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The context for this article is the rapid international growth of (surplus) food redistribution initiatives. These are frequently reliant on networks of volunteer labour, often coordinated by digital means. Movements with these characteristics are increasingly viewed by researchers, policymakers and practitioners as cases of self-organisation. The article explores the nature and extent of self-organisation in food redistribution initiatives. Two contrasting UK initiatives were studied using ethnographic methods during a period of rapid expansion. The concept of self-organisation was operationalised using three dimensions—autonomy, expansion and governance. One initiative established food banks in close cooperation with corporate food actors. Its franchise charity model involved standardised safety protocols and significant centralised control. The other initiative deliberately pursued autonomy, rapid recruitment and de-centralised governance; nevertheless, collaboration with industry actors and a degree of centralised control became a (contested) part of the approach. We highlight the interplay of organisational agency and institutional structures affecting the self-organisation of surplus food redistribution, including ways in which movement dynamism can involve capture by dominant interests but also the seeds of transformative practices that challenge root causes of food waste, particularly food’s commodification. Our analysis provides a way to compare the potentials of food charity vs mutual aid in effecting systemic change.

As fisheries face intersecting ecological and economic crises, small-scale fishers and Indigenous fishing communities have been organising globally to protect their rights. Yet governance of commercial small-scale fisheries in Canada has been dominated by colonial state actors in the interests of both conservation and economic growth. Meanwhile, agroecology has been considered an appropriate framework for reenvisaging and reshaping food systems in Canada’s North. We propose four dimensions of agroecological fishing: governance, knowledge, economies, and socio-cultural values. We apply these to the Ka’a’gee Tu First Nation fishery in the Northwest Territories. We suggest that these agroecological fisheries dimensions, underpinned by Indigenous values and practices of stewardship, offer an alternative paradigm for the conservation of fish, waters, and fishing communities.

This comprehensive Handbook represents a definitive state of the current art and science of food waste from multiple perspectives. The issue of food waste has emerged in recent years as a major global problem. Recent research has enabled greater understanding and measurement of loss and waste throughout food supply chains, shedding light on contributing factors and practical solutions. This book includes perspectives and disciplines ranging from agriculture, food science, industrial ecology, history, economics, consumer behaviour, geography, theology, planning, sociology, and environmental policy among others. The Routledge Handbook of Food Waste addresses new and ongoing debates around systemic causes and solutions, including behaviour change, social innovation, new technologies, spirituality, redistribution, animal feed, and activism. The chapters describe and evaluate country case studies, waste management, treatment, prevention, and reduction approaches, and compares research methodologies for better understanding food wastage. This book is essential reading for the growing number of food waste scholars, practitioners, and policy makers interested in researching, theorising, debating, and solving the multifaceted phenomenon of food waste.

This thesis critically explores relationships between food insecurity and food waste in the UK through the lens of surplus food redistribution (SFR). Ethnographic research compared two UK redistribution organisations’ models, framings, practices and political modalities. Additionally, international comparisons involved research with SFR organisations in North America, where such practices largely denote a sophisticated and large-scale network of foodbanks and subsidiary charities that yield lessons around a key UK debates: does the expansion of charitable distribution of wasted food prevent efforts to prevent the inequality and poverty underlying hunger?Chapter 4 shows how hunger and waste have become co-framed in public discourse, and how this has shaped responses, particularly how discursive alliances can either contest or favour the expansion of food aid. Chapter 5 articulates assemblage ontologies and political ecology to compare infrastructural, material and labour practices by participant organisations, arguing the important of recognising more-than-human dimensions of SFR landscapes. Chapter 6 analyses spaces of eating and encounter, drawing attention to how social difference is constructed and/or challenged by different SFR models. Chapter 7 compares UK observations with findings from North America, considering how critiques of charitable food redistribution have influenced changes in redistribution practice, such as the inclusion of foodbank users in decision making or the use of surplus food to create training and employment opportunities for excluded groups.Research revealed how shifting SFR infrastructures affect organisations’ capacity to critique and transform systemic aspects of waste and hunger. The thesis argues that SFR can boost food access and create important spaces of encounter. However, it demonstrates how organisations’ articulations with corporations, state bodies and other organisations constitute affordances and constraints for SFR’s radical potential, specifically their capacity to depoliticise or contest causes of food precarity and waste.Critiquing power dynamics affecting globalising forms of SFR, the thesis articulates lessons about the political and material affordances of different redistribution models, contributing to debates around the messy realities of wasted food activism and its capacities for radical, preventative change. The thesis concludes with recommendations for practitioners and policy-makers.

