Blaming the consumer – once again: the social and material contexts of everyday food waste practices in some English households

Abstract

In public debates about the volume of food that is currently wasted by UK households, there exists a tendency to blame the consumer or individualise responsibilities for affecting change. Drawing on ethnographic examples, this article explores the dynamics of domestic food practices and considers their consequences in terms of waste. Discussions are structured around the following themes: (1) feeding the family; (2) eating ‘properly’; (3) the materiality of ‘proper’ food and its intersections with the socio-temporal demands of everyday life and (4) anxieties surrounding food safety and storage. Particular attention is paid to the role of public health interventions in shaping the contexts through which food is at risk of wastage. Taken together, I argue that household food waste cannot be conceptualised as a problem of individual consumer behaviour and suggest that policies and interventions might usefully be targeted at the social and material conditions in which food is provisioned.

Keywords:

• everyday life
• food policy
• food waste
• home
• material culture
• social practice

Acknowledgements

This research was made possible through funding from the Sustainable Consumption Institute at the University of Manchester. Additional writing was undertaken whilst I was a visiting researcher on the Economic and Social Research Council funded ‘Waste of the World’ programme (RES000232007). I thank Ulla Gustafsson, Liza Draper and Wendy Wills for their helpful guidance and editorial steer. I also thank the two anonymous referees whose useful and insightful comments have no doubt strengthened this article. The usual disclaimers apply. Above all, I am indebted to those who accommodated my sustained presence in their homes during the course of the fieldwork.

Notes

Notes

1. This is not victim blaming insofar as the ‘victims’ are not UK households but those in less developed countries (Stuart 2009).

2. The same impact as the emissions generated by ¼ of the cars on UK roads.

3. http://www.lovefoodhatewaste.com [Accessed 8 June 2011].

4. I am not claiming that households never do these things; I am simply highlighting the normativity of binning surplus food.

5. http://www.lovefoodhatewaste.com/recipes [Accessed 3 February 2011].

6. http://www.lovefoodhatewaste.com/save_time_and_money/two_week_menu [Accessed 7 February 2011].

7. Iceland is a food retailer in the UK that specialises in low-cost frozen foods.

8. Or more accurately, it is cast as excess at which point it is deemed appropriate to dispose of it through the waste stream (Evans forthcoming).