussed a half eaten red pepper that had been used for a ‘spag bol’ that they could not find a use for because ‘it [the weather] is cold and this is only good for salads’. They suggested that it might get used ‘for an omelette or something’ but when I returned to their home a week later to talk through the items in the fridge again, they told me that it had now gone ‘soft and wrinkly’, was no longer of any use and consequently, Tony put it in the bin. Throughout the study, households enacted the disposal of food via this ‘two stage holding process’ (Hetherington, 2004) suggesting that there is nothing careless or carefree about the acts of binning encountered here (see also Gregson et al., 2007a). To the contrary, it indicates that households are following very specific procedures in order to manage the residual value of discarded foodstuffs and ameliorate anxieties about its wastage.
Returning now to the items in the diary, Kirsty discussed each item in turn. First, the broccoli:
Well yeah, you see I use some of it but I, we, don’t tend to use the whole thing before it goes off […] and I am not the type who can just chuck stuff together out of leftovers and so if there is no use for it, it goes.
Throughout the study, Kirsty continuously affirmed – in conversation and through my observations of how she prepares meals – that her cooking style is not one of improvising meals out of what is left in the fridge or cupboards (Halkier, 2009). In addition to these issues of confidence and competence (which are most likely matters of biography and background), the domestic context in which she provisions food helps to explain the difficulties she encountered in trying to find a use for leftover ingredients. Her food practices – in common with many of the families encountered – were situated in a household where the culinary repertoire is relatively fixed. It is instructive here to think about the activity of household food provisioning as a family practice (Morgan, 1996) – a way of ‘doing family’ in the realm of everyday routines. Indeed, it is well understood that those who assume responsibility for this activity (typically women) enact familial relations by giving consideration to the preferences and tastes of others within the household (Burridge and Barker, 2009; DeVault, 1991). Viewed as such, it is perhaps not surprising that Kirsty (and others) would cook ‘tried and tested’ recipes instead of improvising and cooking a meal that would find a use for leftover ingredients (such as the broccoli). The fall out of this, of course, is that certain ingredients remain unused and in turn, end up being wasted.
Next, she discussed the spinach and fruit:
That, well when we shop I always try and get mainly healthy stuff in. That explains the apples and or – er clementines as well before you ask […] and some weeks we are quite healthy, some weeks we do eat these things.
You shop the same each week?
Erm, yes […] Well, every week or two, ten days probably.
Tony and Kirsty provision food in line with the imperative to eat healthily. However as the fruit and the spinach attest, buying healthy food does not necessarily mean that healthy food is eaten. This alone does not explain why food gets wasted. In common with most of the families encountered, Tony and Kirsty purchased food at relatively fixed intervals and through accompanying them as they did so – I discovered that they tended to buy roughly the same things each time. 3 Whilst they did not plan what they were going to eat meal by meal; there was certainly a tacit expectation that certain dishes would be eaten (recalling the fixed culinary repertoire) in the periods between shopping trips. These repetitive routines of food provisioning were easily thrown out of balance by the rather more fluid nature of the ways in which lives are lived. To give an example of how this mismatch results in waste: on one occasion I went shopping with Kirsty at a time when they had run out of a lot of ingredients required to cook the tried and tested recipes for the following ten days. However, they had not run out of everything and so they still had items from a previous shopping trip (an unopened packet of green beans and a half eaten bag of satsumas) in the fridge that might – under different circumstances – have been eaten before they went shopping again. 4 Given that they purchase the same things each time, this shopping trip saw the acquisition of a new packet of green beans and a new bag of satsumas. As these got put in the fridge, Kirsty explained to me that she knew that there was no way that she would be able to find a use for their older counterparts and so she put them in the bin.
Finally, she discussed the leftover pasta sauce:
That was leftovers from our tea a few nights earlier. You don’t just chuck straight out what’s left in the pot, do you? […] it goes in Tupperware and you whack it in the fridge ‘cause you might have it later, for lunch but [laughs] as you know, that doesn’t happen with me.
Her laughter refers to incidents elsewhere in the study where she had made light of my being around when she was doing something that would prevent her from eating leftovers. To give a notable example:
Following my interview with Sadie,
5
I take myself off to the greasy spoon down the road from RC to kill some time and write some notes. Whilst there, I see Kirsty in the takeaway section. I smile at her and she throws her arms up, laughs and announces ‘You got me!’ before explaining that she often comes in here on the days that she is at home to ‘get out of the house’ and ‘treat herself’. (Field diary: February 2010)
Those who are given to moralizing about acts of wasting would no doubt suggest that Kirsty could just as easily have stayed at home and eaten the leftovers. However suggestions such as these miss the point that Kirsty’s position as ‘housewife’ carries certain structural risks of boredom and isolation (Oakley, 1971; Pink, 2004). In the example above, she went on to explain that getting out of the house allows her to ‘feel part of the world’ and so here, the perfectly understandable expectation of taking respite from the home and the work of household management can be used to explain why certain foodstuffs go uneaten and in turn, wasted.
