Still not loving food waste: anti-food-waste activism and its material practices in the Czech context
Abstract
"My grandma used to wait in a queue for bananas, nowadays I can find loads of them in rubbish behind supermarkets," says one of the Czech anti-food-waste activists. During the transformation to a market economy the Czech food trade system has undergone a significant reconstruction accompanied by an emergent problem of massive food waste.
In response to a social, ethical, economic and environmental urgency of this issue several non-state initiatives have started tackling food wastage in different ways and on different levels. I have carried out an ethnographic research among two Czech groups of anti-food-waste activists concerning myself with specific material practices deployed by its members.
Food Not Bombs, the first of them, is a part of an international anarchist movement based on informal and anti-authoritarian organisational principle. Food not bombs groups practise dumpster diving (they gather food waste from bins) and cook their findings for low-income and homeless people.
The second one, Save Food (Zachraň jídlo), is a student-based initiative which has organised a massive event "The feast for one thousand" and which leads a campaign against food wastage in the media. In my contribution I will focus on specific material practices deployed by those two initiatives.
Food Not Bombs and Save Food handle food waste in very different ways: official and unofficial, legal and illegal practices are enacted. Through these practices the two initiatives produce specific standards of edibility and food safety.
I argue that different material practices create different "versions" of food waste (Annemarie Mol would say ontonorms) which more or less, if ever, fit with the "versions" produced by supermarkets. Consequently, those various versions of food waste shape the anti-food- waste politics.