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Too Many Bananas:

Re-valuing and Re-using Food Waste for Human Consumption

Amy Woodward

Thesis submitted to the University of Surrey for the degree of Master of Philosophy

Department of Sociology

University of Surrey, Guildford, Surrey, GU2 7X

Supervisors: Dr Kate Burningham and Professor Nigel Gilbert

March 2016

Copyright © Amy Woodward 2016

Summary

This thesis offers a sociological analysis of food waste as a social issue of importance.

Alongside government intervention, numerous community groups and social enterprises

have emerged across the UK which attempt to mitigate the costs of food waste in different

ways. Drawing on ethnographic examples, this thesis draws attention to one grassroots

social response to the food waste issue, freegan dumpster diving.

Freeganism is a counter cultural movement which rejects capitalism and promotes more

socially and environmentally equitable relations. Freegans reject the normative

categorization of discarded food as valueless, unhygienic and inedible, and instead reclaim

food disposed of by retailers for human consumption. Literature to date constructs freegan

dumpster diving as a niche practice performed by individuals for political resistance or food

poverty. Little attention has addressed the transformation of food waste into a valuable

resource or what happens to food waste once it has been reclaimed.

Drawing on participant observations and interviews conducted with six freegan community

groups in the UK over 18-months, this thesis draws attention to the processes freegans

engage in when dumpster diving to explore how food waste is re-valued and re-used. This

emerges as a complex process. Dumpster diving is not an independent moment of recovery;

attention to the different food waste pathways, as practitioners access, assess, reclaim,

consume and distribute food waste varyingly, is required.

Freegans regularly enact dumpster diving but for multiple reasons and in shifting

configurations. A shared practice is visible across all freegan communities, albeit with some

variations. These deviations allow freegans to navigate the social barriers to performance in

different ways, enabling the practice to become entrenched in everyday life. When barriers

prove insurmountable, practitioners move in and out of affiliation with the practice over their

life-course.

A similar but distinct practice has emerged in recent years with the growth of food

redistribution organizations (FROs). FROs promote the re-valuing and re-using of food waste

as a joint business and charity venture, supporting retailers in managing food waste by

redistributing it to vulnerable people in food poverty. Utilising insights gathered through

participant observations and interviews with two different FROs, these practices promote a

more socially acceptable and scalable approach to reclaiming food waste than dumpster

diving through their partnerships with food retailers. This, however, is at the expense of the

wider socio-political objectives at the core of freeganism. The radical philosophy of

freeganism thus both define its existence yet also constrains the ability for wider participation

and social impact.

This analysis provides useful insights into the freegan subculture and the food waste debate

more widely, by exploring 1) the journeys of food waste 2) processes of reclaiming food

waste 3) practitioner relationships to food waste over time and space. Freegan dumpster

diving is revealed as an everyday practice that is constrained by, and constrains everyday

life. At any one time, multiple food waste practices circulate, connect and transform. If points

of intervention or transition to more sustainable food waste configurations are sought, further

attention to this linked nexus of practices is required.

Declaration

This thesis and the work to which it refers are the results of my own efforts. Any ideas, data,

images or text resulting from the work of others (whether published or unpublished) are fully

identified as such within the work and attributed to their originator in the text, bibliography or

in footnotes. This thesis has not been submitted in whole or in part for any other academic

degree or professional qualification. I agree that the University has the right to submit my

work to the plagiarism detection service TurnitinUK for originality checks. Whether or not

drafts have been so-assessed, the University reserves the right to require an electronic

version of the final document (as submitted) for assessment as above.

Signature: ___________________________________________

Date: _______________________________________________

Acknowledgments

First and foremost I would like to express my gratitude towards the Department of Sociology at the University of Surrey for affording me the opportunity to study for an MPhil part time while working on the ERIE project.

I would like to thank my thesis supervisor Dr Kate Burningham, without her support this thesis would have felt like an insurmountable task. To my co-supervisor Professor Nigel Gilbert, thank you for guiding me in both my career and my studies.

Most importantly, I would like to thank the freegans and other participants in this study for opening up their lives to my questioning and analysis. Without their desire to live more sustainable lives I have no doubt that we would have a bigger food waste situation to deal with. You have opened my eyes to a world of possibility and changed my eating habits for a lifetime.

To my family, thank you for your unfailing confidence in me. To Jess, Ozge and Alex, thank you for all of the coffee breaks and glasses of wine – long may it continue. Finally, to Ian, thank you for all of the above and more.

ContentsSummary...............................................................................................................................................2

Declaration............................................................................................................................................4

Acknowledgments.................................................................................................................................5

Introduction..........................................................................................................................................1

Chapter 1: Food and food waste...........................................................................................................5

1.1 Food waste..................................................................................................................................5

1.2 Freeganism..................................................................................................................................9

1.3 Freegan literature......................................................................................................................10

1.4 Freeganism and food.................................................................................................................12

1.5 Non-consumption......................................................................................................................14

1.6 Dumpster diving........................................................................................................................16

1.7 Food redistribution organizations (FRO)....................................................................................18

1.8 Conclusion.................................................................................................................................21

Chapter 2: Methodology.....................................................................................................................23

2.1 Practice framework...................................................................................................................24

2.2 Selection criteria........................................................................................................................26

2.3 Participant observations and interviews...................................................................................27

2.4 Participant characteristics.........................................................................................................30

2.5 Thematic coding........................................................................................................................32

Chapter 3: Freegan Food Provisioning.................................................................................................33

3.1 Dumpster diving – an entity and a performance.......................................................................34

3.1.1 Elements.............................................................................................................................34

3.1.2 Meanings............................................................................................................................36

3.1.3 Material..............................................................................................................................37

3.1.4 Competence.......................................................................................................................38

3.1.4 Linking elements.................................................................................................................38

3.2 Doing dumpster diving - to dive or not to dive..........................................................................44

3.2.1 Opportunistic......................................................................................................................45

3.2.2 Depleted resources.............................................................................................................46

3.2.3 Planned activity..................................................................................................................46

3.2.4 Enjoyment..........................................................................................................................47

3.3 Doing dumpster diving – when and how to dive.......................................................................48

3.3.1 Timing.................................................................................................................................48

3.3.2 Toolkits and guidelines.......................................................................................................49

3.3.3 Materials and procedures...................................................................................................51

3.4 Organised food reclamation......................................................................................................54

3.5 Conclusion.................................................................................................................................57

Chapter 4: Selecting Surplus Food and Rejecting Food Waste............................................................59

4.1 Re-valuing food waste...............................................................................................................59

4.2 The processes of selection and rejection...................................................................................60

4.2.1 Assessing the visual characteristics of a product................................................................63

4.2.2 Accounting for unseen embedded characteristics..............................................................65

4.2.3 Evaluating the product in reference to personal taste and cultural values........................68

4.3 Conclusion.................................................................................................................................74

Chapter 5: Re-using Surplus Food........................................................................................................76

5.1 Transporting and storing surplus food......................................................................................77

5.2 Managing and negotiating secondary waste.............................................................................79

5.2.1 From bin to consumption...................................................................................................80

5.2.2 From bin to bin...................................................................................................................82

5.3 Communal preparation and consumption of surplus food........................................................85

5.3 Conclusion.................................................................................................................................87

Chapter 6: Food Redistribution Organizations and the Transformation of Food Waste Practices......88

6.1 Introducing FROs.......................................................................................................................89

6.1.1 Elements of FROs................................................................................................................91

6.1.2 Relationship with surplus food providers (access)..............................................................92

6.1.3 The process of food selection.............................................................................................94

6.1.4 Volunteers and the relationship with surplus food consumers..........................................96

6.1.5 Shared elements.............................................................................................................99

6.2 The transformation of food waste practices...........................................................................101

6.2.1 Shifting practices of the dumpster....................................................................................101

6.2.2 Future shifts for dumpster diving.....................................................................................104

6.3 Conclusion...............................................................................................................................106

Chapter 7: Practice in Everyday Life and Across the Life-Course.......................................................108

7.1 Practicing dumpster diving in everyday life.............................................................................108

7.1.1 Starting to dumpster diving..............................................................................................109

7.2 Changing practice across the life-course.................................................................................112

7.2.1 Time..................................................................................................................................112

7.2.2 Children............................................................................................................................113

7.2.3 Lifestyle............................................................................................................................113

7.2.4 Location............................................................................................................................114

7.3 Community..............................................................................................................................114

7.4 Conclusion...............................................................................................................................116

Chapter 8: Discussion........................................................................................................................117

8.1 Dumpster diving as an everyday practice................................................................................117

8.2 Changing practices..................................................................................................................119

8.3 Changing practices of food retailers........................................................................................120

8.4 The application of practice theory...........................................................................................122

Annex A.................................................................................................................................................. i

References............................................................................................................................................ iii

Chapter 1: Food and food waste

Introduction

A ‘wicked problem’, food waste has become a global issue of political importance in recent

years. Reports suggest 1.6 billion tones, one third, of all food produced for human

consumption is wasted each year globally (FAO 2013). A growing trend, food waste has

numerous economic, ecological and societal implications. The carbon footprint of food

produced and not eaten is estimated at 3.3 Gtonnes of CO2-equivalent, while 28% of the

world's agricultural area is used annually to produce food that is lost or wasted, resulting in

direct economic consequences estimated at $750 billion annually (excluding fish and

seafood) (ibid). Defining food waste as loss ‘due to the behaviour of retailers and consumers’

(Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations 2011), it is pervasive, occurring

across the supply chain from cultivation and harvesting, through to household and retail

practices.

Increasing concerns surrounding this perceived growth in food waste has led to greater

attention towards mitigating the social, environmental and economic ‘costs’ of unsustainable

food behaviours. Alongside numerous top down strategies, a plethora of community groups,

charities and social enterprises in the UK look to minimize the production of food waste and

its subsequent effects across society. Despite a wide variety of action groups from the

grassroots consumer level, policy and academia have tended to situate consumers as

driving food waste trends. Thus interventions have tended to focus on changing consumer

behaviour. This thesis shifts the focus away from such a perspective, instead addressing

how food waste is re-valued as a resource for human consumption. Freegan dumpster

diving is part of an emerging sub-culture which challenges the roles and relationships

between food businesses and ‘consumers’, and societies understandings of food waste and

food provisioning. Exploring marginalized freegan dumpster diving, and the linked practices

of food redistribution organizations (FROs), provides unique insights into contemporary food

waste debates.

First coined in the early 2000s, the term freeganism is a portmanteau of ‘free’ and ‘vegan’

(Coyne 2009). While there is not one definitive definition, freegans ‘reject consumerism and

seek to help the environment by reducing waste, especially by retrieving and using

discarded food and other goods’ (Oxford English Dictionary 2016). Whether approached as

a counter cultural movement, a philosophy or lifestyle choice, freeganism ‘employs

alternative strategies for living based on limited participation in the conventional economy

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and minimal consumption of resources’ (Freegan.info 2016d). Underlying these alternative

practices is a rejection of capitalist society and a desire to transform society towards more

socially and environmentally equitable relations. Practices include, but are not limited to,

squatting abandoned buildings, guerrilla gardening in vacant city lots, foraging for wild food,

hitchhiking, voluntary unemployment, and radical community activism (Barnard 2011:420)

Food is of particular importance to freegans and is valued beyond a material for exchange or

nutritional need. As a result, they seek to limit their own production of food waste by

maximising the use and re-use of resources and finding alternative pathways for produce

that is unsuitable for human consumption (as compost or animal feed, for example).

More distinctly, freegans also promote a repertoire of alternative practices which challenge

normative understandings of and relationships with food and food waste. The majority of

these practices can be perceived as ‘pro environmental’ or ‘sustainable’ alternatives,

representing more radically sustainable approaches to mainstream consumption practices,

such as ‘buying green’ or Fairtrade (Edwards and Mercer 2012:281). For freeganism,

consumerism itself is rejected. From a freegan perspective, food has become grossly

commodified within the current capitalist system where social and environmental inequalities

are reinforced. The freegan.info website argues that ‘in a complex, industrial, mass-

production economy driven by profit, abuses of humans, animals, and the earth abound at all

levels of production (from acquisition to raw materials to production to transportation) and in

just about every product we buy’ (Freegan.info 2016d).

To make explicit the unjust social and environmental dynamics that are perceived to underlie

society, freegans utilise food as a material of both resistance and transformation (Wilson

2013). Freegans construct alternative ways of accessing, utilising and disposing of food that

are more aligned to their values surrounding community, equality, sharing and well-being

(Freegan.info 2016d). These alternative food provisioning practices include ‘gleaning’ for

leftover crops that won’t be harvested, foraging for wild food such as mushrooms and

berries, and sharing home grown produce or goods that are not needed. While an array of

practices exist within the freegan toolkit, dumpster diving emerges from literature and

practice as the dominant practice for accessing food and tackling the food waste issue.

Referred to interchangeably as ‘binning’, ‘skipping’, ‘skip-dipping’ or ‘urban foraging’

dumpster diving involves ‘procuring food from a supermarket dumpster bin for individual

consumption’ (Edwards and Mercer 2007:279). Freegan dumpster divers argue that a large

percentage of food that is discarded across the supply chain is edible and suitable for human

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consumption and thus, should be reclaimed and re-used. The loss of value associated with

discarded food is rejected by freegans as they reclaim food waste from bins to minimise

environmental and social degradation and maximise resource value. Dumpster diving is a

visible illustration of the dual role that food plays within the freegan philosophy, whereby

existing food and food waste practices of retailers are resisted and alternative sites of

provision outside of the conventional economy are constructed, as divers access and

reclaim food from retail bins for human consumption. This practice provides a unique insight

into the pathways of food waste and how food can journey from valueless to valuable for

human consumption.

Existing literature surrounding dumpster diving tends to focus on individual practitioners’

motivations for engagement whereby participation is often constructed as identity work.

While the existing limited literature offers insight into why individuals engage with waste

reclamation, it does not address how these practices are formed and performed, or how

knowledge and experience is shared between practitioners. The following chapters look to

build on the existing literature by addressing what freegans do when dumpster diving and

how food waste is re-valued and re-used.

Yet, it is not only freegans who seek to re-value and reclaim retail food waste for human

consumption. Novel social enterprises can be seen emerging within the UK which re-value

and re-use retail food waste as not for profit business ventures. Referred to in this thesis as

food redistribution organizations (FRO), groups such as FareShare, FoodCycle,

PlanZheroes, and ‘Feeding the 5000’ engage in direct relationships with retailers to establish

contracts for salvaging unwanted food before it enters the bin. FROs are organizations which

often have outposts in different locations across the UK which coordinate the collection of

food waste (or surplus food, in their terms) and its redistribution to vulnerable individuals or

charity groups within a local area. Through a consideration of similarities and differences

between dumpster diving and the activities of FROs this thesis develops a richer

understanding of food waste revaluation practices in the UK today.

The thesis begins with an introduction to food waste as a global issue of importance in

chapter 1, and situates freeganism within this context. The key attributes of freeganism and

the freegan dumpster diving practice are then outlined. This chapter concludes by

acknowledging the emergence of FROs as representing a shift in approaches towards re-

valuing and re-using food waste. Chapter 2 provides an account of the framework and

methods utilised to explore freegan dumpster diving. A practice theory approach is utilised,

providing a framework for understanding freegan dumpster diving as linked elements that

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transform as links break and form. The methods of data collection employed with freegan

communities and food redistribution organizations are then outlined and an introduction to

each of the freegan communities and FROs investigated is provided. Chapter 3 introduces

the first phase of analysis, accounting for dumpster diving as the dominant food provisioning

strategy employed by freegan practitioners in this study and identifies the decision making

process they undertake to decide when and how to dumpster dive. Chapters 4 and 5 follow

the journey of food waste once it has been accessed, exploring first the process of

deliberation involved in selecting or rejecting food at the bin (Chapter 4), and then how food

that has been reclaimed is subsequently managed and re-used once it has been transported

home (Chapter 5). Chapter 6 explores two FROs in detail and addresses the relationship

between freegan dumpster diving and the activities promoted within these organizations.

