What is driving consumer food waste: Socio-material assemblages of household consumption practices

Abstract

This paper challenges conventional understandings of how we think about consumer food waste by investigating the food purchasing/wasting views and practices of 102 Colorado (USA) residents (67 households). The methods used in this study included the triangulation of surveys, self-reported pictures of food waste and related daily reports over a two-week period, and focus groups. Understanding who is, and what are, driving food waste is important if the aim is to create policy interventions that meaningfully mitigate loss. This paper approaches concepts like consumer sovereignty and agency through a non-essentialist lens, which is to say it repositions food waste as a mode of ordering as opposed to an outcome of discrete, self-evident products-e.g., attitudes, autonomous consumers. Doing this opens the analysis up to connections that might otherwise go unrecognized when those categories are assumed to be absolute and obvious. After presenting numerical data gleaned from online surveys, findings are organized around the following themes: humans-as-assemblage; storage devices-as-assemblage; and mobility-as-assemblage. The paper concludes synthesizing these themes while suggesting interventions mindful of these fluid socio-material coming-togethers.

Keywords: Assemblage; Consumer sovereignty; Ethical consumption; Mobility; Posthuman; Storage.