Eating as a Family?
This section illustrates how the social relations manifest in the enduring convention of the family meal can result in food waste. Heather and Phil are a married couple in their late 30s who have a seven-year-old son and five-year-old daughter. At the time of the study, they had been living on Leopold Lane for just a few months having relocated to Manchester from a semi-rural town in the West Midlands. Phil has a managerial role in an I.T. firm although he identified himself as having ‘solid working class roots’. Heather described herself as coming from a ‘well to do’ family and at the time of the study, she was taking time out of paid employment in order to ‘be around more’ for their children. 6 Heather assumes the bulk of responsibility for feeding the family and the following excerpt from my field-notes provides a glimpse at how she goes about doing so:
As we go around, Heather offers detailed reflections on what she is buying. All of these descriptions involve balancing out concerns about her family eating ‘properly’ with concerns about her family eating at home or at all. She explains how Phil tends to eat out if there is too much ‘rabbit food’ at home and how she is ‘trying out’ new foods on her children, who are ‘quite fussy’ and would rather not eat than eat something that they do not want. She explains how she ‘goes off plan’ (that she and Phil put together) and ends up buying more food than they really need. (Field diary: February 2010)
Immediately there is a hint that Heather buys more food than the family can – or will – eat and that this is a result of her continuing efforts to ensure that they eat ‘properly’ coupled with her having to buy ‘fail safe’ ingredients for ‘back-up’ meals in case (or when) Phil and the children refuse what she is trying out. These observations are borne out in the following excerpt of recorded conversation:
[A]nd we end up with just way too much food, simply food that just isn’t or, uh, won’t be eaten. I mean, I, there’s food that I cook for the kids that they just don’t touch or ingredients going unused ‘cause I’ll say to Phil – I dunno – ‘Shall we have a moussaka?’ to which he will ask what’s in it, I will tell him and he comes back with ‘I don’t like aubergine’.
I’m not that bad.
Well, you don’t always want to try new things.
Phil responded by suggesting that the picture offered by Heather does not adequately explain why they end up with too much food:
OK, that’s fair, but my line is that I hate that we end up with lots of food that we end up throwing out. That’s not right in my book but then neither is wasting the amount of money that we must be. Maybe I could be a bit better but I suppose I just like what I like – simple stuff that probably isn’t… Same for the kids – I mean, kids they don’t like rich food or poncy stuff.
Hmm, not sure I am trying to inflict anything too pretentious on you all, I am just trying to make sure we all eat right.
Fine, and I appreciate that but me and the kids are happy with meat, spuds and two veg and that never harmed anyone.
In Phil’s account, the problem is not his unwillingness to ‘eat properly’; it is the conflict between his definition of eating properly (simple, traditional foods that he positions as perfectly healthy) and Heather’s (healthy food, cooked from scratch and incorporating a variety of ethnic cuisines – see Bugge and Almas, 2006; Halkier, 2009; Mitchell, 1999; Short, 2006). At issue here are differences in taste and according to Bourdieu (1984, see also Warde, 1997) tastes are social, representing a key mechanism through which class-based processes of classification and distinction take place. In the example above, this point is highlighted by Phil and Heather’s categorization of food as (or not) ‘poncy’ and ‘pretentious’. These conflicts in taste were a consistent feature of my encounters with this household. On one occasion, Heather broached the issue and informed me that they come about due to Phil having ‘a different background to her’ and suggested that he ‘reverts to type’ when they argue about these things.
Returning to the excerpt at hand, Phil went on to explain:
If we ate that and you had what you wanted, we probably wouldn’t end up buying so much food.
Perhaps, but it is important to eat as a family, together – don’t you think?
Notwithstanding the fact that it would be Heather who cooks the meals, Phil is probably right – and more to the point, this suggestion could well reduce the amount of food that they waste. However in the time that I spent with this household, they continued to provision – and waste – food in the ways described above. Of course deeply entrenched household routines are not likely to change automatically in light of the recognition that they could waste less and again, it is important to recognize the family context in which their food practices are located. 7 It is well understood that the family meal is a site through which family relations are constituted and expressed (DeVault, 1991; Jackson, 2009; Murcott, 1997). Indeed, it is useful to interpret the family meal as an activity through which families are displayed as well as done (Finch, 2007: 66) insofar is it carries strong cultural connotations of and meanings associated with ‘family’. Viewed as such, and despite her dislike of wasting food (and money, and time), Heather’s commitment to the idea of eating as family can be seen as an allegory for her commitment to Phil and their children. Her expressions of love and devotion are manifest in her continuing efforts to ensure that her family ‘eat properly’ (Charles and Kerr, 1988; Murcott, 1983) but also in her provision of ‘back-up’ meals to ‘avoid complaint’ (Burridge and Barker, 2009). In the meantime the food that Phil and the children refuse to eat becomes obsolete and, ultimately, wasted.