Chapter 7 breaks down the components involved in the practices of freegan dumpster diving

across the different communities and FROs, exploring how the formation of, and

commitment to, these practices changes over time. Drawing on the previous sections

Chapter 8 situates this study in wider discussions of food waste and makes suggestions for

tackling food waste.

4



A number of government interventions in the UK have sought to change the waste practices

of food businesses and individual consumers to reduce the production of food waste and

associated effects. Despite these strategies, food waste continues to be an issue of socio-

political importance. Alongside top down strategies to minimise food waste, a plethora of

community groups, charities and social enterprises have emerged in the UK to mitigate the

cost of increasing food waste trends. Exploring freegan dumpster diving, and the relationship

to food redistribution organizations (FRO), this thesis addresses how food waste is re-valued

and re-used for human consumption.

Drawing on existing literature, this chapter introduces food waste as an issue of global

importance with associated environmental, social and economic costs. While attention to

food and waste has developed within the social sciences and environmental sciences, the

domain of food waste has been comparatively neglected. However recent shifts have sought

to overcome this and situate food waste within the rules, routines and social expectations of

everyday life. This approach draws attention to mundane and normative activities that

become routinised and habitual. Yet a number of alternative strategies exist which illustrate

different ways of navigating normative food waste practices. Freeganism is introduced as

one social response to the food waste problem which attempts to resist and reconfigure

normative practices that make food waste an inevitable feature of everyday life. While limited

literature explore freeganism and food waste, an introduction to key themes is provided, with

particular attention to the practice of ‘dumpster diving’. The practices promoted by food

redistribution organizations (FRO) are then introduced as an alternative social response to

food waste which, while similarly re-valuing and re-using food waste, does so in a more

socially acceptable configuration.

1.1 Food waste

‘Food waste’ refers to any food produced for human consumption but which has been left to

spoil or has been discarded before they can be consumed Food wastage occurs for a variety

of reasons and can occur at any stage of the food cycle, from harvesting, to storage or at the

household. Anxieties surrounding a perceived growth in food waste production have

increased over the last 20 years as the environmental, social and economic costs of waste

production and waste management have become more evident.

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The construction of food waste as a societal and environmental problem is widespread and

strategies to transform current food waste dynamics are numerous. Three broad themes can

be seen emerging across the literature which constructs negative characteristics of food

waste in terms of: natural resource depletion; environmentally and socially damaging

techniques of production and recycling; economic loss and limited access. These themes

are often used interchangeably across the literature and by action groups to justify increased

management and intervention in how people provision, consume and manage food.

A report from the Institution of Mechanical Engineers (Fox & Fimeche 2013) provides an

account of the devastating impacts food waste production can have on natural resources.

Global food production currently uses 4.9Gha of the 10Gha usable land surface available,

figures that are set to escalate as world diets are increasingly based on animal based

produce, where beef accounts for 50 times more water than vegetable production (ibid: 5).

Furthermore, the carbon footprint of food produced and ultimately not eaten uses 28% of the

world's agricultural area annually and produces 3.3 Gtonnes of CO2-equivalent.

The industrialised farming techniques favoured in the majority of developed countries are

also critiqued for being socially and environmentally damaging, with widespread implications

for habitat and biodiversity (FAO 2013). Once waste has been produced it needs to be

managed: processes can include anaerobic digestion and composting, but these processes

are unable to manage the plethora of associated inorganic waste, including product

packaging. Despite attempts to promote recycling, a large percentage of food produced for

human consumption and associated packaging ends up in landfill sites, creating unsightly

and smelly spaces that contaminate soil and produce methane which are harmful for the

environment.

As well as environmental and social effects, economic loss is inherent within waste practices

across the food chain, costing the global economy $750 billion annually (FAO 2013). The

rejection of large swathes of fruit and vegetables before they have been harvested because

they do not meet a specification or projected sales has emerged as a particular point of

contention. Consumers’ expectations that food should always be abundant, fresh, and

available overshadow any concerns for the nutritional potential and full value of the products

themselves (Stuart 2009).

Similarly, household food waste trends have become fodder for news media. Households in

the UK are regularly condemned for wasting 7 million tonnes of food and drink each year,

which equates to more than 1.4 million bananas being thrown away daily (WRAP 2016).

6


Within the context of climate change, peak oil, and global food security these food waste

trends are ‘bewildering’ for many (Jackson 2013) raising questions about our current

relationships with food and food waste and how we might intervene for more sustainable

future configurations.

Within developed countries, food waste trends are often attributed to a ‘throwaway’

consumer culture and retailer trends which encourage people to waste (Bauman, 2002).

While critical responses from the likes of O’Brien (2007) conclude that dumping huge

quantities of unwanted ‘stuff’ and condemning subsequent waste is nothing new, the

depletion of food resources and the characteristics of food waste are contextually specific.

Supermarkets for example, dominate food and grocery retailing in the UK (Hingley 2005).

The four largest supermarket chains account for 75.4% of all food shopping in the UK and

are criticised for embedding food waste within their supply chains in order to encourage

consumption and profit (Henderson Research 2011). Supermarkets have become the source

of colourful, fresh and uniform produce. In order to maintain the image of abundance

retailers must reject and dispose of produce that is still useable (Stuart 2009). In some cases

food is rejected due to expiry dates, while in other cases, food is rejected to make room for

newer, fresher products, or because of forecast demand, regardless of whether older

products are still consumable or not (Stuart 2009).

The harvesting practices of the supermarkets have also been a particular point of contention

in recent years. Supermarkets contract or procure fresh produce beyond their requirements,

allowing them to reject entire batches of edible produce because they do not meet specific

aesthetic standards or requirements. It is reported that some 30% of vegetable crops do not

get harvested as a result of this in the UK alone (Fox & Fimeche 2013). Campaigns by

celebrity chefs, such as Jamie Oliver, and activist groups have challenged these practices

and in some cases have been successful at putting ‘wonky’ or ‘ugly’ vegetables on the

supermarket shelf (JamieOliver.com 2016). Chef Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall has also

declared a ‘War on Waste’, challenging the supermarkets and fast food industry to drastically

reduce the amount of waste they generate (RiverCottage.net 2016).

Despite these campaigns, large proportions of food waste still occur at this stage of the

supply chain. Furthermore produce that does get to the supermarket is often promoted in

batch sales to encourage consumers to purchase higher quantities of food at small discount

rates to push up profits. The quantity promoted in these sales is often more than a

household can consume and thus this leads to households generating waste. Supermarkets

7


argue that food waste is unavoidable in order to ensure consumers are kept safe from

microbiological risk and have the choice and variety that they desire.

Despite increasing attention towards food waste, it remains under researched in the social

sciences (Evans, 2013:5). While sociological engagement with food has developed, attention

towards food waste has tended to remain within domains of environmental management

which has focused on recovering waste materials and recycling. Coles & Hallett (2012)argue

that the invisibility of food waste normalises it as an everyday unavoidable occurrence. What

research does exist then tends to attribute food waste trends to globalised and industrialised

society which has led to a wasteful throwaway society that has normalised the devaluation of

food. There is a broad field of literature based on this understanding which promotes an

array of intervention strategies to improve consumer decision making and in turn minimise

any negative environmental effects (WRAP 2016).

A more recent development seeks to challenge understandings of waste practices and

situate them as bound up with the dynamics of everyday life, leaving individual consumers

locked-in to wasteful food practices. Evans, (2013; 2014) recent studies of household waste

practices found that consumers were often cautious about producing food waste and did not

want to purchase too much food or let food depreciate in their fridges. Participants often

attempted to re-use and manage their waste practices but the household routines,

conventions and the social organization of food consumption, got in the way of their best

intentions and food waste became unavoidable. Evans (2014) found that these cultural

conventions and expectations surrounding food provision create barriers to reducing waste.

This work highlights the socially constructed nature of waste as ‘matter which has crossed a

contingent cultural line that separates it from stuff that is worth keeping’ (Watson & Meah

2012: 157), and illustrates that our understandings and behaviours of waste are bound up

with cultural meanings, traditions and expectations (Douglas & Isherwood 1996). In contrast

to individualised approaches, this argument situates the cause of food waste outside of the

consumer. Rather the focus is shifted towards the structural factors which provide the

foundation for our understandings, definitions and practices around food, which enable and

constrain food waste possibilities. These factors are not static or one dimensional, they can

be fluid and change over time.

From this perspective, individuals are not inherently wasteful consumers, but that wasting

food is an inevitable outcome of the dynamics of everyday life (Evans, D. Campbell, H &

Murcott 2013). This research draws on normative practices and consumer engagement with

waste in households. While data surrounding the provisioning of food within supermarkets

8


was collected, to date there has been little attention to alternative food provisioning and

engagement with waste outside of the household or of the pathways of food waste once it

has been disposed of.

The disposal of food in the bin does not necessarily result in the final rejection of food. Food

waste can be reclaimed, re-valued and re-used by individuals and groups for human

consumption. This reclamation of discarded food can take place at numerous locations, such

as household waste bins, restaurant tables and waste bins. The reclamation of food waste

from supermarket retailers and local food market sites through dumpster diving is one way in

which alternative practices of food and food waste are promoted. Freegans reclaim, re-value

and re-use food waste produced at both the retail and household level for human

consumption. Diverting attention away from a household or consumer perspective, this

thesis explores how freegans re-value and re-use food waste for human consumption.

1.2 Freeganism

Freeganism is a counter cultural movement which ‘employs alternative strategies for living

based on limited participation in the conventional economy and minimal consumption of

resources’ (Freegan.info 2016c). A blending of the words ‘free’ and ‘vegan’, a coherent

‘freegan’ rhetoric has become increasingly visible since the late 1990’s as individuals came

together to promote a more symbiotic relationship with the environment and nature (Coyne

2009).

Freegans reject the value ascribed to the profit economy and the promotion of consumerism,

both of which they perceive to be products of a degrading and unjust capitalist society.

Freeganism is underpinned by a philosophy of valuing social and environmental relations

and involves a more radical pro-environmental lifestyle than mainstream sustainable

choices, such as purchasing Fairtrade produce (Edwards & Mercer 2012:281).

Consumerism itself is rejected as systematically abusing humans, animals, and the earth to

drive economic profit (Freegan.info 2016c). As a result, individuals seek to reimagine

everyday life towards more socially and environmentally equitable configurations, such as

limiting paid employment to spend more time in community based activities, squatting in

abandoned buildings to avoid the need to work more hours, foraging for wild food, and

supporting local community activities (Barnard 2011:420). As well as promoting an array of

alternative lifestyle activities, freeganism is also promoted as a strategy of political resistance

against capitalism. Freeganism thus involves a repertoire of alternative strategies that

9


construct novel configurations of daily life while simultaneously resisting dominant

configurations.

1.3 Freegan literature

While there is no way of reliably recording freegan activity on a global scale, there has been

a marked increase in the visibility of freegan practice in recent years across news and social

media, with particular attention to the practice of dumpster diving (Bloom 2014; Samira &

Palmer 2014; Bock 2015). Despite this increased visibility, freeganism is an under-

researched area. The limited literature surrounding freeganism is scattered across

disciplines from sociology (Edwards & Mercer 2012) and anthropology (Moré 2011; Gross

2009), to marketing (Pentina & Amos 2011) and legal studies (Thomas 2010) predominantly

within North American and Australian contexts. Despite interest coming from different

disciplines, accounts have tended to focus on the motivation for individual participation and

processes of identity construction.

Undertaking an 18-month ethnographic study of a freegan community in New York City,

Barnard (2011) situated freeganism as a marginalised anti-capitalist activity. Applying

Goffman’s social dramaturgy, dumpster diving is situated as a key device in the freegan

toolkit, a ‘political street theatre performance’ which individuals utilised as a conscious

expression of their political values (ibid: 421). Here, engagement with freeganism is

constructed as motivated by innate values that individuals undertake as a display. The

novelty of dumpster diving allows practitioners to stand out as different, to draw attention to

themselves, the issues and to engage ‘outsiders’. For Barnard freegans have ‘a limited

window of time in which to present their movement to newcomers and can show only part of

the vast repertoire of freegan practices in their performance’ (Barnard 2011: 428).

Also utilising the ethnographic tool kit in North America, Moré (2011) conducted in-depth

qualitative interviews and participant observations with college students who dumpster dived

in Illinois. For Moré (2011), subjects were motivated to participate with freeganism for

sustainable consumption purposes, rather than as a political performance. Where Barnard’s

freegans organised ‘trash tours’ to draw attention to political inefficiencies, More constructs

dumpster diving as a less political activity whereby freegans sought to limit food going to

waste by handing out food to passers-by or informing friends where they could find free

edible food. Here the motivation is centred on minimising food waste for social and

environmental purposes.

10


Combining these themes, Gross (2009) situates freeganism as a socio-political strategy

which individuals engage with to benefit themselves and the wider society. Freegans ‘rebel

against selling their time to labour in the capitalist system’ (Gross 2009:61) choosing to ‘work

as little as possible in low-paying, low-skilled employment’ (Edwards & Mercer 2007b:291).

Instead, freegans engage in more individually rewarding activities which promote more

equitable and symbiotic relationships with nature and the wider environment (Gross 2009;

Edwards and Mercer 2012; More 2011).

Contrastingly, freegan food provisioning has also been constructed as a practice of

necessity conducted by individuals to overcome food poverty. Eikenberry & Smith (2005), for

example, argue that dumpster diving is the result of ineffective food assistance programmes,

those who engage in the activity are perceived to have fallen through gaps in the welfare

system. Here, freeganism is constructed as an activity which individuals engage in when

they have no way of provisioning for themselves. While accessing food for human

consumption is a motivation for freegan engagement across much of the literature, this

theme is distinct as it constructs individual practitioners as having no alternative options. In

this construction, dumpster diving is not a choice individuals make but it is forced upon them

by their lack of access to food.

However Eikenberry and Smith (2005) fail to account for the complexity involved here.

Drawing on the wider literature, I suggest that there are two distinct practices surrounding

nutritional need as a motivation for dumpster diving. The first is based on necessity which is

not situated within the freegan philosophy, for example individuals who would purchase food

if they had access to the appropriate resources. Alternatively there is a ‘need’ to access food

by dumpster diving because of wider lifestyle choices based on the freegan philosophy. For

example, some freegans reject engagement with paid labour which may result in limited

access to money or food resource, thus alternative strategies of food provision are

necessary. This is driven by wider cultural and political decisions rather than strictly by

vulnerability. This challenges Eikenberry and Smith’s (2005) assumption that dumpster

diving is a negative experience for practitioners and needs to be overcome. Contrastingly,

some individuals engage with freeganism because it is fun and sociable. Edwards and

Mercer (2007) and Rush (2006:10) point to the sociability of freegan practices as a

motivating factor for participation as it brings people together and promotes a cohesive,

social environment. For Rush (2006:2) this dynamic is proof ‘that it’s perfectly possible to

have fun while making a political point'.

11


Extending on the social and collective characteristics, (Pentina & Amos 2011) conducted a

netnographic analysis of freeganism to explore the use of online communication across

communities. Online resources such as ‘freegan.info’, ‘Evasion’ (Coyne 2009) and YouTube

(Gross 2009) were identified as facilitating shared practice and community development.

The repetitive use of ‘freegan.info’ across the literature as a site of reference or for data

collection suggests it may hold particular importance for the freegan community (More 2011,

Coyne 2009, Edwards and Mercer 2007, Pentina and Amos 2011 and Barnard 2011). First

established in 2003 by The Wetlands Activism Collective, the ‘freegan.info’ website is an

official website and blog for the freegan movement (Freegan.info 2016a). The website

contains personal accounts of freeganism, a freegan manifesto, materials for the press, and

how to go about being a freegan, identifying ‘waste minimisation’, ‘waste reclamation’, ‘eco-

friendly transportation’, ‘rent free housing’ and ‘eco-transportation’ as key strategies.

Alongside this information links to events, organizations and further information are provided.