Every year, developed countries recall tens-of-thousands of tonnes of food from the market for quality or safety violations. Meanwhile, the amount of food passing through the UK's largest surplus food redistribution has tripled in the last four years. These flows of unwanted products (hereafter 'divested food') are a logistical challenge throughout the food system, raising public health, environmental, ethical, and business concerns. There exist myriad diverse schemes attempting to manage these flows of divested food, often pitched as 'win-win' solutions that purport to resolve the environmental consequences of food waste while offering social (and economic) benefits. Examples include diverting recalled human food into the animal feed system, or corporate donations of surplus human food to food charities. We present a view of food divestment as assemblages of human and more-than-human actants that can 'bite back' in unanticipated ways, raising questions about the knowability of food risk, definitions of edibility, and biopolitical concerns around public health and food access. We suggest that a shift away from the language of 'wasting' to that of divestment and the conduits along which divested material is subsequently moved offers broader analytical insights that elucidate the vitality of divested food, providing a fuller accounting of the relations severed and created through divestment, but which are frequently elided by the conceptual externalising of so-called 'waste'. This richer, relational picture can encourage internalising the costs of 'win-win' downstream management of food waste while highlighting the merits of upstream interventions into the antecedents of food waste. Drawing on field work conducted in the domains of surplus food redistribution and recalled food, we put forward a view of food redistribution and disposal as comprised of assemblages of human and more-than-human actants. These assemblages possess the capacity to 'bite back', presenting socio-political and environmental challenges to the past, present, and future of 'solutions' to food waste. The concept of conduits refers to the various pathways or routings by which divestment takes place and along which divested material flows. Divestment excises some relations while generating others as material moves through and between conduits. The numerous and diverse efforts to manage the flows of contaminated, unsold, or rejected food are often pitched as win-win solutions that resolve the environmental consequences of food waste while bringing about social benefits. In lieu of upstream interventions in waste generation comes the exploitation of an increasingly diverse range of conduits for divestment.

Global food insecurity levels remain stubbornly high. One of the surest ways to grasp the scale and consequence of global inequality is through a food systems lens. In a predominantly urban world, urban food systems present a useful lens to engage a wide variety of urban (and global) challenges—so called ‘wicked problems.’ This paper describes a collaborative research project between four urban food system research units, two European and two African. The project purpose was to seek out solutions to what lay between, across and within the different approaches applied in the understanding of each city’s food system challenges. Contextual differences and immediate (perceived) needs resulted in very different views on the nature of the challenge and the solutions required. Value positions of individuals and their disciplinary “enclaves” presented further boundaries. The paper argues that finding consensus provides false solutions. Rather the identification of novel approaches to such wicked problems is contingent of these differences being brought to the fore, being part of the conversation, as devices through which common positions can be discovered, where spaces are created for the realisation of new perspectives, but also, where difference is celebrated as opposed to censored.

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book demonstrates that the food waste problem affects all parts of the inhabited world. It describes concept of 'vastogenesis'. Far from being devoid of, or separate from, regimes of value, 'food/waste is both supportive of and necessary to the functionality of the system and therefore of direct value to it'. The book analyses the wastage of edible food commodities as the necessary counterpart to the reckoning of exchange value through the constant flow of capital. It draws on assemblage thinking to consider the ethical, regulatory, and material infrastructures - or conduits - through which food is variously divested. Critical animal studies consider animal relations and how discourses around dirt, pests, vermin, and waste are reflected in stigmatic framings of both the unwanted non-human and the unwanted human other within an urban context.

Food waste in the food service sector has been reported to be a significant generator of food wasted in developed countries. This chapter begins with background on food waste in the food services, definitions of key concepts and the current situation. We then move to discuss the amounts and types of food waste in different kinds of outlets, e.g. school canteens, and compare studies from different countries. Food waste originating in the kitchen, while serving and plate waste are considered. Drawing upon our experience we summarise methods for food waste measurement in the food service sector setting, detailing the essential data required for managing and preventing food waste in this context. Finally we consider the best practices to decrease the amount of food waste and the most suitable options according to the food waste hierarchy.