This book offers the first framing of potential social science approaches to the compelling and yet hugely under-researched topic of food waste.  

• Shows how the profile of waste has suddenly increased as a topic of sociological relevance and extends these developments to analyses of food
• Conceptualises waste as a dynamic category and one that plays an important role in processes of cultural and economic organisation
• Brings together theoretical and empirical contributions from a range of disciplinary perspectives
• Engages with food waste in a number of contexts and at a variety of scales
• Explores issues such as the regulation and governance of food systems; the materiality of foodstuffs and associated technologies; the dynamics of social practices and what goes on in domestic kitchens; the ways in which food and waste are circulated in societies; dumpster diving and freeganism, and socio-technical innovations for waste reduction
• Demonstrates how food waste is a useful lens through which to tend to a number of contemporary issues within sociology and social theory

David Evans is Lecturer in Sociology and Sustainable Consumption Institute Research Fellow at the University of Manchester, UK.

Hugh Campbell is Professor of Sociology at the University of Otago, NZ.

Anne Murcott isProfessorial Research Associate at the SOAS Food Studies Centre, UK.

Acknowledgements

Introduction

1. A brief pre-history of food waste and the social sciences (David Evans, Hugh Campbell and Anne Murcott)

2. From risk to waste: global food waste regimes (Zsuzsa Gille)

3. ‘Waste? You mean by-products!’ From bio-waste management to agro-ecology in Italian winemaking and beyond (Anna Krzywoszynska)

4. The performativity of food packaging: market devices, waste crisis and recycling (Gay Hawkins)

5. Arbiters of waste: date labels, the consumer and knowing good, safe food (Richard Milne)

6. Food, waste and safety: negotiating conflicting social anxieties into the practices of domestic provisioning (Matt Watson and Angela Meah)

7. Practising thrift at dinnertime: mealtime leftovers, sacrifice and family membership (Benedetta Cappellini and Elizabeth Parsons)

8. Food waste bins: bridging infrastructures and practices (Alan Metcalfe, Mark Riley, Stewart Barr, Terry Tudor, Guy Robinson and Steve Guilbert)

9. Eating from the bin: Salmon heads, waste and the markets that make them (Benjamin Coles and Lucius Hallett IV)

10. Food waste in Australia: the freegan response (Ferne Edwards and Dave Mercer)

11. A ‘lasting transformation’ of capitalist surplus: from food stocks to feedstocks (Martin O’Brien)

12. The disposal of place: facing modernity in the kitchen-diner (Rolland Munro)

Notes on contributors

Index