As my final semester, I am taking an Anthropology Fieldwork Lab on food waste on campus. This class has encouraged me to critically examine the root causes of food waste.
Throughout our exploration of food consumption behaviors, one of the prevailing themes that surfaces is food as a relationship. People engage with food in a deeply intimate way, investing emotions, socialness, time, and money in planning, expecting, cultivating, provisioning, cooking, eating, and ultimately dispensing it, in one form or another. It is simultaneously an extremely personal, yet sometimes taken-for-granted, relationship. My memory harkens back to Prof. Stanton’s imagining the personification of the refrigerator, crying for attention. Pieces by Evans, Martínez, and Larkin have been guiding forces in this relational framing of food and individuals in the broader context of agribusiness agendas. After stewing over these anthropologists’ arguments and the transcripts and discussions of my classmates, I radically integrate this relationship as a cycle of abuse, sometimes unbeknownst to the victim themself.
Figure 1. A work in progress: my attempt at blending Evans and Martinez’s perspectives of food as a relationship with the stages and characteristics of the cycle of abuse.
My figure attempts to visualize this relationship in the three stages of an abusive relationship: honeymoon, tension building, and acute explosion. When creating this schematic, it was difficult to discern who is the victim and perpetrator. In general, I associate the victim with consumers, inspired by how Martínez argues that people’s conception of waste is synonymous with failure and disrespect, writing that “when people and places become associated with waste, they may be seen as waste themselves, disposable and superfluous, reduced to zero value” (346). This is helpful in paralleling how in being associated with waste or abuse, victims are zeroed and therefore de-humanized. While not the central focus of my memo, it is worth noting that the Earth is a victim of this abuse as well. At times, however, the consumer can also be a perpetrator. Most glaringly, I think of how my faculty interviewee said, “I tend to abuse prepared foods to be honest with you [due to convenience and ease].” The perpetrator can be food as a singular ingredient, as memorialized by my eggplant field notes, or as one of Chung’s interviewees said: “I found a, like, a molding zucchini—like it was turning *black*. Um, I didn’t know that that could happen. I was a little scared.” This demonstrates an Acute Explosion of an ingredient going bad, with the victim feeling understandably “scared” by the transformation of a once-seemingly-innocent zucchini. Expanding beyond a singular ingredient as an “abuser”, it is important to zoom out to identify other potential “perpetrators”. As Princess Diana said about her impending divorce in her notorious BBC interview, “There were three of us in this marriage.” The third entity in this marriage is infrastructural agribusinesses – corporations so humongous and omnipresent, to the point that we as consumers oftentimes do not even recognize them. In fact, many times, victims do not even identify the perpetrator as an abuser, unconscious of their coercive behavior.
While Martínez focuses on people’s identification of and with waste, Evans’ work provides insight to how waste is perceived on the household level. In writing about the language, anxieties and negotiations between individuals and their food, he is careful not to blame consumers for their behaviors. He argues how social anxieties are “cooked up in the domestic kitchen”, particularly with fears about food safety and food waste (an example of Tension Building); but this is a two-way street, as public policies and culture surrounding food safety and waste goes hand-in-hand with technological prowess (e.g. pasteurization processes, refrigeration) and emphasizes consumer as crucial problem-solvers (8). As for how technological advancements ultimately seep into the food-individual relationship in the “domestic kitchen”, when confronted with the question of whether that U.S. statistic of 30-40% of food always went to waste, my student interviewee suspected that this has been the case “since industrialization” – yet had difficulty defining or chronologizing it. This example integrates Evans’ arguments with that of Brian Larkin, as infrastructure is designed to become a norm on which even highly educated people are dependent and benumbed. Unlike Evans and Martínez, Larkin also ventures to how these technological systems ingrained in infrastructure determine the “educational and cultural competence needed to understand its functioning and to operate it” (329). This gated, secretive club leverages people who can speak its language (i.e. corporate executives), leaving many consumers disconnected from how much of their behaviors are reactive to norms determined by supermarkets. Waste due to overproduction happened before the consumer even wasted anything themselves. Thus, an imbalanced relationship forms, in which food becomes waste, which “entails contagious disinvestment and disaffection, or even desolation and abjection” (Martínez 347).
Just as in an abusive relationship, the media and supermarkets frame consumers as crucial problem solvers to food waste. While consumer habits certainly play an important role, in some cases, I view this as a form of victim blaming. Consumers are expected to act prim and proper – buying organic, recycling, bringing reusable bags – while buying from an entity that manipulates them. Several classmates shared how they felt guilty growing up for not completing their meal, or for buying too much for one person. Her shame is evident as my faculty interviewee fumbles to admit: “I feel bad. I I I I I don’t want to say… that I mean I feel sort of guilty, because sometimes it feels like it could just. I could just like put, like a just an extra little bit of effort, and that wouldn’t happen.” A Whole Foods’ guide on “12 Ways to Stop Wasting Food” echoes this interviewee’s belief, with one of the pillars being to “make a plan”. According to Evans, while this effort may seem to make sense, “inclined to suggest that households already do a good deal of planning, and that it would actually be quite hard to plan for the contingencies that render a certain amount of food as surplus to requirements” (4). In other words, the surplus existed before the consumer ever realized it: it is not necessarily the consumer’s fault. In the case that the consumer does over-do it, it was fascinating to read how some interviewees felt “secondhand guilt.” In Turnage’s student interview, their interviewee said: “And sometimes I see [my friend], put her, full bowl of food on, the, little rotary thing, and I’m like, ‘I feel so, secondhand guilt for you in a weird way.’”
While this integrated framework I have proposed may not be productive in finding a “solution”, I believe it is helpful in identifying abusive infrastructural powers that have polluted our own relationship with food. While Evans and Martínez highlight the relationship aspect of food, Larkin’s presentation of infrastructure as an invisible and omnipresent power boosts an aerial view of undermining forces at play. I would like to conclude with one final thought: this cycle of abuse is not one most of the population can leave, so it must be changed.
Works Cited
David Evans, “Anxiety, Routine, and Over-Provisioning Download Anxiety, Routine, and Over-Provisioning” from Food Waste: Home Consumption, Material Culture and Everyday Life (2014)
Brian Larkin, “The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure,” Annual Reviews of Anthropology (2013)
Francesco Martínez, “Waste is not the end. For an anthropology of care, maintenance and repair” in Social Anthropology (2017)