In the social sciences and the humanities, food waste has been explored by studying the practices, rituals, structures, politics, policies, relations, and institutions that underline it. The plurality of disciplinary perspectives involved in food waste studies illuminates the multiplicity and variety of actors involved in the prosaic practice of disposing food. The interest and visibility of food waste studies intensified in the 21st century as the result of the global food crisis in 2007, policy shifts in the EU and US, activist politics in academia as well as technological and environmental changes (Evans et al., 2013).

As an often-invisible companion to individual daily routines, food waste is also an important part of a massive global sustainability problem: globally about one third of all food produced is wasted if one adds the wasted food at harvest and retail (14% according to FAO, 2019) and at retail and consumer levels (17% according to UNEP, 2021). At the same time, across the world societies are experiencing increasing food prices, and more and more people are affected by food insecurity. In the Netherlands, Dutch households have been steadily reducing their food waste in the last decade, but the problem is far from being a minor one. In 2019 consumers were responsible for about 42% of the total food waste in the country, a total of 5 million kilograms worth an estimated 13 million euros (Sheldon, 2021). Simultaneously, about 25% of residents in low-income neighborhoods in the Netherlands are food insecure (Janssen et al., 2022). Abiding to the SDGs (Sustainable Development Goals), the government of the Netherlands plans to cut food waste in half by 2030 (compared to the 2015 situation, Stichting Samen Tegen Voedselverspilling, 2023) and end hunger. While consumption practices can lead to food waste, Stuart argues that food waste is a matter of law and governance, as it is to a large degree created by existing rules and policies regarding food access and provisioning, and a lack of responsible policies in relation to waste (Stuart, 2009). In this context, critically exploring the elusive governance of food waste becomes highly relevant, especially when paired with addressing food insecurity. This paper makes visible the stories of two objects, a cargo bike (bakfiets) and a fridge (koelkast), and how they connect to debates about food waste management, and collective action to tackle food insecurity in the city. We suggest that paying attention to these objects, and all the others that support food relations, can offer new ways of thinking about food waste governance, unsettling the frontiers of what counts as waste, what counts as food, and the mutual entanglements between both.

In recent years the literature is recognizing the dynamic qualities of waste and the extent to which its impact (economic, social, and environmental) depends on its spatio-temporal context (Evans et al., 2013). Work by scholars such as Gay Hawkins (2006) and Gille (2010) have contributed to this paradigm shift. While Hawkins (2006) work centers on recognizing the cultural elements embedded in waste practices, Gille (2010) explores the formation of “waste regimes,” that is when institutions and social conventions shape the value of what counts as waste, which in turn defines, manages, and politicizes waste governance policies. The concept of “waste regime” allows us to understand “the economic, social, and cultural origins of specific wastes as well as the logic of their generation” Gille (2010, p. 1,056). Other relevant approaches are what Moore (2012) describes as waste geographies, namely how waste flows and moves between people and places. This makes visible what Gidwani (2015) describes as the associated role of invisible labor involved in managing and dealing with waste.

In waste studies, food waste belongs to the category of avoidable waste. According to Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO), disposed food still has value and is very often fit for consumption. Food waste is food that is spilled, spoiled, bruised, or wilted; it may include whole or unopened packages or individual items of food which are not eaten at all (FAO, 2019). It is foreseeable that in the coming years, food waste will continue to grow, which makes it a salient environmental and socio-economic problem. For the EU, waste prevention has become a priority of the Farm to Fork Strategy.¹ However, they have not managed to align member states to adopt legally binding targets to reduce food waste by 2030 (Abou-Cleih, 2022). Hence, the process of dealing with food waste is not straightforward.

Alternative solutions to prevent or reduce food waste that are well discussed in the literature are connected to donations and redistribution, taxes, and subsidies to model and optimize people’s food and drink choices, and as a result households’ waste management. In this line of thought, taking an approach based on new-materialism and critical infrastructure studies, we propose to think about food waste as a set of relations mediated by objects and the infrastructural labor that supports them. Here, objects are a form of infrastructures, and are understood not as inert materials, but as crucial support systems of social relations (Graham and McFarlane, 2015). Infrastructural labor refers to the labor that, within and through objects (Gidwani, 2015; Stokes and Lawhon, 2023), facilitates alternative forms of waste governance.

This paper is the result of a project carried out between 2021 and 2022 to identify the ways in which local communities in The Hague deal with the double problem of food waste and food insecurity. Supported by a seed grant for inter-faculty collaboration by the Global Transformation and Governance Challenges (GTGC) program of Leiden University, a group of researchers at different stages of their academic careers engaged in participatory action fieldwork with two initiatives in the city:² Conscious Kitchen and Vers & Vrij. Following an interpretivist, community-based and participatory methodological approach, the researchers joined the initiatives as volunteers. This allowed us to not only observe but also experience relations derived from practices of food waste governance in everyday life (Lehtokunnas et al., 2022).