Such online resources provide practitioners and those interested, with information about

freegan philosophy and the opportunity to share experiences, including ‘good’ sites for

reclaiming food.

The use of the website to share knowledge and experience supports Barnard’s (2011)

characterisation of freeganism as fluid and non-hierarchical New Social Movement.

Resources such as freegan.info provide a collective space for people with shared

environmental, social and political values. In contrast to traditional forms of political

participation and community formation, freeganism represents a novel formation whereby

individuals are able to come together around shared understandings and make a collective

point, in this case surrounding food waste as a symptom of consumerism and capitalism

(Thomas 2010; Coyne 2009; Barnard 2011).

1.4 Freeganism and food

The relationship with food is promoted as particularly significant for the freegan philosophy

(Belasco 2014). Food is not just a nutritional resource for freegans but is utilised to support

community cohesion, health and well-being, and sustainable food production, and is a

resource for political resistance. Freegans argue that the commodification of food within the

current productionist food system is an instrument of capitalism which valorises

individualisation, consumerism and economic growth above social and environmental

wellbeing (Edwards & Mercer 2007). Freegans thus look to promote alternative relationships

with food which better support their values of social and environmental equity.

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Repertoires of alternative food provisioning strategies are visible within the freegan ethic

which ultimately seeks to promote the use value of food and reduce the production of food

waste. Like many people across society, freegans seek to limit the amount of food waste

they produce in the household; however, they also display more radical alternative

strategies. By accessing, re-valuing and re-using food waste, freegans look to reject the

perceived unnecessary and excessive rejection of food. Through this practice of ‘dumpster

diving’, freegans access, assess and reclaim food waste that other people have disposed of,

often in retail refuse areas, which they salvage and use for their own or other people’s

consumption.

For freegans, the practice of dumpster diving allows them to minimise their interaction with

the profit economy while simultaneously highlighting the inefficiencies and inequalities in a

food system which produces millions of tonnes of food waste each year, while millions of

people experience food poverty on a global scale. Underlying this is the belief that by

uncovering these inequalities and encouraging people to resist the normative perceptions

embedded across the Western world then more sustainable configurations will be available

to the masses (Wilson 2013). Freegans take issue with the ‘ideology of convenience’ which

permeates modern living seeing it as responsible for devaluing food, situating it as a

commodity to be purchased, disposed of and replaced easily (Belasco 2007: 53).

Freegans argue that food has become a mere commodity for consumers in capitalist society,

‘where the profit motive has eclipsed ethical considerations’ and food is only valued in terms

of its exchange value, rather than for its nutritional value or in terms of its embedded

resources (Freegan.info 2016d). The wide variety and constant choice available to

consumers has made disposal a more readily legitimate step and end point of consumption;

once in the bin, food waste is hidden and ‘managed’ so that it is no longer the consumer’s

concern. Freegans argue this has resulted in ‘an amount of waste so enormous that many

people can be fed and supported simply on its trash’ (Freegan.info 2016d). The perception is

that food becomes devalued when perceived as a commodity, and that the continuous cycle

of consumption and disposal is promoted by a society where ‘consumers are constantly

being bombarded with advertising telling them to discard and replace the goods they already

have because this increases sales’ (Freegan.info 2016d).

Freegans criticise capitalist society for encouraging ‘the masses’ to frivolously buy food in

excess and throw it away with little consideration for the conditions and resources

surrounding production and waste management. This discourse of careless consumers

13


wasting food is evident across public policy literature and news media surrounding food

waste. Yet where the focus tends to be on poor decision-making of individual consumers,

the freegan approach is explicitly directed towards the socio-political structures that lock

consumers into the unsustainable behaviours and constrain alternative food provisioning.

For example, the freegan.info website criticises capitalist society for validating ‘corporate

pressure to consume, and to work and take on debt to enable that consumption’

(Freegan.info 2016b). For freegans individuals are not necessarily at fault for waste

production, rather it is the social structures which shape everyday behaviour that make the

capitalist agenda what needs to be transformed.

In contrast to capitalist norms, freegans construct alternative food practices which re-value

food and food waste in ways which are seen as more socially and environmentally symbiotic.

Food is constructed as a valuable resource that can bring communities together, be a

resource of leisure, politically significant and environmentally supportive rather than its

exchange value.

Recent literature supports this perception of wider structures enabling wastage and

constraining alternative, more sustainable, food practices. Evans (2012) situates household

waste processes as embedded within the wider dynamics of everyday life which make food

waste unavoidable. This thesis builds on such work by exploring how retail food waste is

resisted and re-valued by freegans in their everyday lives. While the participants in this study

are more radical in their strategies to minimise waste and be sustainable individuals, they

also replicate difficulties participants experienced when facing barriers that constrained their

ability to act in sustainable ways. Like Evans’ participants (ibid), the freegans in this study

displayed a range of different strategies to select the food they procured and minimise

subsequent food waste, as well as displaying a range of justifications for their continued

waste despite a desire to do otherwise (see chapter 5 for further detail).

Freegans thus display unique relationships with food and food waste which provide

important insights into wider food waste debates surrounding sustainable food consumption

and disposal. These relationships are situated as residing outside of ‘consumerism’: they are

practices of non-consumption, promoted as less detrimental to the environment and are

more attuned to the cycles of life (Freegan.info 2016c).

1.5 Non-consumption

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The term ‘non-consumption’ refers to tactical actions to resist consumerism itself (Portwood-

Stacer 2012). Such strategies are supported by freegans as they enable practitioners to limit

their participation in the capitalist market place and minimise consumption of resource more

widely (Freegan.info 2016c). In light of this, the majority of freegans do not purchase food

from supermarkets or large scale profit focused organizations so as not to be complicit with

the profit driven economy. Instead home grown produce and locally sourced goods direct

from producers are favoured. Furthermore, vegetarian or vegan diets are promoted as

environmentally friendly alternatives to meat consumption as the production of vegetables

and grains are less resource intensive and are more readily available outside of capitalist

market place. As these examples suggest, ‘non-consumption’ does not mean that freegans

do not consume any food but that the strategies they employ to do so reject the values of

consumerism and resource depletion.

The rejection of consumerism and an explicit desire to move towards greater harmony with

nature by freegans can also be situated in relation to the ‘voluntary simplicity’ movement and

trends towards ‘downshifting’ and ‘the simple life’ (Elgin 2013). These approaches all

promote a detachment from conventional consumer processes and assume that consuming

less will be beneficial to society and the environment. Voluntary simplicity is a broad concept

encapsulating a wide array of practices across different lifestyle choices, social movements

and ideologies. In contrast freeganism is a specific movement which incorporates facets of

‘voluntary simplicity’ via a collection of associated practices which favour values of sharing,

community and equality (Moré 2011). Freegans for example, promote ‘free stores’ as

‘place(s) where you can bring the things that you no longer need but others can use and

where others can do the same’ (Freegan.info 2016c). While the goods that are swapped in

these stores were once part of the conventional economy, they have moved into a space of

‘post-consumption’. Goods that are ‘post consumption’ do not have the capacity to make

profit for the capitalist system, either because they have already been rejected by the

system, or because they hold no immediate exchange value. As a result, these items

become legitimate items for consumption for freegans and can be reclaimed.

Furthermore, while both freeganism and voluntary simplicity construct alternative spaces for

food provisioning, freeganism is also centred upon the rejection and resistance of existing

dominant food relationships in order to transform social relations beyond the actions of

individual practitioners.

As a non-event, ‘non-consumption’ has received relatively little academic attention as it is

difficult to empirically investigate (Friedman 1985; Chatzidakis & Lee 2012). However,

15


freegans make explicit their non-consumption through engaging in visible protest alongside

alternative provisioning techniques. Freeganism thus provides a lens through which to

address the dynamics of consumption and non-consumption.

1.6 Dumpster diving

Referred to interchangeably as ‘dumpster diving’, ‘binning’, ‘skipping’, ‘skip-dipping’ and/or

‘urban foraging’ the ‘technique involves rummaging through the garbage of retailers,

residences, offices, and other facilities for useful goods’ (Freegan.info 2016c). A multitude of

items can be procured in this way, from household goods and toys to building materials but

the reclamation of food emerges as a particularly dominant activity in the freegan food

provisioning repertoire (Rush 2006). Here, dumpster divers reject the disposal of food by

‘procuring food from a supermarket dumpster bin for individual consumption’ (Edwards and

Mercer 2007:279).

Many people will have reclaimed items found, however the salvaging of food is a distinct

practice and is more markedly affiliated with the freegan philosophy. The reclamation of food

is considered inherently more risky and less legitimate than reclaiming inanimate objects.

This is a result of food being bound up with social and cultural conventions, identity,

celebration, religion, and leisure, and also that food is ingested and taken into the body.

When food is disposed of it crosses a ‘contingent cultural line’, the waste bin contaminates

the food placed there and its value for humans is removed (Watson & Meah 2012).

However, freegans challenge both the devaluing of food that occurs by reducing the

rejection of food and by resisting the perceived lack of value of rejected food because of its

location in the bin. For dumpster divers, food waste is valued as a potential site of food

consumption.

While dumpster diving can encapsulate an array of food reclamation practices, be it from

table top surfing (taking diners’ leftovers from their plate) or consumer waste reclamation

(reclaiming waste from household bins), here the term is used specifically to refer to food

that has been rejected by retailers and is discarded in supermarket or food market waste

bins. The food waste in these locations varies in quantity, quality and ingredients. Produce

can be fully wrapped and packaged items, items still within freshness date, overproduced

food items that take up too much space, or food items that are damaged, this can be either

the product or the packaging which may be bruised or dented (Pimentel 1990).

16


The reclamation of food waste from the retailer bin is a dominant food provisioning strategy

for freegans. This could be a result of the overt and visual performance involved in the

practice, which other alternative freegan configurations do not display. Freegans also use

foraging as an alternative food provisioning practice, however as a practice that tends to

occur in remote and hidden spaces, it is rarely displayed to the public. Furthermore,

dumpster diving is distinct in its radical nature, it tends to be perceived as socially

unacceptable which means it is more readily identifiable as alternative. Freegans, including

Tristram Stuart, author of ‘Uncovering the Global Food Scandal’ (Stuart 2009) and organiser

of ‘Feeding the 5000’, have sought to tackle the negative connotations of dumpster diving by

situating the practice within more acceptable discourses of tackling food waste and social

equality. These negative perceptions, however, make the practice of freegan dumpster

diving stand out as distinctively different, more so than if a person was seen foraging for

mushrooms. This ‘otherness’ is situated as an integral ingredient in the identity construction

and motivation to engage with freeganism.

Scholars have investigated dumpster diving as a context specific practice in locations across

America (Barnard 2011; Eikenberry & Smith 2005; Gross 2009; Moré 2011), Canada

(Carolsfeld & Erikson 2013) and Australia (Edwards & Mercer 2007; Edwards & Mercer

2012). The increased visibility in recent years has been has been evident across social and

news media within the UK, however, there has been little academic attention towards

freegan dumpster diving within the UK.

The only literature that directly explores freeganism within the UK context focuses on its

legality (Thomas 2010). The majority of ‘dumpster diving’ takes place on the private property

of retailers, and as such all goods, whether they are placed in bins or not, are the property of

the retailer and should not be removed according to The Theft Act (1968). Thus individuals

that reclaim goods from private property leave themselves open to prosecution. Freegans

criticise the basis for such prosecution arguing that if an item is disposed of, it is unwanted,

and therefore no longer has an owner and should be open to reclamation. This tends to

result in an ambiguous situation whereby the threat of prosecution is brandished as a

deterrent, but infrequently happens. Thomas (2010) has sought to clarify the legal grey area

in the UK, but with little success. While arrest and prosecution of dumpster divers is

infrequent both in the UK and further afield, it has occurred. Dumpster divers do report being

warned or cautioned by police officers as they reclaim food with the threat of imprisonment

used as a deterrent. The threat of punishment and being policed is also evident with the

increase in use of physical deterrents within refuse areas, such as the installation of CCTV

17


or security staff to patrol waste areas (Pentina and Amos 2011). While literature suggests

dumpster divers navigate this transforming physical environment differently, how

practitioners go about performing their food reclamation in new built environments and how

these compare across performances has not been explored.

In parallel to the wider freegan literature, dumpster diving is constructed as either politically

motivated activity or as a symptom of food insecurity (Vinegar et al. 2014). Social movement

literature, for example, has situated dumpster diving as a form of political ideology (Barnard

2011; Rush 2006; Coyne 2009; and Edwards and Mercer 2007), a stylised way for

individuals to present their identity and their affiliation to a specific community (Barnard

2011). Here, dumpster diving is seen as expressive of a ‘proactive effort against the damage

of the system, specifically working to reduce waste, resist mainstream consumerism, raise

awareness, and fulfil a commonly held obligation to the environment’ (Carolsfeld and Erikson

2013:260).

In contrast, dumpster diving as a response to food insecurity constructs divers as vulnerable

and dumpster diving as a last resort to provision food. The reclamation and consumption of

food waste is perceived as socially unacceptable and indicative of economic instability

(Carolsfeld & Erikson 2013; Vaughn 2011; Black 2009; Mintz & Du Bois 2002). This literature

tends to suggest that government supported food assistance programmes need to be better

designed to meet the needs of the food insecure and thus prevent people resorting to

dumpster diving. Underlying this is the belief that dumpster diving is a risky activity and thus

should be deterred. Yet the literature also suggests that even when food assistance

programmes are available, some individuals would prefer to dumpster dive than to be open

to the stigma that these programmes impose (Eikenberry & Smith 2005; Vozoris & Tarasuk

2003; Vinegar et al. 2014). Dumpster diving within this formation is an individualised activity

engaged with out of necessity but which comes with social and health risks and at a cost to

the practitioner.

This literature provides a rich insight into the political and social motivations for engaging

with freegan dumpster diving. However, there is limited attention to the UK formations of

dumpster diving and the differing formations and performances associated with the re-

valuing and re-using of food waste for human consumption.

1.7 Food redistribution organizations (FRO)

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Food Redistribution Organizations (FRO) are alternative social response to the food waste

issue which share distinct similarities and differences with freegan dumpster diving. The term

FROs is used in this thesis to refer to organizations which reclaim food waste from food

businesses and redistribute it to vulnerable people for consumption.

Organizations such as FareShare and FoodCycle are labelled as FROs as they aim ‘to fight

hunger and its underlying causes by redistributing surplus food’ (FareShare 2014d). A

distinction here is the construction of unwanted food at various points across the food supply

chain as ‘surplus’ food rather than food waste. Surplus food is produce that has been

rejected because: it is in oversupply; has damaged packaging; has short expiry dates, or; it

is projected not to sell, amongst others (FareShare 2014c). FROs look to identify surplus

produce before it enters the bin, reclaiming and redistributing it to vulnerable people directly,

or to community groups and charities that in turn provide food assistance to vulnerable

individuals.

FROs provide a food aid service that is distinct from traditional food banks in the UK. Unlike

traditional forms, FROs are not based on faith values or geographical proximity, they are

national structures which promote objectives of increasing access to food, and minimising

food poverty and food waste. Yet FROs are also distinct from more grassroots based

responses to food waste, including freegan dumpster diving, that are political and that seek

wider changes across the food system.

Figure 1 depicts these different formations across a spectrum representing how they interact

with key overlapping objectives of food poverty reduction, engagement with food retailers,

environmental and social inequality reduction and political resistance.

19


Figure 1 - Activities to re-value and re-use food waste

Figure 1 illustrates a range of different responses to the food waste issue. FoodCycle and

FareShare are just two of a number of FROs that tackle the food waste issue from a social

enterprise structure, including Plan Zheroes and Second Chance Smoothies. Figure 2,

depicts where FROs sit within this spectrum.

Figure 2 - Identifying food redistribution organizations

20


For some, the growth in novel food support structures is as a response to government

recommendations that better utilisation of food waste could generate social, environmental

and economic benefits (DEFRA 2011). The basis of this suggestion is twofold: diverting food

waste from landfill increases resource efficiency while the redistribution of surplus food can

support people who are in need (DEFRA 2010). Thus, similarly to freegan dumpster diving,

FROs re-value and re-use food waste for human consumption.

