Redistributing surplus food: Interrogating the collision of waste and justice

Published by SHARECITY on the 20th July 2019.

Abstract

This chapter provides an empirically grounded contribution to better understanding the logics of surplus food redistribution for human consumption and develops contingent insights into food redistribution’s benefits and limitations for simultaneously reducing food waste and food injustice. It considers the practice of redistributing surplus food from businesses to charities. The chapter explains contemporary collision of extended food mobilities and social justice concerns that emerges when surplus food that would have previously gone to waste is redistributed to people for consumption. Retailers additionally benefit from the increasing protection provided through an expanding governance architecture around food donations that sets out clear requirements for safe redistribution. A mobile ethnography of the assemblage of actors engaging with one surplus food redistribution initiative in Ireland was conducted between 2015 and 2017. In Ireland, the Waste Management Regulations 2009 specify that most businesses selling or serving food must segregate their food waste at source and that it must not be sent to landfill.

Please cite this chapter as:

Davies, A.R. (2019) Redistributing surplus food: Interrogating the collision of waste and justice. In Butz et al., (Eds.) Mobilities, Mobility Justice & Social Justice. Routledge, London.