The Rhythms of Everyday Life
Staying on Leopold Lane, this section explores the socio-temporal context of food practices and food waste. To do so, it moves away from discussions of feeding the family and instead focuses on a single person household. Tamsin is in her mid-20s and at the time of the study she had been living in a rented one bedroom flat in a converted Victorian property for about nine months. Tamsin identified herself as ‘terribly middle class’ and as such, is broadly typical of the single people, young couples and house-sharers that I encountered. She first came to Manchester as an undergraduate student and following her graduation, she decided to stay because she got a job in marketing that she ‘really wanted’. Her employment requires her to travel away from Manchester frequently and she told me that she ‘does not know where she is going to be from one moment to the next’. This sense of dislocation characterized her discussions around food provisioning. Looking through her fridge, she explained that:
At any point in time, there is very little in my fridge – just a bit of booze, condiments erm, probably some cheese and something going off that I will have to throw out sooner rather than later […] The way my life is, I just try not to buy too much that can go off – fresh and perishable stuff so I try to avoid it.
But you do buy perishable stuff, right?
Yes, sorry wasn’t clear…when I am at home for a few days in a row I will get stuff in to cook properly
Properly?
Uh-uh, yeah, I like to look after myself properly.
Uh huh.
Yeah, you know – cooking meals from scratch, healthy meals using fresh ingredients and not toast or takeaways or snacks or pasta with nothing […] but when you are [on your] own, you end up buying too much and cooking too much.
How do you mean?
Erm… well if a recipe calls for, say, like, five different ingredients and you buy them all then, um, well you don’t buy them in the quantities that you need them so there is always five lots of stuff left over.
At one level, the problem for Tamsin relates to material infrastructures of provision insofar as ‘proper’ ingredients are not made available in quantities that are suitable for single person living. At another level, the problem is one of time. She went on to explain:
[A]ll this food then sits in the cupboards or fridges when I go off to London or Leeds or wherever again.
Uh huh.
So when I go away, right, I simply have no memory um recollection of what’s going on in my fridge. Or what I have that I can eat in the flat. Shit, I don’t even know if I have anything in at all and if I think about it, well, I [laughs] just don’t really think about it […] so when I get back into Manchester, the train gets in and all I really know is that I am tired and hungry and in desperate need of food.
So what do you do?
Well, generally one of two things. Either I go for something quick and easy from the local supermarket – perhaps a ready meal and a bagged up salad or if it’s the weekend, I can justify a cheeky takeaway. Actually, sometimes I try and tie in a meet up with a mate and eat out so that I don’t have to cook or wash up.
Again, those who are given to moralizing might argue that food is being wasted as a result of Tamsin choosing to purchase surplus items instead of finding a use for those that she already has. Arguments such as these, however, fail to recognize the socio-temporal context of food practices. Aside from not necessarily having the time to cook ‘proper’ meals from scratch; there is a more subtle point to be made about the mismatch between the rhythms of everyday life and the temporalities of food. It is worth re-iterating that a lot of so-called ‘proper’ food imposes its own demands in terms of the timeframe within which it must be eaten. Indeed, the materiality of food is unforgiving insofar as the temporalities of its decay render it unable to accommodate erratic work schedules such as Tamsin’s. Viewed as such, for reasons that are fully understandable (being tired and hungry), food that is sitting in the fridge or cupboard requiring time and effort to cook gets displaced by food that does not. Consequently it goes uneaten within the timeframe required, decays and goes to waste.
In a subsequent interview, Tamsin returned to the food that goes uneaten:
One of the things that I try to do is batch cook stuff so I don’t have like four or five half used ingredients kicking around. And then what I do is put the leftovers in the fridge so I can just chuck it in the microwave when I get back.
At first glance, this appears to be a strategy for circumventing some of the tensions that are created at the intersection of food’s materiality and the rhythms of everyday life. In line with Southerton’s analysis of ‘the time squeeze’ (2003), domestic technologies are being used to save time and shift time, enabling her to treat ‘proper food’ as convenience food and so overcome some of her difficulties in scheduling everyday life (Warde, 1999). However, our discussion continued:
So you end up not throwing out the ingredients?