However the objectives and mode for undertaking re-value and re-use practices differ across

the different formations. Figure 3 represents how different responses to food waste across

this spectrum are focused differently on provisioning for the consumption of others; raising

awareness about the food waste issue to other people, or; consumption for self and raising

awareness to others.

Figure 3 - Strategies employed to re-value and re-use food waste

FROs access food waste by developing formal contracts and/ or agreements with the owner

of the produce. Food that has been rejected as ‘waste’ by the ‘owners’ of the produce (e.g.

retailers and markets) is put to one side and reclaimed by organizations at various intervals

for use elsewhere. The direct partnerships with large food retailers, and businesses across

the food supply chain is a distinct feature which is not evident across freegan dumpster

diving. This is just one of a number of differences that can be identified between these

different structures of similar food re-value and re-use practices. For example, FareShare

21


and FoodCycle also look to make a financial benefit from their waste practices by setting up

food waste cafes (FoodCycle) and selling food palettes to retailers (FareShare), which they

then reinvest into their community. Thus, freegan dumpster diving and FROs are just two, of

many, different responses to the food waste issue which seek to re-value and re-use food

waste for human consumption.

1.8 Conclusion

This chapter highlights food waste as an issue of increasing importance. While top down

intervention strategies have failed to reduce food waste trends by any significant proportion,

a plethora of community based organizations have emerged in recent years which also seek

to reduce food waste. Freegan dumpster diving and FROs are two formations which look to

reduce food waste by re-valuing and re-using discarded food. Freeganism is an emerging

social movement which seeks to transform and re-value social and environmental

relationships. Dumpster diving is an illustration of this whereby food waste is re-valued and

re-used for human consumption. Existing literature has tended to be addressed as either a

radical political practice or as a symptom of food poverty, while FROs have received little

recognition outside of the news media. The structure of these practices, how practitioners

‘do’ them and the transformation of waste to value would provide useful insights for the wider

food waste debate.

This thesis seeks to expand upon the existing literature by unpicking the repertoires of food

waste re-value and re-use practices, the processes involved in accessing, re-valuing,

sharing and consuming surplus food and the processes of negotiation that individuals and

collectives undertake when managing their alternative food provisioning.

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Chapter 2: Methodology

In recent years the conceptual framework of practice theory has increasingly been used as a

means of understanding sustainable practices in everyday life. The practice theory approach

has emerged out of Giddens (1984: 2) assertion that the social sciences ‘is neither the

experience of the individual actor, nor the existence of any form of social totality, but social

practices ordered across space and time’. Previously, behavioural models have dominated

approaches to the understanding of human behaviour. In contrast, practice theory removes

the individual and their social structure from the centre of analysis, instead the practice itself

and the consumption it involves becomes the focus of research.

This thesis draws attention towards what individual practitioners do when dumpster diving

and engaging in FRO activities. Utilising a practice theory approach, attention is redirected

towards the structure and dynamics underlying ‘real’ events, while also taking into

consideration the socially constructed and varied nature of practitioner experiences. The

application of a practice based approach to this work required the use of a qualitative

strategy which can account for habitual and subconscious behaviours of individual

practitioners while also capturing the interaction between practitioners and practices.

This study utilises a qualitative approach to understand the practice of dumpster diving. Re-

valuing and re-using food waste is a complex phenomenon which requires detailed

examination to expose the nuances of the practice and performance. This thesis draws on

an 18-month ethnographic study undertaken with freegan dumpster divers and food

redistribution organizations (FRO) in England. Participant observation and unstructured

interviews were carried out with five freegan communities and two individual freegan

dumpster divers across four different cities in the South-East and South-West of England.

Participatory and explorative data collection methods were designed to extend upon the

existing literature which has predominantly explored motivations for engagement with

dumpster diving. In contrast, this thesis looks to identify and capture the different practice

configurations utilised to access and re-value food waste and the subsequent management,

negotiation and re-use of surplus food. During the data collection process with freegan

dumpster divers, a novel formation of food waste redistribution practice emerged as

pertinent to freegan dumpster diving. As a result, two FROs in the UK, FoodCycle and

FareShare, were contacted and participant observation and un-structured interviews carried

out within them to explore the changing formations of food waste practices.

23


This chapter first situates the food waste issue within a practice theory framework. The

recruitment and selection criteria of participants are then introduced, with the key

characteristics of each participant group introduced, drawing attention to the two divergent

formations of freegan dumpster diving and FROs. Participant observation and semi-

structured static and walking interviews are then introduced as the key data collection

methods employed to access the underlying structures of alternative food provision

practices, and the strategies performed to re-value, re-claim and re-use food waste by

freegans.

2.1 Practice framework

This thesis situates freegan dumpster diving and FRO activities as food waste re-value and

re-use ‘practices’, that is broad cultural entities that shape individuals’ perceptions,

interpretations and actions within the world (Hargreaves 2011). This thesis applies a practice

theory framework to identify the elements within freegan dumpster diving and FROs which

link in different configurations to form coherent food waste re-value and re-use practices

across practitioners and communities. The different performances of these configurations

are then explored to identify what dumpster divers do, how they do it and the everyday

processes employed to manage food waste.

Theories of practice provide a structuration-based framework, which can address both

structural and agentic determinants of social phenomena (Sewell 1992). Rather than

valorising one over the other, a practice becomes the unit of analysis which values both

equally. Applying Reckwitz's (2002: 249) definition, a practice is ‘a routinised type of

behaviour which consists of several elements, interconnected to one another: forms of bodily

activities, forms of mental activities, ‘things’ and their use, a background knowledge in the

form of understanding, know-how, states of emotion and motivational knowledge’.

From a practice perspective, everything we do can be defined in terms of our understanding

of the activity and its relationship to other practices we do. A ubiquitous example for practice

theory is the emergence of showering as a practice of cleanliness which grew out of pre-

existing formations of bathing, technological advancements of household heating and water

supply and which is now linked to an array of material items as it has become embedded as

24


a daily practice (Hand et al. 2005). A more relevant example for this thesis might be the

preparation and heating of food for human consumption as a recognisable practice of

‘cooking’. For practice theorists, the behaviour that is seen when cooking or showering is an

observable expression of social phenomenon rather than an expression of an individual’s

values or attitudes. It is through practices that individuals come to understand the world

around them and construct their sense of self (Warde 2005).

While attention to practices is nothing new, there has been a resurgence in practice theories

in recent years (Flyvbjerg 2001). Despite this, there is no one definitive practice theory

(Schatzki 1997). Recent work by Shove has led developments in the field and has seen

explorations into pervasive everyday practices (showering - Hand et al. 2005) and the

emergence of novel practices (Nordic walking - Shove & Pantzar 2005). While more detailed

frameworks exist, (Shove et al. 2012) schematic is a simplified and flexible framework for

investigating what practitioners do to re-value and re-use food waste and how practices are

formed. Following this framework, practices are shaped and transformed via the repetitive

and stabilised linking of elements which come to form coherent and recognisable activities

across time and space.

For Shove & Pantzar (2005) a practice is formed of three types of elements: materials,

competences and meanings, which can be linked and broken to form practice configurations.

‘Meaning’ encapsulate any issues of relevance surrounding the practice in question, include

understandings, beliefs and emotions that are associated with it (ibid). ‘Material’ refers to all

physical aspects associated with a given practice, while ‘competence’ involves the practical

application of materials, meanings and the tacit knowledge necessary to perform the

practice.

Key to the application of practice framework in this thesis is Schatzki's (1996) distinction

between practice as an ‘entity’ and a ‘performance’. A practice consists of a coordinated and

socially embedded structure, which is made up of a dispersed nexus of doings and sayings –

the practice ‘entity’. These practices are regularly re-enacted and get reformed as individuals

perform them slightly differently – the different ‘performance’ of the entity. At any one time a

practice consists of both an entity and the context-specific performance of the entity. It is the

different performances of a given practice that can set changes to practices in motion.

Extending upon ‘cooking’ as an example of a practice, the ‘entity’ refers to the collection of

sayings and doings which structure ‘cooking’ as a shared and coherent activity across

society. This includes accessing and utilising ingredients and utensils correctly and the

25


meaning associated with cooking certain foods at specific times of the day for breakfast,

lunch or dinner. The performance of this cooking practice however can take many different

manifestations. Food can be prepared in different ways, using different ingredients for the

same meal and/or different utensils for the same purpose. Food practices are socially and

culturally context specific. A lasagne, for example, involves the layering of a meat Bolognese

sauce in between sheets of pasta and a white sauce which is then baked in the oven. The

cooking of a lasagne thus could involve the preparation of raw ingredients to prepare the

meat based bolognese and white sauce, the assemblance of goods in a certain order before

baking in the oven. Yet it can also involve the purchase of pre-made sauces and pasta

sheets, which are assembled prior to baking, or even the microwaving of a purchased pre-

made lasagne meal. The ingredients and cookware required for these different

configurations are different as are the meanings associated, with each representative of

healthy home-cooked meals through to convenience and time saving. This example

highlights how transformations of a practice can co-exist as different material items

(prepared sauces, microwave) and skills (using a microwave, food preparation) can

transform the way in which the practice of cooking is performed while still representing a

coherent cooking strategy.

Situating practices as existing outside of the individual, which are carried and brought into

life through the performance of individuals, allows for exploration into the complex

relationship between individual agency and structural factors (Reckwitz 2002). Practices are

not simply performative, or the outcome of rational decisions, they are entwined in more

complex processes of shared understandings which need to be constantly negotiated as

multiple elements circulate and interact. To explore the re-value and re-use of food waste is

to explore the ‘field of embodied, materially interwoven practices centrally organized around

shared practical understandings’ (Schatzki 2001) within freeganism and FROs.

To date, practice theory has tended to be applied to the reproduction of existing dominant

practices or to trace historical transformations (Shove & Walker 2010). As a result, the

practices and identities which circulate at the periphery of society have not received the

attentions of practice theory. One exception is Shove & Pantzar's (2005) investigation into

Nordic walking which represents a foray into the emergence of niche practices. This thesis

looks to extend upon this by utilising a practice based approach to explore how freegan

dumpster diving and FROs performances connect materials, meaning and competence in

different formations for the re-valuing and re-use of food waste for human consumption.

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2.2 Selection criteria

A multiple case study approach was undertaken with freegan communities and FROs in the

UK to identify and analyse the practices of food waste re-value and re-use. The recruitment

of freegan communities were initially sought as the collective environment provides a unique

opportunity to capture dialogues and nuanced interaction between participants (Bennet &

Bennet 2008), as well as the shared use of materials (Hildreth 2000). However, due to

difficulties in accessing and securing a sufficient number of freegan groups, individual

freegan dumpster divers were also recruited for this study. During data collection with

freegan communities, FROs emerged as a relevant developing structure as I regularly came

across their activities when researching food waste issues and met volunteers when looking

to engage freegans and attending food waste activities. FROs are organised structures

which rely upon large teams of volunteers, thus I was able to access these structures to

explore changing configurations and relationships with food waste.

Individuals were eligible for participation if they self-identified as freegan, or with the freegan

ideology, and/or individuals reported regular (more than once in the last month) performance

of alternative food provisioning practices such as dumpster diving, organised food

reclamation, foraging, gleaning or community surplus food provision. Suitable participants

were identified in one of two ways. Either participants responded to advertisements for

participation in a study exploring freeganism and food waste, or the alternative food

provisioning activities were identified first. This tended to manifest itself in the attendance of

activities that were either overtly freegan or supported by FROs.

Pseudonyms are utilised to refer to the different locations (Oldmere, Redmoor, Greenhill and

Pinemead) in which the freegan community groups are based and the individual practitioners

within these groups throughout this study (see appendix A for an outline of communities and

affiliated members).

2.3 Participant observations and interviews

Two primary methods of data collection were used for this study: participant observation,

and semi-structured interviews. Participant observation was selected as the principal data

collection strategy to access the reality of dumpster diving and FROs under near normal

conditions. Involving the ‘systematic description of events, behaviours, and artefacts in the

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social setting’, utilising this method enables an account of the doings, sayings, as well as the

stuff involved in re-valuing and re-using food waste (Marshall & Rossman 1999).

Taking on the overt role of ‘observer as participant’ (Adler & Adler 1994), I was able to spend

prolonged periods of time with freegans as they accessed, reclaimed, rejected, re-used,

consumed and disposed of food waste. Initially an individual would respond to my enquiry

and invite me along to an event or meeting which allowed access to more participants. All of

the participants directly engaged with were informed of the project and my participation as a

researcher. Being explicit about my position from the start was essential; due to the illegal

nature of some of the practices participants were engaging with I had to be aware not to

engage with activities, yet also provide a suitable justification to participants which would not

alienate them.

I acknowledge that my presence and the participants’ knowledge of me as an ‘outsider’,

watching what they were doing and asking questions, may have had an impact on what was

being observed, it may have caused participants to behave differently than they normally

would. This could open the data up to criticism of its validity (Punch 2013:321). However this

method provides richer data surrounding taken-for-granted and habitual behaviour which

would not have been reached using more static methods. In order to minimize this effect as

much as possible I tried to engage participants in discussions via social media and email in

advance of meeting them, allowing them to get to know me so that my presence as an

outsider was less impactful.

Gaining initial access to these communities in the field proved time consuming and energy

intensive. Identification of suitable participants was initially difficult as groups did not

advertise their activities, preferring to keep communication of events and activities within ‘in

groups’ or across linked networks, or they were ad hoc and were not identifiable in time to

arrange attendance. This difficulty was overcome through repetitive attendance at food

waste events across the UK including ‘Feeding the 5000’, ‘the Pig Idea’, ‘The Food Waste

Debate’ amongst others; participation in discussions on social networks, and; advertising for

participants across an array of media over a period of 18 months. Following the guidance of

Bernard (1994) this was predominantly a strategy of being ‘seen’ and heard in informal

situations and developing rapport and trust with potential participants by ‘hanging out’.

This difficulty continued as the maintenance of relationships with participants over a period

of time was also troublesome. Participants tended to travel a lot or took long periods of time

to respond to communication which meant establishing relationships and opportunities to

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engage in repetitive instances of data collection with the same participants was limited.

Individuals and groups were also wary of providing access to their daily lives and meetings

were repeatedly cancelled as a result of the flexible and ad hoc nature of many of their

activities.

Further still, as a result of the legally ambiguous nature of dumpster diving, it proved

necessary to develop relationships and build rapport with freegan participants before I could

be trusted and I could gain access to their food waste behaviours. This required a period of

contact and communication with key participants prior to any data collection in order to put

participants at ease with my presence and to confirm my research intentions. The validity of

my presence was questioned regularly and on two occasions I was accused of being an

undercover police officer infiltrating the group; this was particularly a concern for the more

radical freegan groups. I overcame this barrier to engagement through a combination of

repetitive contact and attending events where I could be seen supporting affiliated activities

and values, which overtime allowed me to build relationships. While this process was

prolonged and energy intensive it allowed me to access the ‘doings’ and ‘sayings’

surrounding the practices without engaging in any illegal activity (Schatzki, 1996).

Access to FROs was a simpler process. As outward focussed organizations, they advertise

events and regularly call for volunteers to support their activities. Responding to one of these

calls, I offered to act as a volunteer for food collection and preparation activities, highlighting

my research intentions.

Participant observations were conducted at least once with all freegan communities and

FROs, with semi-structured interviews conducted where possible to compliment and develop

observations.

Interviews provided the opportunity to delve further into emergent themes and to clarify

observations after the event, providing for a richer insight into how food waste is re-valued

and managed in everyday life. However, all participants appeared reticent to arrange

meetings and times for more in depth discussion. FRO participants blamed this on being too

busy during voluntary periods and limited available time outside this for discussion, while

freegan dumpster divers would confirm meetings but cancel when other activities came up.

