A Matter of Waste: Making experiences and perceptions of household food waste visible

Abstract

This thesis examines the topic of household food wastage in New Zealand. The possible ecological economic impacts of food wastage are now increasingly being recognised as part of a turn towards recognising the political importance of consumption practices. Whereas current research in the area attempts, often problematically, to quantify household food waste, the research presented here focuses instead on how food ‘wastage’ is understood and dealt with and, if it is, why food is ‘wasted’. Of particular interest in this research is how the biophysical nature of food and different understandings of edibility interact with how individuals think and act when it comes to food waste, and how attitudes to food waste and patterns of both production and consumption dominant in New Zealand today are interrelated. A specific focus is how the biophysical nature of food, as well as different understandings of edibility, interact with how individuals think and act when it comes to food waste.

The research process within this thesis commences with a review of existing literature on historical and cultural developments relating to household waste more generally to identify how food waste fits into this picture. Contemporary socio-cultural changes to individuals’ and households’ wider relationships to both their waste and their food are also examined within this review. Analysis of qualitative data gathered in a series of interviews about attitudes to household food waste was undertaken using the dual lens of a Gramscian conception of hegemony and Actor Network Theory. The former emphasises the interaction between structural constraints and the potential for individual agency; the latter draws attention to the possibilities of nature/culture hybridity and the importance of interactions between human agents and the biophysicality of food. The key finding is that there is an incongruous absence of food waste practices amongst focus group participants in the study setting in New Zealand. Participants identified that, on reflection, they were concerned about food waste, but that there were few cultural practices that they could immediately draw on to help them reduce food waste. A distinct gap emerges between recognition of a problem and actual coherent bodies of social practice to respond to it. Three different, yet interlinked, frameworks, deriving from explanations situated in 1) cultural historical understandings, 2) Actor Network Approaches or 3) political economy of food approaches, are proposed as potentially fruitful in understanding the lack of coherent social practices responding to food waste and are useful in helping frame future research questions about household food waste practices.