[laughing] Not the ingredients, no – but I don’t, I do end up not eating the stuff in the fridge.
Why is that then?
Really, I don’t like eating the same thing again so I end up not eating it and throwing it out anyway.
In this example she finds a use for the ingredients that would otherwise be displaced by ‘something quick and easy from the local supermarket’, however her taste for variety means that she is unwilling to eat the same thing more than once within the timeframe that the batch cooked leftovers command. Once again, the fridge is being used to defer the (perhaps inevitable) disposal of certain foodstuffs. It is instructive to note that although the fridge is designed to preserve food (at the very least, it has historically been marketed as such), it can be viewed here as an active participant in the processes of devaluing and decay that work to ameliorate anxieties about acts of binning.
Another strategy that Tamsin deployed in order to allocate time across practices was to meet with her friends by arranging to eat out with them. She informed me that she does so on occasions when she has been working away from Manchester because the train brings her back into the city centre and this is where many of her friends work:
See – we live all over the place. Some live in [lists various suburbs in and around Manchester]. If we arrange to meet in town, it means that we actually might spend, erm, see, see each other […] in the week we, I, um don’t have time to try and get from, around each others’ houses and [laughing] probably can’t always be arsed.
If she were to commit herself to coming home and eating the batch-cooked leftovers in the fridge before they decay (and so save them from being wasted), she might miss out on opportunities to ‘meet up with a mate’. This scheduling tactic explains further the – perfectly understandable – reasons why certain foodstuffs remain uneaten and, in turn, wasted.
Conclusion and Discussion
The preceding analysis does not dispute that current volumes of household food waste are problematic in a number of registers. It does however question the tendency to observe levels of waste generation and then read back to make unsubstantiated inferences about the nature of modern consumers and food practices. The emphasis here has been on reversing the linear thinking that is implicit in the throwaway society thesis by exploring the dynamics of domestic food practices and considering their consequences in terms of waste. In summary, a number of points can be drawn out of the previous three sections. First, that the respondents appeared not to hold a callous or careless disregard for the food that they waste. To the contrary, the process of ridding was shown to be anxiety laden, with households following complex procedures in order to enact the disposal of food in ways that ameliorate concerns about its wastage. Second, that despite these anxieties; every household encountered in the study – and not just the ones presented here – routinely provisioned more food than they could find a use for and that the vast majority of this surplus ended up as waste. Third, that in order to make sense of this apparent contradiction, it is important to recognize the social and material contexts of food practices. The analysis here has drawn attention to the social context through reference to discussions of time, tastes, conventions, family relations and domestic divisions of labour. Similarly, it has drawn attention to the material context through reference to discussions of domestic technologies, infrastructures of provision and the materiality properties of food itself.
Whilst my arguments are based on a small scale study and a non-representative sample, I am nevertheless inclined to suggest that the throwaway society thesis does not stand up to empirical scrutiny (see also Gregson et al., 2007a). The case studies illustrate that it is not satisfactory to position food waste as a matter of profligate consumers being lured in by Buy One Get One Free offers and then being too lazy to cook properly or find a use for every last scrap of foodstuff before mindlessly throwing the discards in the bin. Taken together, they suggest that the passage of ‘food’ into ‘waste’ occurs as a consequence of households enacting ordinary domestic practices and negotiating the contingencies of everyday life. More generally, in a parallel point to the idea that consumption is a moment in virtually every practice (Warde, 2005) - the analysis here offers a tentative suggestion that disposal (and wasting) is a necessary moment in the competent enactment of domestic practice. For example, Tamsin needed to waste food in order to make the time to spend with friends just as Heather needed to in order to ensure that her family eat ‘properly’, eat together and at the very least, eat at all. Viewed as such, it becomes clear that a sociological approach to household food waste – drawing on contemporary perspectives on home consumption, material culture and everyday life – has much to offer. In moving beyond the throwaway society thesis, a more subtle and nuanced account of how and why food gets wasted begins to emerge.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
This research was made possible through funding from the Sustainable Consumption Institute at the University of Manchester. Additional writing was undertaken when I was a visiting researcher on the Economic and Social Research Council funded ‘Waste of the World’ programme (RES000232007). Thanks must go to my colleagues Katherine Davies, Nicky Gregson, James Rhodes, Dale Southerton and Alan Warde for various forms of help, support and guidance. Thanks must also go to the anonymous referees whose feedback has no doubt strengthened the quality of this article. The usual disclaimers apply. Most importantly, I am indebted to those who accommodated my sustained presence in their homes during the course of the fieldwork.