As such the majority of interviews with freegan dumpster divers were undertaken while ‘on

the move’, while searching for food waste, sharing it out to friends or preparing meals. This

approach has links to novel methodological approaches such as ‘walking interviews’, which

allows participants to show rather than just describe the environments they are talking about

29


in static interviews (Clark & Emmel 2010). While such methods were not designed into this

study, the approach emerged as useful and insightful. Being immersed within their

environment and moving across spaces they interact with when dumpster diving acted as a

catalyst for opening up discussion and acted as a prompt for forgotten information.

In order to make participants feel at ease and to allow activities and discourse to emerge

organically, note taking and recording devices were not utilised in the data collection

activities. Hand written notes were made during natural breaks in data collection where

possible and during interviews, and full notes were written up after each session.

Due to the time and financial restrictions on the scale of the project, all case studies were

conducted in the UK with the majority of participants residing in the South-East of England.

Possible participants and freegan communities were identified in numerous locations in the

North of England and Ireland yet it was not practical to engage them in this specific project

because of resource restrictions. Inclusion of these geographically dispersed freegan groups

could be an interesting extension of this work.

2.4 Participant characteristics

Five freegan communities and two individual freegan dumpster divers were recruited across

four different cities in the South-East and South-West of England. In addition two FROs were

engaged with at three London based hubs. The activities of the FROs were known to several

of the freegan participants; however there was no crossover between these practices.

Similarly, while some of these freegan participant groups were co-located, there are no

known crossovers between groups.

An outline of each of the participating communities and individuals is provided below to

situate the forthcoming analysis. Further detail regarding group membership and activities

can be found in Appendix A.

Oldmere 1 is a community of freegans based in a coastal city in the South of England which

has been in existence for 4-years, with periods of inaction. The group consists of a core

group of 7-10 men and women aged between 18-50, with a larger peripheral team that

attend some activities but less frequently. Members of the group dumpster dive on a regular

basis, though this does not always involve the same people, depending upon individual

availability and food requirements. Oldmere 1 undertakes dumpster diving for their own food

30


provisioning but they also redistribute food to the wider community and in support of political

protests. Data was collected with Oldmere 1 on several occasions. Observations were

conducted while the group were dumpster diving, and during the preparation of surplus food

for a community event, in total 19 hours of interaction. Subsequent face to face interviews

and communication via email and social media was conducted between January and June

2013 to supplement this data.

In the same seaside location as Oldmere community, Oldmere 2 consists of a group of

students and unemployed ‘twenty something’s’ who organise a pop-up food waste cafe. The

cafe was set up by two female friends who had an excess of salvaged food, which they

distributed to friends and family, and then grew as they were able to reclaim larger amounts

of produce. In total, ten individuals were mentioned as members within this group, be that

regular volunteers with the café or fellow divers. Two observations were undertaken with

Oldmere community 2 between January and March 2014, the first during a service at the

food waste café and the other during a group dumpster diving activity involving four of the

members. An interview was also conducted with one of the founding members of the café to

supplement the data.

Greenhill community is a group based around a house share in a seaside city on the south

coast of England. The group consists of an informal collective of 7 friends, all in their early

20’s, who dumpster dive together for their own food consumption. An observation of the

group dumpster diving took place over the course of one afternoon and night in June 2014.

Redmoor community 1 is an informal group of people that reside in a large city in South-East

England who meet either weekly or fortnightly to salvage food from a large wholesale food

market. An observation took place with this group in April 2014 with four of the members.

Redmoor 2 is a grassroots action based community that is co-located in the same city as

Redmoor 1. A shared housing community, the Redmoor 2 group strives to promote freegan

community resilience and self-sufficiency. The core group is made up of approximately 15

men and women who have squatted on unused land since 2010. The membership of the

group is regularly supplemented on a weekly basis when between 5-10 visitors and

peripheral members move in and out of the group. One observation was undertaken with the

group during July 2013.

Ted is a freegan in his late 30’s. He lives in Redmoor but does not engage with a group of

dumpster divers based that were also involved in this study. Ted was recruited through

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advertisements on social media for freegan participants. A one hour interview was

conducted with him in April 2014.

John is also an individual freegan who was recruited through social media. He is 25 and

lives in Pinemead, a city in the south-west of England and was interviewed in July 2013.

Three participant observations were undertaken with FROs in London-based hubs.

FareShare and FoodCycle were both engaged with in the capacity as a volunteer collecting

and preparing food for redistribution. An observation was also undertaken at FoodCycle’s

‘Pie in the sky’ cafe and an interview was conducted with FoodCycle’s then CEO, Kelvin

Cheung, to explore in more detail the strategy behind FROs.

2.5 Thematic coding

Notes from participant observations with dumpster divers were the foundational data used

for analysis, while the notes taken during interviews and observations with FROs were used

to complement my interpretation of the data. Notes were transcribed after each of the

participant observations and interviews and transferred to the qualitative data analysis

software MAXQDA.

Once available in the software, data was coded using a thematic strategy. Utilising the

practice theory framework to guide this analysis, particular attention was directed towards

themes of: value, meanings, materials, skills, disposal and consumption. The use of software

enables the identification of recurring themes as well as novel instances which emerged

across different practitioners’ experiences and community groups. Undertaking this process

after each data collection activity also allowed me to draw out themes for further attention in

following data collection instances.

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Chapter 3: Freegan Food Provisioning

Freegan philosophy promotes social and environmental equality and the reduction of

resource depletion via excessive consumption and waste. Freegans engage in an array of

tactics to re-value and re-use food waste for human consumption. The participants in this

study referred to instances of gleaning, food swapping, dumpster diving, foraging and

growing their own produce to provision food sustainably. While an array of tactics were

visible, dumpster diving emerged as the dominant food provisioning strategy employed by all

freegan participants. A relatively novel practice, the concept was coined in the early 2000’s

with only a small percentage of the population thought to provision food in this way today. As

a result, there is limited literature surrounding the practice. This chapter looks to develop a

more nuanced understanding of freegan dumpster diving as an alternative food provisioning

practice.

Freegan dumpster diving provides a unique insight into the food waste debate. A niche

practice, practitioners not only minimise their own waste production but actively seek out and

salvage food rejected by other people. Freegans challenge the unnecessary disposal of food

by reclaiming it from refuse bins for human consumption. Through this practice, the

reduction in value of food when it is placed in the bin and the association of the bin as a site

of waste is simultaneously rejected as the bin becomes a site for food provisioning.

Freegan dumpster divers have a shared practical understanding surrounding the re-valuing

and re-use of food waste. While existing literature suggests a singular dumpster diving

practice, practitioners in this study displayed an array of processes for re-valuing, reclaiming

and re-using food waste when dumpster diving. Several of these configurations were shared

across all of the freegan communities, while others involved more context specific and

subjective elements. Thus, to inform this analysis, this chapter begins by deconstructing

freegan dumpster diving as consisting of both an ‘entity’ and a ‘performance’. That is, the

structure of freegan dumpster diving is delimited from what individual practitioners do when

dumpster diving in different places and at different times. The chapter then moves on to

identify the key decision-making strategies practitioners engage in when deciding ‘to dive or

not to dive’ and in turn, ‘when to dive’. Recognising that practices are constantly in a process

of transformation, this chapter concludes by identifying organised food reclamation as a

strategy which is emerging across freegan communities.

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3.1 Dumpster diving – an entity and a performance

Practices are broad cultural entities that shape individuals’ perceptions, interpretations and

actions within the world (Hargreaves 2011). Utilising a practice based approach draws

attention to both the coordinated structure of the practice, as well as the individual

performance of the practice. Attention to both the ‘entity’ and the ‘performance’ (Schatzki

1996:90) of freegan dumpster diving practices is useful at identifying how the nexus of

practices that make up everyday life relate to one another. Individual practitioners are neither

fully autonomous or norm following, the performance of a practice is dependent upon a

reciprocal interaction between structure and agency, between an entity and the individual

practitioners’ understanding of the world and themselves (Reckwitz 2002).

Utilising Shove et al's (2012) simplified framework, practices consist of the routinised

interconnection of ‘meanings’, ‘competences’ and ‘materials’. To understand freegan

dumpster diving then is to identify and explore what elements it consists of. Yet, elements

and their linkages are not static, they shift and evolve as they are ‘carried’ and ‘performed’

by different people, in different contexts. Despite this instability, the repetitive presence of

elements and relationships across different performances can provide some insight into

dumpster diving in the UK between 2013- 2015. Key materials, competences and meanings

that emerged from the data as shared and recurring are now identified to validate a coherent

dumpster diving practice across freegan communities in the UK. These emergent themes

are analysed to explore how freegans ‘do’ dumpster diving to re-value and re-use food

waste.

3.1.1 Elements

Table 3a below highlights the practice elements that were displayed and/or explicitly talked

about across all of the freegan dumpster diving communities. This is not an exhaustive list of

all elements that were displayed across all data collected but represents the key elements

that were in existence across the different groups of freegan dumpster divers.

Table 3a – Dumpster diving elements: All data

Competence

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Accessing a bin

Developing relationships with retailers

Identification of suitable food

Knowledge of food (what is it)

Location of food bins

Material requirements (what to take)

Preparation of produce (how do you

prepare it)

Redistribution pathways

Storage methods

Meaning

Collective activity

Enjoyable/Fun (social)

Environmental equity

Food access (nutrition)

Food waste reduction

Freegarian diet

Low cost

Waste minimization

Political resistance

Political transformation

Post-consumption

35


Social Equity

Surplus food

Unhygienic

Variety

Material

Bag/other temporary storage

Bicycle/other transport

Bin key (to access)

Human body

Lighting

Other people

Packaging

Refuse site

Retailer

Storage mechanisms

Waste/surplus food

3.1.2 Meanings

The ‘meanings’ surrounding dumpster diving, the understandings, beliefs and emotions

associated with the practice have changed over time with multiple meanings prevailing in

different contexts. Accessing food from a bin has historically been associated with

homelessness and food poverty but this has been challenged within freegan formations.

Freegan participants identified a number of meanings associated with their performance of

dumpster diving, including enjoyment, political activism, environmental justice, food

provisioning, and social equality.

36


Much of the existing literature surrounding dumpster diving situates the meanings associated

with the practice as motivating engagement. Yet there is a tendency to assume that there is

one ‘true’ meaning or motivation that is representative for all practitioners. The data from this

study destabilises this approach as all participants drew on multiple meanings when talking

about dumpster diving. For example, dumpster diving was simultaneously situated as

politically transformative, benefiting environmental justice and being fun.

The meanings utilised also appeared to change for some practitioners in different

circumstances and contexts. For the majority of the participants, dumpster diving is regularly

performed, occurring at different times in different places. Perhaps because of this frequency

and diversity, dumpster diving can be utilised to meet varying needs and meanings. This

variability suggests there is complexity involved in the meanings and motivations

surrounding dumpster diving for practitioners, which requires further attention.

3.1.3 Material

This complexity can also be seen across the multiple and transforming material components

that are conjured within the dumpster diving practice. The ‘material’ element refers to all

physical aspects associated with a given practice. A number of material elements can be

perceived as pre-requisites for all dumpster diving practices, including the human body, bins

to ‘store’ waste, food waste itself and the spatio-temporal context in which these material

factors reside.

A plethora of materials are brought into view when dumpster diving as individuals engaged

with food waste in slightly different ways. Kaz (Oldmere 1) for example took hand gel and

wet wipes with her when she dumpster dived so she could clean herself and the food as

soon as she could. No other practitioner appeared to utilise this material item while dumpster

diving but for Kaz it was an essential component for successfully reclaiming food. While the

literature does account for the quantity and quality of food waste that can be accessed when

dumpster diving, the role of other materials in (re)constructing coherent dumpster diving

practice is interesting.

3.1.4 Competence

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There are also certain competences and skills that need to be successfully navigated when

dumpster diving. This involves the practical application of materials, meanings and the tacit

knowledge necessary to re-value, reclaim and re-use food waste. Based on the observations

with participants, there are a number of competences that are prerequisites for dumpster

diving and an array that are embedded within the practice including locating food waste,

accessing a bin, identifying food items and transporting food home.

3.1.4 Linking elements

These element types are not independent. Several elements within any one category could

be identified or referred to in a single performance. During a participant observation with

Oldmere community 1, Si, Pete, Louise, Greg, Lizzy, and Jo predominantly referred to

dumpster diving as a ‘food waste reduction’ activity, which had ‘political resistant’ and

‘enjoyable’ benefits.

Table 3b – Dumpster diving elements: Oldmere 1 – participant observation

Competence

Bin access

Development of relationships

with retailers

Identification of suitable produce

Location of bin

Material requirements

Meaning

Collective activity

Enjoyable/Fun


Freegarian diet


38


Political transformation

Material


Bicycle/other transport

Human body

Lighting

Other people

Retailer

Waste/surplus food

While during interviews with Oldmere community 1, the meanings were more associated

with social equity and enjoyment (table 3c). I do not believe that the difference in meanings

displayed here is related to the data collection method itself. The different meanings are

more related to the different ways individuals understand their behaviour and the context that

they are in when talking about or undertaking practices. This is to say that the same

practitioners meanings of dumpster diving could change depending on when, where and

how I engaged with them.

Table 3c – Dumpster diving elements: Oldmere 1 – interview

Competence


Location of bin

Meaning

Collective activity

Enjoyable/Fun

Food access

39



Low cost

Community support


Post-consumption

Social Equity

Surplus food

Unhygienic

Variety

Food consumption

Material

Human body

Other people

Retailer

Waste/surplus food

Preparation requirements

In contrast, Claire and Adam (Greenhill community) associated the meaning of dumpster

diving with ‘low cost’ strategies for ‘accessing food’ and utilised several of the materials but

tended to walk rather than use a bicycle. This suggests that a pool of dumpster diving

elements exist across time and space and that each practitioner links a selection of elements

from this repository at any one time.

Table 3d – Dumpster diving elements: Greenhill

Competence

Bin access

Identification of suitable

40


produce

Knowledge of produce

Location of bin

Material requirements

Preparation of produce


Storage methods

Meaning

Collective activity

Enjoyable/Fun

Food consumption

Food access


Freegarian diet

Low cost

Surplus food

Unhygienic

Variety

Material


other transport

41


Human body

Other people

Packaging

Refuse site

Retailer

Storage mechanisms

Waste/surplus food

Preparation requirements

These examples illustrate that practitioners do not necessarily perform dumpster diving in

the same way over multiple instances. Elements were connected in different configurations

by the same practitioner. The differentiation in performance appeared to be a result of

interactions with the built environment and multiple underlying motivations which dominate

under different circumstances.

Depending on the refuse site selected, practitioners would need to use different skills to

navigate the built environment and access the bin. As a result, different ‘competences’ and

‘materials’ were utilised under different conditions. For example, knowledge of how to access

the bin included scaling a fence, rolling underneath a gate and requesting permission from

the shop owner. In some instances individuals also held certain expertise and skillsets which

changed how dumpster diving was done.

A number of practitioners implicitly identified changes to the refuse site as requiring the

integration of new skills and materials to access food waste, and subsequently impacted

upon the meaning of the practice. Scott (Redmoor Community 2) reported that supermarkets

in his area had begun to use locks on refuse bins in order to deter people from accessing

food waste. In order to access food waste in these locations, alternative strategies needed to

be sought. Scott and his friends had overcome this issue by making and/or purchasing ‘bin

keys’ to open the newly imposed locks. The inclusion of the lock on the bin not only added

the materiality of a lock and key, but it also required the practitioners to have specialist

knowledge and skill of where to access or create a key. Furthermore, the introduction of

locks and the subsequent counter measures criminalises the practice of dumpster diving and

shifts the meanings associated with it.