The stories we include in this paper are generalized and anonymized excerpts quilted by the authors of this article in collaboration with student assistants and the design team of The Hague University of Applied Sciences. As an embodied practice of knowledge production,³ that challenges the artificial binary separating knowledge from bodies, our team engaged in a practice of listening and telling stories derived from the interactions associated to grassroots food waste governance. Such co-creation practices emanate from an entanglement of experiences, ideas, and reflective moments, discussed throughout the research process. At a point during the research, it became apparent that these stories were not only the stories of the people involved in these initiatives, but also of the objects that enabled these entanglements. Hence, we decided to focus on the stories of the objects that facilitated and mobilized interactions, and the management and transformation of food waste. The contexts, colors, shapes and narratives of these stories challenge de-contextualized, invasive research methods and extractive practices of knowledge production, and, at the same time, they forefront the everyday aspects of today’s food waste relations. In this paper, we focus on two objects, each playing a key role in structuring the voluntary engagement of these initiatives. In what follows we present the stories of a cargo bike and a fridge.

Design by Gabriela Bustamante and Sarpsirin Larbboonsarp, The Hague University of Applied Science, for the exhibition that accompanied this project.

Conscious Kitchen (CK) and Ver & Vrij (V&V) are two initiatives that help reduce the problem of food waste by collecting disposed foods from the Haagse Markt and use it to prepare edible meals: the former does it with the help of a cargo bike (represented above in dark blue), the latter with the help of a fridge (represented above in pink). The two objects reveal the networks of exchanges between different people, locations, disposed foods. Furthermore, these are everyday domestic objects which are transformed into brokers that unsettle food relations: redefining food waste and the very notion of food waste governance. These anti-food waste initiatives, and the objects that support them, highlight the need to approach food scarcity, insecurity and wasting as symptoms of much broader social inequalities. These objects make visible how some people find use in what others discard and waste, reflecting what Sarah Ahmed describes as “queer use” (Ahmed, 2019). These objects change the form of food, from discarded to edible. In doing so, they trans/from and queer what counts as waste and how food waste governance takes place in the city. These are their stories:

Waste is not a fixed category representing what is left over or disposed; it is also connected to what is consumed and what is discarded. Thus, there is no clear binary predefining when something becomes waste. Instead, the idea of waste is fluid and contextual. Speaking of disposed food centers, a journey where different actors (human and non-human) engage in deciding what is wasted, when and how. The above examples show the stories of objects involved in the reduction of food waste and its trans/formation into edible food. These objects transverse and transcend private and public spaces, materialities of the human and the non-human, enabling a network of collaborations, where food waste is transformed physically and ontologically. Thus, queering the very notion of food waste, these more-than-human relations transform public spaces in the city through grassroot food waste governance. They also show how, to unsettle conventional understandings of (food) waste, it is necessary to renegotiate social relations and search for spaces of collective solidarity in cities like The Hague. The infrastructural labor associated to the cargo bike and the fridge, trans/forms what is wasted into a source of sociability and connection, a network of weak ties that has the strength to tackle both the problem of food waste and food scarcity. The stories of these objects illustrate the patchwork behind processes of waste production and recycling: who does it when, where, how, for what purposes and, at the same time, these stories offer a window into alternative regenerative directions through food waste flow and entanglements.

This project has made visible forms of exchange, collaborations and transformations derived from interactions between objects, food waste and civic action that are often hidden from the public eye. By concentrating on the stories of ordinary objects such as a cargo bike and a fridge, our intention has been not only to unsettle the ways in which we think about food waste, but also to identify alternative ways to relate to it and to one another These objects have served the purpose of displacing the question from the experiences of vulnerability associated to food scarcity and waste, to other stories that speak of trans/formations through disposed food exchange. These ordinary objects reflect extraordinary forms of sociability that promote sustainable behavior and the necessary rethinking of the work and infrastructures necessary to connect a more effective food waste governance.

The raw data supporting the conclusions of this article will be made available by the authors, without undue reservation upon request.

The studies involving humans were approved by Faculty of Humanities Research Ethics Committee, Leiden University. The studies were conducted in accordance with the local legislation and institutional requirements.

DVM: Conceptualization, Formal analysis, Funding acquisition, Investigation, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing, Methodology, Project administration, Supervision. JT: Conceptualization, Formal analysis, Funding acquisition, Investigation, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing. EBM: Conceptualization, Formal analysis, Funding acquisition, Investigation, Writing – review & editing.