Ordinary overflow: Food waste and the ethics of the refrigerator

Abstract

This article analyzes the role of the refrigerator in how food becomes waste in socio-material and ethico-cultural practices. The modern food refrigeration technologies and practices have extended food’s useability time. They have transformed ordinary life by allowing households to store ample amounts of fresh food. However, this study suggests that fridges merit more attention not only in terms of reducing food waste, but in efforts to understand how food waste comes into being. This article draws from an analysis of qualitative interviews with ordinary people in Canada and Finland to show that refrigerators are important agents in the moral narrative of food waste: They provide a concrete space where food becomes waste, a justification for food becoming waste, and a material reference point through which people can talk about wider cultural patterns, moral norms, and ordinary ethical dilemmas tied to food waste. Technical devices such as refrigerators do not alone create or solve the problem of food waste, but they are relevant to the ethics of wasting food. Focusing on the fridge helps to show how human and non-human material worlds are entangled and how an overflowing fridge can structure, illustrate, facilitate, and contribute to human ethical conduct related to food waste in a significant way.

Keywords:

• Food
• waste
• refrigerator
• abundance
• ethics

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Food packaging provides an interesting extension to the discussion of food waste, because it has a dual role as both preventor of food waste and as waste in itself. Plastic, foil, foam, and the other non-food materials that surround food items try, in their part, to prevent food from spoiling (Hawkins 2012, 69). However, especially in recent decades, food packaging has become the apex of the waste problem.

2 The study is part of a wider project that aims to understand ethics of food consumption in an affluent world (Salonen 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021). All participants gave their informed consent to participate in the study in writing prior to the commencement of the study.

3 Group interviews were conducted in Finnish; translations of citations from them are my own.

4 The individual and group interviews did not allow strict comparison, since these two interview methods produce different data: Individual interviews allow to discuss in-depth about the interlocutors’ life, while group interviews help to capture justifications that are utilised in broader social contexts. Eliciting country specific characteristics and differences across countries would require more research with directly comparable data.

5 In addition to refrigerators, in the following chapters, I use some examples of other temporospatial devices such as freezers and cupboards when they serve similar purposes and highlight same patterns as refrigerators. For a more detailed analysis of freezers, see Hand and Shove (2007).

6 See Rees (2015, 2–3; 30–37) for discussion on how refrigerators vary in size and how size influences lifestyles. This informant referred to North American food culture, but similar patterns were mentioned by Finnish interviewees.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Academy of Finland under the project ‘(Im)moderation in everyday food consumption’ (decision number 316141) at the Tampere University, Finland.