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Any one practitioner appeared to hold a range of ‘meanings’ surrounding the practice which

were called upon at different times or locations. For the majority of participants, multiple

meanings were compatible with each other and represented different values surrounding

different themes. Scott (Redmoor community 2) called upon social equality, political

resistance, political transformation, and food waste repeatedly when discussing dumpster

diving. For Scott, these meanings are individual components that are all necessary for

dumpster diving. However, other participants appeared to make use of the practice

differently. Greg (Oldmere community 1) situated his discussion of dumpster diving around

‘waste minimisation’ and ‘social equity’: he was driven to engage with dumpster diving

because he was disgusted by the existence of food waste when so many people are going

hungry across the country. Yet when observing his activities at a ‘Food Not Bombs’ event,

Greg was explicitly promoting the reclamation and re-use of food waste as a political tactic

employed to overthrow the capitalist system. While these are linked themes across the

freegan philosophy, within Greg’s discourse they were utilised as distinct entities. These

examples suggest that individual practitioners are able to select and connect a range of

elements in different configurations depending on the requirement of the time and place.

Thus a plethora of elements and multiple configurations of freegan dumpster diving co-exist

at any one time. However, these configurations are not necessarily coherent ‘entities’ that

can be recognised across the freegan communities. Practices are context specific: as

individuals embed elements within their own everyday lives, transformations begin to take

shape; nevertheless this does not mean that this will be diffused beyond the local sphere.

From an external perspective, the connection of elements within freegan dumpster diving is

incoherent. For many people, the linkages between the ‘material’ and ‘competence’

elements would have significantly different meanings associated with poverty,

homelessness, dirt, and hippyish-ness. From this perspective ‘food waste’ and ‘the refuse

site’ are not viable materials for ‘food access’, or ‘food consumption’. Similarly, the

competences required for food provision would likely not involve ‘bin access’ or

‘redistribution pathways’. This further elucidates that multiple elements circulate and are

linked surrounding food re-value and re-use at any one time.

Thus, as broad shifts in the elements of food practices over time are identified (Kearney

2010), I would argue that shifts in food waste practices and freegan dumpster diving

specifically is visible over time. While this study is unable to provide longitudinal data to

support this assertion, the changing trends of food production, consumption and waste of the

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food industry and the growth in challenges to minimize food waste would suggest that

dumpster diving practices may have also changed in response.

To summarise, dumpster diving is the repetitive and shared linkage of materials, meanings

and competences to access food waste from retail bins for human consumption. The

structure of this practice is in a process of transformation as freegan practitioners connect

elements in slightly different ways and as subjective and structural factors enable and

constrain the shape that performances can take. This suggests that dumpster diving is not

just a practice that individuals do or don’t do, but requires the alignment of elements in

specific contexts. Drawing on the elements of dumpster diving that have been identified, this

chapter now addresses how these elements are linked in different configurations by

freegans when re-valuing and re-using food waste.

3.2 Doing dumpster diving - to dive or not to dive

There is a tendency across literature and media reports to construct dumpster diving as

simply the removal of food waste from a bin. Contrary to this perception, the participants in

this study displayed a number of steps that must be undertaken or considered before a

refuse site is accessed. This section highlights these processes and explores how freegan

practitioners decide whether to locate and infiltrate food waste for human consumption at a

particular point in time and associated barriers. Rather than a routinised activity that

practitioners perform with little conscious thought, participants in this study appeared to

deliberate over whether to dumpster dive, or not, on any given occasion, with several

decisions that needed to be made before the act of dumpster diving took place.

Prior to the performance, practitioners displayed clear consideration as to whether it was the

right time to dumpster dive. Thus for dumpster diving to occur practitioners must have made

the decision to dumpster dive at a particular point in time. While existing literature addresses

why individuals choose to dumpster dive, here a more time dependent question of ‘why

now?’ is broached. The following themes emerged as driving the decision to dumpster dive:

‘opportunistic’; ‘depleted resources’; ‘planned activity’, and; ‘enjoyment’.

3.2.1 Opportunistic

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For some practitioners, dumpster diving took place because ‘it was there’. These instances

can be referred to as ‘opportunistic’ practices, occurring when freegans come into contact

with food waste and reclaim food as they go about their daily life. Lizzy (Oldmere community

1) displayed this ‘opportunistic’ characteristic when discussing the frequency of her diving.

Reporting that she ‘went diving’ sporadically, Lizzy explained that she did not necessarily

make a conscious decision to dumpster diving but she would checks bins as she passed

them and would reclaim food as and when she came across it on an irregular basis. This is

formalized as ‘opportunistic’ in this thesis as practitioners are not required to undertake

additional activities to seek food waste beyond their immediate environment. Lizzy did not

have to change her schedule in order to provision food; she used the space and materiality

within her everyday environment to simultaneously provision food.

The ‘opportunistic’ dumpster diver within this study suggests that alternative food

provisioning does not necessarily require additional time or material resources; it can be

practiced alongside already embedded daily habits and requires little additional effort to

perform. This insight could have implications for pro-environmental behaviour change

interventions more widely as approaches have tended to suggest that the cognitive effort

and resource requirements of sustainable lifestyle choices serve to lock individuals in to

unsustainable habits (Jackson 2005). Here the opportunistic nature of dumpster diving can

be seen as allowing people to slot more sustainable configurations into their everyday

routines, suggesting little cognitive effort would be required to change provisioning behaviour

to this more fluid and sporadic approach.

3.2.2 Depleted resources

Where ‘opportunistic’ dumpster diving is motivated by features of the immediate

environment, ‘depleted resource routine’ dumpster diving is about a conscious decision to

locate and reclaim surplus food due to a lack of food resources. Redmoor practitioner, Ted,

displayed this more structured approach, where dumpster diving is a conscious decision

made to replenish depleted resources. Ted regularly dumpster dives on Sundays and

Thursdays, a habit that emerged after he identified a specific food retailer threw away ‘good

quality’ stock on these days every week. By aligning his practice to the retailer, Ted was able

to be efficient in his reclamation and wastage practices as he was able to gauge how much

45


food he ‘needed’ to reclaim to meet his needs until the next batch of food waste became

available.

Bec (Redmoor community 1) also displayed a routinised ‘depleted resource routine’, cycling

to the same wholesale market, on the same day, on a weekly basis. While Bec would

sometimes ‘top-up’ her food by dumpster diving elsewhere this was irregular, instead she

would try to salvage as much food as she would need for that week during this weekly ‘dive’.

This routinisation suggests that freegans adhere to habitual cycles of provisioning in the

same way that mainstream consumer routinize their food provisioning at supermarkets and

markets. Large supermarkets have become the dominant mode of food provisioning in the

UK (Wrigley & Branson 2009) where the majority of people undertake ‘big shops’, on a

weekly basis and often for the same goods (Grewal et al. 1998). The frequency of visits, the

retail outlet chosen and the selection of items is constructed as routinized and largely

unreflective (Thompson et al. 2013). The routinisation of ‘big shops’ can be critiqued for

encouraging food waste as regular unreflective shopping means that existing goods are

opened up to being replaced by fresher newer produce. Unlike supermarket provisioning

however, freegans do not necessarily procure the same foods at each activity, the food they

reclaim is dependent upon the produce that is available in the bin at the specific time they

visit. Furthermore, the decision to reclaim was not unreflective, while an abundance of food

was reported at points, practitioners were often concerned about not provisioning too much

food, they would reclaim sufficient for their needs taking into account future availability.

3.2.3 Planned activity

In contrast to ‘opportunistic’ and routine ‘depleted resource’ diving, participants also made

the decision to dumpster dive for ‘planned activities where food is sought for a specific event

and for other people to consume. While all participants in this study reclaimed food for their

own consumption, several also sought to reclaim food specifically for family and friends, and

to cater for social events. For Pete (Oldmere Community 1) the reclamation of food waste

was predominantly to obtain food for other people. Pete reported that the frequency of his

dumpster diving had become more ‘sporadic’ in recent years since he gained full time

employment. The access to monetary resources had changed the role of dumpster diving in

Pete’s life, he felt it was less acceptable to dumpster dive when he could purchase food from

and support local community food stores and markets. As a consequence, Pete now tends

to dumpster dive when he is provisioning food for a big meal, when he is sharing with friends

46


or sourcing food for political activist events such as Food Not Bombs. Dumpster diving for

these specific activities was perceived as justifiable as the food was supporting other people

who might not be able to provision for themselves, while also saving food waste from landfill.

The utilisation and sharing of food waste that is reclaimed is a key theme for participants

when deciding whether to dumpster or not, to varying degrees.

3.2.4 Enjoyment

The three themes of decision-making identified thus far have been focussed on practitioners

provisioning food waste for their own or other people’s consumption. However, several

participants also reported dumpster diving as a predominantly leisure based activity.

‘Enjoyment’ as a driver refers to practitioners’ perception of dumpster diving as a group

based, leisure activity, that they chose to participate in when they had spare time available

and friends were free to join them. For the participants in Greenhill 1, dumpster diving has

become part of their leisure activities. The individuals tend to only dumpster dive when they

are all available and they can go together as a group. For Greenhill, dumpster diving is now

associated with socialising and ‘going for drinks’ before, during and after dumpster diving

sessions. Situating the practice as a leisure activity and combining it with other consumption

practices such as drinking alcohol, could be perceived as reducing the significance of the

freegan political agenda associated with dumpster diving. Yet motives of fun, amusement

and pleasure are increasingly being combined with political seriousness and goals in new

social movements (Shepard 2012). In this way freegan food provisioning is a type of serious

fun, whereby resistance is an enjoyable leisure (Wettergren 2009) and group based activity

that can be integrated into everyday life.

In support of this assertion, the participants in this study referred to multiple drivers for

dumpster diving in reference to different instances of the practice. Si (Oldmere community 1)

for example makes the decision to dumpster dive when he has run out of food, when he is

passing supermarket bins overflowing with produce and also when he is ‘tagging’ along with

other people, while socialising, when they are dumpster diving. This suggests that motivation

to dumpster dive cannot just be described in terms of individual values at one point in time, it

is fluid and dependent upon a number of factors including assessment of stocks held, the

practitioner’s environment and the ability for alternative practices to be embedded within

existing routines.

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3.3 Doing dumpster diving – when and how to dive

None of these drivers alone, however, are sufficient to explain when and how food waste is

accessed and reclaimed. A number of interim decisions needed to be made before the act of

reclaiming food waste was possible, these included: deciding when to go (time of day), what

to take (toolkit) and where to go (location). This section focuses on the spatio-temporal

context of the practice, what happens, where and with what. Analysis of these decision-

making steps suggests that the practice of dumpster diving is both constitutive of and

constructed by time and space; that there are certain configurations in which the practice

can and cannot occur and it is through these steps that practitioners are able to assess the

viability of dumpster diving at any one time.

3.3.1 Timing

The time of day selected to dumpster dive was a carefully considered decision for many of

the participants. The majority of participants chose to dumpster dive at night when it was

dark and quiet so that their activities were less visible by other people. For these

practitioners dumpster diving is a night time activity, their performance is constrained by

other people’s perceptions of the practice and thus the decision to dumpster dive is not

immediately met with the action as practitioners have to wait for the right time. While several

participants would reclaim food during the day, if the environment felt right, only one

participant explicitly resisted the construction of dumpster diving as an activity to be hidden

by nightfall by reportedly wearing bright clothing and using a megaphone to tell passers-by

what he was doing during the day.

The prevalence of dumpster diving as a night time activity is also a result of the waste

practices of retailers, as participants reported that this was when the best food was

available. They felt that retailers tended to store food waste internally through the day only

discarding it in refuse areas when they came to close for the night or at the end of shifts. The

individuals that did not solely dumpster dive at night, did so because they had found

alternative sources of food waste that followed different patterns of wastage. The Redmoor

community for example reclaims food from a market in the early hours of the morning

because that is when the best choice of produce is available from that specific location. Thus

the practice of dumpster diving predominantly takes place at night because there is a fear of

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being seen by other people and because it provides practitioners with the best available

produce.

3.3.2 Toolkits and guidelines

Practitioners learn about when to dumpster dive, as well as what to take from a variety of

resources. Online resources such as the dumpster diving trashwiki (Trashwiki 2015) provide

guidance on how to dumpster dive, how to find food waste and what you require to do it. As

well as providing general guidance on what dumpster diving is and how people can get

involved these resources also list toolkits for dumpster diving, advising practitioners to ‘Bring

a bottle of water, to wash your hands when you dive into bags of fruits and vegetables’, or a

‘stepping stool will help you reach over the top…duct tape in case your bag splits open… A

basic first aid kit, in case you hurt yourself’ (Allthingsfrugal.com 2012).

Two participants in this study reported using online resources when first starting to dumpster

dive. Bec (Redmoor 1) accessed the trashwiki guidelines highlighted above when she had

first heard about dumpster diving because she felt uncertain about how she should go about

it or what she needed to do. Exploring the use of these guidelines further It became

apparent that Bec no longer felt the need to refer to guidelines, that ‘practice makes perfect’

and she had her own strategies and toolkits in place for doing dumpster diving. This did not

detail any new material items or skills but referred to her knowledge and experience of

dumpster diving in a particular context, she knew the best locations, when to go and what to

take, all which she had developed over time. The guidelines provided her with access to the

‘entity’ of the practice but it is through repetitive performance that she has been able to

embed it into her everyday life.

This process of ‘learning’ was not an isolated experience amongst the participants. A

number referred to feeling unsure about what they were doing when they first began

dumpster diving, but that their confidence and practices had changed over time as they

developed their knowledge and experience. However, unlike Bec, other participants referred

to this process as collective and collaborative as they learnt what to do from other people.

Participants both implicitly and explicitly situated the group environment as providing access

to a knowledge base unavailable online or from a book. This shared knowledge is not static

or written down, it is fluid and often tacit, transferred and transformative as members, skills

and the socio-political environment changes. Situating the participant groups in this study as

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coming together to collaboratively develop strategies for overcoming food waste issues,

dumpster divers can be positioned as part of a ‘community of practice’.

The concept of ‘communities of practice’ refers to informal groups of individuals who actively

develop a shared repertoire of resources (Lave & Wenger 1991). While there may be explicit

recognition of a community structure, communities of practice promote a shared sense of

belonging rather than a formal membership. This feature is visible amongst freegan

participants for whom participation was flexible and ad hoc. Similarly this definition of

‘community’ rests on a shared experience and knowledge formed by mutual engagement

over time, rather than a hierarchical structure, which can be seen within freegan

communities where all ‘members’ are considered equal.

‘Communities of practice’ are not just based on interaction between co-located individuals

and similarly, the freegan community exists on a wider scale than the individual communities

engaged within in the UK for this thesis. While the communities in this study do not directly

engage with one another, they all affiliate with the wider freegan community, their values,

practices and members are connected on a metaphysical level. Using Duguid's (2005)

concept of a ‘network of practice’, the individual freegan communities are connected as they

perform and transform freegan practices and each add to the pool of freegan resource. This

is not to say that all of the communities perform freegan practices in the same way, when

practitioners come together they each bring their own set of values, knowledge and skills to

the group, a subconscious process of negotiation ensues at an individual and group level as

existing practices are challenged and performed or transformed. As each community

engaged with during this study consists of different sets of individuals, different negotiations

take place, resulting in, either slightly or dramatically different configurations.

The changing relationship to a vegan diet is one illustration of this. While the freegan

philosophy promotes a vegan diet, many of the practitioners have chosen to negotiate this

feature as they value the reduction of food waste over the non-consumption of animal based

goods. This negotiation within the shared environment of a community of practice could be

seen as a slight transformation of the practice configuration, which has the potential to

spread. The websites and network activities that practitioners referred to provide spaces for

this shared repertoire to emerge and transform. The changing configurations of practices

between members of freegan communities and freeganism more widely are explored in

further detail in chapter 7.

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3.3.3 Materials and procedures

Across the different configurations of freegan dumpster diving, a range of material items and

processes were displayed. When preparing to visit Oldmere community 1, Greg advised me

to bring ‘hardy clothes and if you can bring a bike, a rucksack and perhaps a torch’, later

referring to this as his ‘starter pack’ for dumpster diving. The materiality embedded within

dumpster diving is illustrated in the following extract of an observation with Oldmere

community 1:

Cycling the city streets at 1am I became aware that of the five people on the dive, all

had bicycles – only two of those were wearing helmets. Si was cycling with a large

empty backpack on his back, Greg had attached panniers to his bike and Louise had

a large shoulder bag which she kept in a basket on the front of her bike, which she

had made from a supermarket shopping basket the previous day. The existence of a

container was not a coincidence. Earlier that day Greg had gone home to attach his

panniers in preparation for the dive because it could hold more produce than his

rucksack could. Once we had been cycling around the city streets for 15 minutes we

came to a small Waitrose store. Greg jumped off his bike and signalled for me to

follow him to the back of the store. We were on the outside of an 8ft high barbed wire

fence, with the supermarket refuse and delivery area on the other side. It certainly

looked like the supermarket had done its best to keep people out of the area.

However, where the double gates open and close for vehicle access, a smaller

section of wired mesh was secured at the bottom of the gate which could be lifted up

to get access. Greg lifted the fence up to allow Louise and Si to roll underneath, with

Si then helping Greg access the compound. They had all been here before and

walked directly to 3 large black wheelie bins near the buildings wall. The bins were

partly open with items spilling out of the lid. Si and Greg took out torches and shone

them in the direction of the bins. I watched as Louise considered using a pair of latex

gloves stuffed in her pocket, before thinking better of it and gingerly opening the lid of

one of the bins. Each bin appeared to be full of small white bags, as they began to

empty these out it became apparent that each bag contained a separate food item

that had been disposed of. I was surprised; I had expected to see masses of rotting

fruit and vegetables all mixed together. Instead what faced me appeared to be a

shopping trolley of carefully wrapped produce, be it with some ‘bin juice’ covering

some of the bags. As Si held the bin lid open, Louise took each white bag out of the

bin assessing what was inside, before placing it either in her bag or offering it up to

one of the others.

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This extract illustrates a range of material items embedded within the practice of dumpster

diving. Each freegan community in this study favoured the use of certain materials, however

a cluster of materials were evident and shared across all groups, further supporting the

‘community of practice’ ascription. The shared repertoire of material resources includes: a

container for collection (rucksack, basket, bin bags, panniers); light (torch, mobile phone,

security light) and; transportation (bicycle, walking, and car). Additional materials that were

taken up by multiple groups included: helmets, gloves, bin keys, dark clothing, hat, hand

sanitiser. Similarly, there were items utilised only by individual practitioners or only within

one group, such as wearing a high visibility jacket and using hand sanitiser.

In addition to these tools, there were a number of material pre-requisites for the reclamation

of food waste, including: food waste; the waste receptacle and; the human body. While all

social practices have to be performed by people, it is meaningful to highlight the role of the

human body here as it can take on different roles and be utilized in different ways to

represent different practice formations. Thus the body can be perceived as a material

element as it is a tangible resource required for accessing food from bins. The movement of

the body within the practice is particularly significant when taking into consideration the

relationship to the bin, which outside of freegan dumpster diving, tends to be limited to

inserting unwanted items and removing collections of unwanted goods in nondescript

reinforced bags.

The majority of literature has ignored these features, with the exception of Carolsfeld &

Erikson (2013:250), who explored how the human body engages with the bin when

accessing food waste when exploring dumpster divers in Vancouver, Canada. Practitioners

were seen to employ four different strategies that utilised the human body, food waste and

the waste receptacle in different formations. The maneuvers: dock combing, wading,

snorkelling, and diving, illustrate that the utilisation of the same material goods can be

performed differently, displaying different skills and meanings. This typology is useful when

addressing how participants performed dumpster diving and is applied to the practices

displayed by Redmoor community 2, detailed below.

Table 3e – Dumpster diving maneuvers developed from (Carolsfeld & Erikson 2013)

Dock-Combing Food can be found beside, or on top of the binWading Food is accessed from reaching inside bins

SnorkelingTo access food, divers have to go inside the bin and check the surface level of items

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DivingTo access food, divers have to go inside the bin, moving and removing items to be able to assess all layers of the bin

Scott and two other members of Redmoor community 2 tend to dumpster dive at a local fruit

and vegetable market and local stores once or twice a week depending on the number of

people they need to feed. Walking me through the recent night’s dumpster diving, Scott had

first gone to a petrol station, which has a small convenience store attached it, close to the

squatter’s community site. Outside the petrol station Scott found and reclaimed several bags

of fresh doughnuts placed next to the bins, and a few bunches of flowers inside the bin.

Moving on to a larger supermarket outside of town, Scott accessed locked grundon bins with

a homemade key. While most of the bins were full of empty boxes he was able to climb into

a bin and reclaim two bunches of bananas, three leeks, bread rolls, several yoghurts and a

large amount of carrots. A box of plums was rejected because he already had a glut from a

previous trip.

During this one dumpster diving session, Scott interacted with food waste and the waste

receptacle in different ways. Using Carolsfeld and Erikson’s (ibid) typology, as Scott fully

immersed himself in the bin in order to reclaim food he can be seen as ‘diving’ while at the

supermarket. However while at the petrol station he could be seen to be ‘dock combing’

because he was able to access food outside of the bin itself. In contrast, the majority of other

participants in this study including Si, Louise and Greg’s tended to engage in ‘wading’,

standing outside of the bin and using their arms to reach inside of the bin, removing items

one at a time for consideration.

Carolsfeld and Erikson’s study suggests that divers have a maneuver of choice, which they

regularly perform in preference. As a result, one could assume that certain locations would

be restricted if practitioners were only willing to engage in the less physical maneuvers, such

as ‘dock combing’. In contrast, evidence from this study suggests that divers tend to employ

a selection of strategies depending on the material environment and their skill at performing

the maneuvers. For example, Scott did not choose to get into the bin and ‘dive’, because he

was dumpster diving on his own; there was no one there to keep the lid open for him while

he ‘waded’. The environment constrained his ability to dumpster dive in another way.

Similarly, Claire (Greenhill community 1) bemoaned a recent session where she completely

immersed herself in the bin because there were no lights in the refuse area and the only way

she could see what was in the bin was by getting up close to the produce and shining her

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phone at it. Thus these maneuvers can be seen as a typology of engaging with the

environment rather than a subjective preference held by practitioners which constrain how

they dumpster dive.

The human body and materiality is further utilised as practitioners negotiate the environment,

they cycle to refuse sites, get on their hands and knees and roll under a fence or scale

fences which are intended to restrict access. For others the body is used to intervene with

the material environment, for example through developing skills in locksmithing and the

creation of homemade keys to access locked food bins, as Scott and Redmoor community

did. This suggests that greater attention to the material environment and how divers engage

with and negotiate this space in different ways could provide insight into how novel practices

are enabled and constrained.

3.4 Organised food reclamation

Dumpster diving was undoubtedly the dominant food provisioning practice for the

participants in this study. However, a number of additional food provision practices also exist

within the freegan repertoire which seeks to re-value and re-use food waste. ‘Food Not

Bombs’ (FNB) and ‘organised food reclamation’ practices are two such examples which,

while similar to dumpster diving in many ways, display distinct features and provide further

insight into the food waste debate.

A number of practices including ‘composting, wild foraging, growing community gardens,

(and) repairing’ are situated as integral to the freegan food provisioning toolkit (Pentina &

Amos 2011:1773), yet it is only Edwards & Mercer (2007a) who seek to distinguish between

different types of freegan food provisioning when comparing dumpster diving with ‘Food Not

Bombs’ (FNB) activities. First emerging in the USA in 1980, FNB came into existence when

food was prepared by and for demonstrators at a nuclear power station protest. FNB has

since become a worldwide phenomenon whereby groups of volunteers come together under

the FNB umbrella, which are often not linked, to provide food for other politically focused

events (ibid).

FNB is a more outward focussed activity in comparison to dumpster diving, that can also

incorporate dumpster diving. FNB involves provisioning food in a range of alternative ways to

then redistribute to participants at political and community focused events. The core

objective is to redistribute food to outsiders in the public domain and bring together a diverse

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mix of people including ‘‘punk’ subcultures, the disadvantaged, the mentally ill and

indigenous and war veteran communities’ (ibid p 283). FNB thus is a wider political

movement which sometimes involves dumpster diving for the provisioning of food. Literature

surrounding FNB to date has focused on the explicitly political structure and has not address

the provisioning strategies utilised to obtain surplus food for these events. Like freeganism,

FNB groups tend to reject capitalism and consumerism, and thus look to source food that

does not implicate them with mainstream food provisioning, including dumpster diving.

Two freegan communities in this study specifically referred to reclaiming food for FNB

events. Participants did not go on separate trips for their own provisioning and another for

FNB but they labelled some foods more suitable for these community events than others.

Lizzy (Oldmere 1) explicitly referred to a packet of bread rolls as not suitable for an

upcoming event because it probably wouldn’t last until then. Similarly Holly (Oldmere 2)

consumed several yoghurts rather than putting them forward for a community event because

she feared people would be worried about eating dairy products past expiry dates.

This theme emerged from the data with six participants referring to their involvement in

collecting surplus food for community-based activities so they could provide hot food. Three

of those that talked about their involvement were affiliated with the same ‘Food Not Bombs’

division. The other three were from different community groups and had organised or

volunteered at events where they were required to source surplus food and then prepare it.

All of these participants linked this type of activity with dumpster diving, with several explicitly

referring to diving for goods for these events.

Another hybrid variation of dumpster diving observed was the development of formal

exchanges of food waste with freegans. Relationships had developed between freegan

dumpster divers and local retailers, food markets and restaurants whereby food that was

discarded was stored up and handed over to divers rather than placing it in the bin.

Participants had communicated directly to owners and workers of these outlets and outlined

their social, political and environmental justifications for wanting to divert food waste; they

would then ask for any food due to be discarded be put to one side for their collection on a

set time basis. These relationships had developed over time and often began with requests

for support for local events which appeared to provide some legitimacy to the request.

However in some cases these relationships had changed over time and individuals had

started to use this strategy to reclaim food for their own consumption as well as for

community activities. Whether the retailers were aware of this change in use or not was not

clear.

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Bec (Redmoor community 1) had built up a relationship with the owner of a local

convenience store which had a small fresh fruit and vegetable market outside the front door.

She had initially requested food they had discarded because she had seen it in the bin but

wanted to be courteous and ask if they would mind her taking it. He had been really helpful

and given her a big box of bananas that were going brown and a bag of carrots and parsnips

the last time she had been in to see him. She felt the owner had given her better quality food

as time had gone on and he had begun to trust her intentions.

Greg also referred to engaging in more formalised relationships with retailers and

restaurants to reclaim surplus food within the Oldmere community. He had friends who

worked at a local restaurant who had told him about the amount of salad and bread they

threw away at the end of the day. He went and met with the manager and asked if he could

come by once a week and take any produce they had no use for. While it is mainly bread he

reclaims this is sometimes supplemented with cakes and prepared dishes that they would be

disposing of. Again there was an immediate positive response from the owner.

In comparison to dumpster diving, this formation disconnects the practitioner from the refuse

site. While the objective of salvaging food from the bin remains, the formal relationship with

business owners means that the food never crosses over into the waste bin. The direct

interaction with freegans changes the food owner’s perception of the produce; there is a

mindfulness of some potential value to freegans. Thus rather than be classified as waste and

disposed of, these goods reside within a space between valued and valueless, they are

unwanted by their owners but have not been contaminated as valueless by placement in the

waste bin.

For some of the participants the reclamation of food without accessing the waste site was

seen as a positive transformation, it would mean practitioners would no longer have to spend

hours trawling through bins under the cloak of darkness, it could also mean that produce

was in better condition because it had not been put in the bin with decaying produce

contaminating it (Claire Greenhill and Emma Oldmere 2). However, such a strategy reduces

the activism associated with the freegan performance of dumpster diving. Being gifted

produce from retailers does not display a rejection of the capitalist system which freegans

assert when they surreptitiously access refuse sites and take food waste without the food

owner’s permission. Furthermore, removing food waste from retailers could be perceived as

a benefit to the food industry itself as they no longer need to dispose of it themselves, it

becomes someone else’s responsibility.

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However, the participants were keen to ensure that they only undertook this activity with

small, local stores and restaurants that they felt worthy of their support. Partnerships were

carefully chosen. Relationships with large, multi-national organizations were not sought or

seen positively, this was to avoid supporting capitalist and consumerist values that they were

perceived to promote (Oldmere community 1). This process of salvaging food before it

enters the bin bears strong resemblance to emerging formations of food aid in the UK which

have begun to reclaim and redistribute food waste. The key difference between these

formations is that, food redistribution organizations actively seek to build relationships with

national retailers and large food businesses; this theme will be explored in more detail in

Chapter 6.

3.5 Conclusion

Literature has addressed a range of motivating factors for dumpster diving, however this

chapter has introduced a more nuanced approach to dumpster diving taking into account an

array of processes and subjective dynamics involved in accessing food waste for dumpster

diving.

The decision to dumpster dive, or not, is not a binary decision made at one point in time,

practitioners must make a number of decisions and negotiate barriers before they even

come into contact with food waste. A number of drivers for engaging with dumpster diving at

a particular point in time were identified, which, along with an ability to identify, locate and

navigate the spatio-temporal environment, were necessary for ‘successfully’ accessing food

waste for dumpster diving. Bound up within these processes were a range of meanings,

competences and materials which each participant needed to manage. These elements and

routes for accessing food waste were learnt from a variety of resources, including online

guidelines, trial and error and reenacting what they have seen other people do. The sharing

of experience and knowledge and the body of resources across the freegan practice is

suggestive of a ‘community of practice’.

Yet there is not one single formation of accessing food waste for dumpster diving, individuals

and communities promote specific formations and negotiate performance in different ways.

Hybrid versions can be seen where key elements of the practice have become transformed

at localized levels or are appropriated by other practices, such as food aid. Thus the practice

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of accessing food waste is in a constant process of transformation as links between

elements are broken and re-connected differently.

This chapter highlights the complex dynamics that practitioners negotiate and manage in

their everyday lives in order to access food waste for dumpster diving. As a result, definitions

of dumpster diving as ‘procuring food from a supermarket dumpster bin for individual

consumption’ (Edwards & Mercer 2007a:279) need to be extended to capture the pre-

requisite processes necessary for the realization of dumpster diving, as well as the

development of more formalised relationships with food retailers and the access of unwanted

food before it enters the bin.

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Chapter 4: Selecting Surplus Food and Rejecting Food Waste

Freegan dumpster divers challenge the disposal of food based on aesthetic and/or

microbiological characteristics which are perceived as unfounded and unjust. Through the

process of reclaiming food discarded by others, dumpster divers challenge the perception of

food waste as valueless and inedible. However, not all food waste is reclaimed by dumpster

divers. The limited number of practitioners and an abundance of produce, results in divers

choosing what produce to reclaim and what to reject. Dumpster divers re-value food waste in

different ways, what is selected for reclamation and what is secondarily rejected varies

across practitioners as they employ a range of strategies to make their decision. Mirroring

more normative consumption behaviours, the decision to select or reject food for freegans is

based on a combination of product characteristics and subjective taste. However, this

decision making process is distinct as freegan practitioners seek a justification not to reclaim

food.

This chapter first explores the transformation that food undertakes as it enters the bin and

how freegans seek to destabilise this characterisation by reclaiming items from the bin for

human consumption. Delving into the process of ‘doing’ dumpster diving, the different

strategies practitioners implement when deciding whether to re-value food waste or to

secondarily reject it while at the bin are then explored. Three themes emerge as dominant

justifications for not reclaiming produce: visual characteristics of products; embedded

(microbiological) characteristics and personal taste and cultural values. This chapter

accounts for these justifications and explores how they are utilized differently across

practitioner performance.

4.1 Re-valuing food waste

The type of food found in retail bins is diverse; produce can vary depending on the day, time

or location of the retail bin chosen. The produce freegans accessed during this study ranged

from one off items of fruit and vegetables and alcoholic drinks to crates of yoghurts, meat

and fish, ready meals and tinned goods. It is difficult to accurately quantify the amount of

food waste accessed and reclaimed by freegans during this study and generally. There is

uncertainty as to whether what is located in a bin at any one time is the full waste for that

day, as other dumpster divers may have reclaimed from the bin previously, furthermore, as a

hidden practice for some people, even self reports cannot accurately capture the quantity of

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food reclaimed. Despite this, the variety and abundance of produce reported by practitioners

in this study echoes trends seen across the literature (Rush 2006). While excess surplus

food may appear to be advantageous for dumpster diver as they have an abundance of food

available to them, ultimately the quantity is problematic when the objective is to reduce food

waste and limit the associated environmental, social and economic effects.

As food is placed in the bin it crosses a cultural line, it loses its value and becomes

something risky and inedible (Jackson 2013). This ‘contamination’ is symbolic, irrespective

of the quality or condition of the produce itself when food enters the bin it is transformed.

From a microbiological perspective however, there could be tangible risks associated with

food waste as much of the produce exceeds expiration dates, or is cross-contaminated by

other items in the bin. Salvaging food from the bin also bears social hazard as it violates

numerous social norms surrounding how food should be provisioned (Rush 2006). Thus, by

reclaiming food from the bin, freegans challenge a range of embedded risks and

stigmatisation associated with food waste (Edwards and Mercer 2007).

Yet for participants, food found in the bin is not perceived as waste but as a resource of

‘surplus food’. The concepts of surplus food and food waste were used interchangeably by

practitioners while from an outsider perspective there are distinct differences between them.

Where waste is valueless, the idea of surplus food suggests that while the goods do not

have use for the owner they could be of use to someone else. This re-classification of food

waste occurs before any contact with specific items is made and suggests that for freegan

dumpster divers all food waste holds potential value. In characterizing food waste as surplus

food freegans transform bins from sites of valueless goods to vessels of potential value.

4.2 The processes of selection and rejection

While freegans report finding an abundance of food waste in bins, measuring the amount of

food wasted and reclaimed is problematic both because there are no requirements for food

retailers to measure the food they are disposing of and because there is uncertainty as to

the number of dumpster divers and their reclamation practices.

Due to the qualitative design, this study is unable to provide an insight into a total quantity of

food salvaged from the bin on a national or global scale, however the following data

collection images are able to illustrate that wide varieties and relative quantities of food is

salvaged from the bin. Figures 4 and 5 represent the food waste salvaged from a two hour

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dumpster diving session with Oldmere community 1. Similar trends, of copious amounts of

food, were reported across all freegan groups in the study.

Figure 4 - Food at the bin

Figure 5 - Food at the bin 2

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Figure 6 - Dumpstered food at home

These images only represent the food goods that were reclaimed from the bin, not the full

scale of the produce that was in the bin. The quantity and variety of food waste disposed of

enables practitioners to select which food to reclaim, which means that they must also reject

other goods and leave them in the bin. All practitioners displayed this process of selection

and rejection, however the items selected and different decision-making processes and

justifications used differed across participants.

All food in the bin appeared to hold similar potential value for freegans. However the process

of deliberation and assessment of goods, to decide what to reclaim, is bound up with both

individual norms and values and the wider freegan philosophy. Thus discarded food is not

valued equally by all freegans; goods that are reclaimed by one person could be rejected by

another. This suggests a previously unrecognized phase in the food waste life cycle,

whereby food resides within a space between value-laden and value-less as goods are

opened up to being reclaimed for future consumption or, secondarily rejected as waste. This

process of decision making is a rapid and intuitive assessment, based on three broad

themes: the visual characteristics of produce; the unseen embedded characteristics of

produce, and the personal values and tastes of the practitioner. This section utilises these

three themes to explore how food waste is re-valued or rejected for human consumption at

the bin.

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4.2.1 Assessing the visual characteristics of a product

Freegans condemn retailers for rejecting food needlessly. In particular the aesthetic

standards imposed by retailers and ad hoc or last minute changes to orders are critiqued for

producing excess waste. Despite this, freegans themselves displayed similar justifications

when rejecting food waste at the bin. Practitioners assessed the quality of produce and

decided whether to reclaim food or not based on the visual characteristics of individual items

and the perceived future availability of the produce. However, this was a more nuanced

decision making process than more dominant food provisioning, practitioners were hesitant

to reclaim food if they were unsure they needed it or could use it before it was inedible,

further still considering alternative pathways for re-value and re-use, such as gifting to

friends and family, in order to avoid secondary rejection.

In contrast freegans considered the disposal of fresh fruit and vegetables based on

ambiguous aesthetic imperfections by retailers as a pervasive and profit driven practice.

Participants argued that producers construct ‘imperfect’ produce as inedible and less

valuable. As a result this produce becomes more readily disposed of and replaced, which in

turn drives continued consumption as disposed goods get replaced with fresher, newer,

better looking produce in order to satisfy the perception of abundance.

Freegans explicitly reject the perception that the aesthetics of food is linked to its quality or

edibility. Jo encapsulated this when she reclaimed a bunch of ‘over ripe’ bananas from the

bin, which while she wouldn’t eat on their own in their current state, she knew would make

good banana bread as they got sweeter the riper they got. Similarly Bec, Redmoor

community, salvaged a box of carrots that had been discarded by a market because they

were odd shapes and sizes, which she used to make carrot soup. These examples illustrate

how the innate value of produce is recognised by freegans. Jo, Oldmere community, felt that

more sustainable food practices would be inevitable if retailers valued food more and acted

first with the interests of consumer and environmental health and wellbeing, rather than

profit. This argument mirrors wider discourses which suggest that sustainability is

incompatible with a profit focused economy.

In recent years, however, retailers have also begun to tackle the issue of the disposal of food

for aesthetic reasons. Asda, a large supermarket chain in the UK and subsidiary of the US

Walmart chain, launched a campaign to sell ‘wonky veg’ at the beginning of 2015 after

movements to reduce the amount of harvested food going to waste received media attention

(Asda 2015). A number of large retailers have since followed suit and seek to offer

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‘customers more choice and value with wonky fruit and veg’ (ibid). This drive towards re-

valuing food draws a parallel with the freegan drive to decouple the aesthetics and the

edibility of food.

However, in some cases these campaigns associate ‘wonky fruit and vegetables’ with lesser

value and providing consumers with cheaper options rather than treating them as equal

products. Freegans would argue that while the produce may have imperfections this does

not mean it is not perfect for a multitude of needs. For Bec (Redmoor community) the

aesthetics of the carrots she reclaimed did not reduce their nutritional benefit and once they

had been prepared and cooked, the shape and size of the carrot was irrelevant. Through the

reclamation and re-valuing of imperfect produce, freegans serve to highlight this normative

characterisation as immaterial and unsustainable.

The aesthetics of product packaging can similarly impact the perceived edibility and value of

food waste. Numerous products were reported that appeared to have been discarded by

retailers because of flawed packaging, with little or no damage to the produce itself. This

tended to be slight flaws and damage such as dented tin cans, or ripped plastic wrapping,

but did also include ruptured milk cartons and holes in packaging which resulted in a smelly

and messy bin. The more extensive damage not only eliminated the product from being

reclaimed but it also tended to contaminate other goods in the bin and meant that they also

were not reclaimed. Where damage was limited, the produce was deemed edible by most

freegans. For example, Louise (Oldmere 1) reclaimed a packet of cakes that had a torn label

but the plastic covering itself was intact. For Louise, the cakes were within their use by dates

and looked edible so she reclaimed them, the damaged packaging was not a reason to

reject the goods inside.

As well as rejecting extensively damaged produce like milk cartons, practitioners also chose

not to select produce based on aesthetic reasons where extensive mould or unexpected

features were seen. Claire (Greenhill community) described this as rejecting anything that

‘didn’t look quite right’. Here the visual assessment of produce is based on expectations of

what certain goods should look like; if goods do not meet these standards then they will not

be re-valued and reclaimed. This assessment is employed as a risk aversion strategy and

was illustrated when Claire came to eat a chicken sandwich. The chicken in the sandwich

looked ‘a little green’ and was rejected because this was an unexpected characteristic which

was thought to be potentially harmful to her health and she did not want ‘to risk it’.

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Other features that reduced the value of produce included; ‘the yoghurts all open and

(spilling out) everywhere’; ‘the apples have maggot holes’; ‘is there mould on it (the bread)?’

In all of these instances the items were not re-valued but were secondarily rejected and

placed back in the waste receptacle. Here spillage, infestation and mould are characteristics

that devalue produce and justify the rejection of produce for dumpster divers.

This visual assessment of produce by freegan dumpster divers shares both similarities and

differences with more dominant food provisioning, such as supermarket shopping. People

will avoid purchasing produce if there are visible cues that suggest there is a health risk

associated with it (Tsiros & Heilman 2005). However the expectation is that consumers will

search for the best quality produce, which is considered to hold less risk, and to reject any

produce that does not meet normative standards and expectations. In contrast, freegans

appear to search for reasons not to consume; they ask, what was it about the product that

classified it as waste?

4.2.2 Accounting for unseen embedded characteristics

As well as a visual assessment of the produce, practitioners were seen to assess the

embedded microbiological risk associated with the condition of goods when deciding

whether to reclaim or not. Food safety literature argues that consumers make irrational and

risky decisions when assessing the safety of food (Nesbitt et al. 2014), with the increased

use of detailed of food labelling promoted as an intervention to enable more informed and

less risky decision making. Expiry dates, such as ‘use by’ or, ‘sell by’ dates, are examples of

labelling utilised on packaging to provide consumers with information about the condition

and quality of produce. The usefulness and validity of such labelling mechanisms are

questioned by many people, yet freegans actively resist the information provided on such

food guidelines. Instead practitioners navigate these guidelines and employ their own niche

food safety practices.

Exceeding ‘best before’, ‘use by’ or ‘display until/sell by’ dates appeared to be the dominant

reason for the rejection of food by retailers in this study. EU and UK legislation requires the

inclusion of ‘use by dates’ to any foods which, from a microbiological point of view, can be

considered highly perishable and could constitute a danger to human health, while other

labels are organization specific. In contrast, ‘best before dates’ are implemented by food

businesses to advise consumers of the quality of produce over time, while ‘display until’ and

‘sell by dates’ are systems used by retailers to manage their stock. Thus some of these

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labels are guidelines for retailers and consumers, and not specific dates as to when the food

becomes inedible. Yet goods that exceed any of these dates tend to be removed from the

shelves and thrown away, irrespective of their condition. Throughout the data collected,

goods appeared to be disposed of because of these varying guidelines. While the exact

reason for rejection cannot be captured without engaging with the person who disposed of it,

there were no other visual cues as to why this produce would be disposed of. As such, we

can assume that retailers disposed of these goods due to the information provided on the

packaging.

The rejection of food because of such guidelines is justified by retailers as necessary to

protect customer health and promote quality goods. The understanding and implementation

of food safety is undeniably critical for food intake; however the complex nature of food

labelling and the ambiguous nature of the information provided is questionable and causes

confusion for many people, including many of the freegans in this study (Sustain 2012). As a

result freegans tend to challenge the information provided on food labels and reclaim

produce that exceeds expiry dates.

The differences between the various expiry dates and what that information meant were not

always understood by practitioners. Whether surpassing ‘best before’, ‘use by’ or ‘display

until/sell by’ dates, participants felt that the goods looked ‘normal’ and that these labels were

tools utilised by the food system to increase profit. Participants did refer to the labelling

information when selecting produce but the validity of information was questioned if no other

characteristics for rejection were identified. As a result, freegans regularly consume produce

far beyond specified expiry dates specified. Baked goods, fruit and vegetables, prepared

sandwiches, ready meals and in some cases, meat, dairy and fish, which had exceeded their

expiry dates, were all consumed by participants.

Pete (Oldmere community 1) argued that the implementation of food labelling regulation is

part of a capitalist conspiracy to promote the profit economy. The basis for this argument is

similar to that seen in relation to aesthetically different produce above, whereby the

construction of dates to define when food is and is not edible serves to promote continued

consumption as newer, less risky produce is constantly available to replace it.

The legitimacy of expiration guidelines is also questioned as freegans continue to consume

‘risky’ produce without any adverse health effects. All participants reported the consumption

of food from the bin beyond their expiry dates, yet they all said they had never experienced

any adverse health effects as a result. Relying on self-reporting here may be problematic as

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all practitioners were keen to promote the practice and prove the benefits of dumpster diving.

To confirm that food waste had made them ill would be to verify the perception that the

practice is dangerous or has harmful effects. However, the frequency with which this type of

food waste was consumed, and the relative health of individuals, would suggest that much

food disposed of on the basis of expiration information can be safely consumed.

This is not to suggest that health and safety information should be removed from food. There

are certainly food borne risks that need to be considered, not least when you consider the

storage of many fresh items is paramount and many of the items dumpster divers reclaim

will have been in a bin for a number of hours open to the elements. Freegans do factor in the

microbiological risks associated with food when they are reclaiming waste. However

participants felt that retailers should be doing more to make these goods accessible before

they became inedible. Bec, Redmoor community, suggested that items should be sold at a

significantly reduced cost in the days leading up to expiry dates. For Bec, this practice would

not only minimise the amount of waste produced as people would more readily purchase

cheaper food, but it would also reduce any adverse health risks and simultaneously allow

people on lower incomes to access a wider variety of food. While supermarkets do often

reduce the cost of items on the day of expiry dates, this was criticised for being too late and

‘too focussed on profit at all costs’ and should instead be focussed on ensuring that the

innate value of food is materialised for someone (Jo, Oldmere community 1).

While all participants in this study reclaimed items that had passed their expiry dates, Si

(Oldmere 1) reclaimed meat, poultry and/or fish past expiry dates. For the majority of

participants, these products were thought to be particularly high risk and would only be

reclaimed if the labelling indicated they would still be ‘safe’. Si’s decision to consume these

goods was not met with any negativity by the rest of the group. Contrastingly, it appeared to

be a relief for the group to find an alternative avenue for produce as they were able to

reclaim more food from the bin and then pass it on to Si. The decision to salvage meat,

poultry and fish was a conscious decision for Si, based on his aim to reclaim as much of his

food needs as possible. To overcome any potential risks associated with this produce, Si

implemented a number of risk aversion strategies when selecting and preparing goods. The

‘sniff test’ is a strategy that many participants referred to in the study when assessing the

‘freshness’ of produce, where the omition of strong odours was seen as an indicator of the

edibility of food. If it passed this test, Si would take items home and if possible freeze it to kill

off bacteria. When preparing these goods, Si would ‘overcook’ food which was thought to

further reduce the potential health risks should the food be compromised.

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For the other groups in this study, food containing meat and fish, and in some cases dairy

that were past expiry dates were not consumed. Participants suggested that this was due to

a combination of the risks associated with them and their personal preferences which sought

to minimise animal based produce. For the majority of practitioners if these items were

deemed edible they would be reclaimed anyway and would be offered to friends or family

who would consume them. This re-distribution thus opens up the risk associated with these

goods to a wider network of people. While dairy produce such as yoghurts and hard cheeses

were redistributed, meat and fish were again perceived as ‘too risky’ for many people and

they tended to be rejected once again and placed back in the bin.

Freegans challenge the validity of labelling systems as they negotiate and interpret

microbiological risk differently. While freegans do take labelling information into

consideration, the product type and individual perceptions of what food should look, smell

and feel like are assessed in unison. Despite the desire to minimise it, the rejection of food

becomes unavoidable as perceptions of food safety constrain reclamation.

4.2.3 Evaluating the product in reference to personal taste and cultural values

As well as an evaluation of the aesthetics and implicit safety of produce, freegans also

evaluated food waste based on their own personal and cultural preferences. Three themes

emerged within this category: vegetarian and vegan diets; picky eaters and; existing stocks

held.

Vegetarian and vegan diets

Several of the participants selected or rejected food waste based on personal preferences

and in particular a commitment to a specific diet. The provisioning of food based on a

specific preferences or dietary requirements is not surprising with an increasing number of

individuals across society following halal, gluten free, vegetarian or lactose free diets for a

variety of reasons (Marshall 2015).

Within this study, Lizzy (Oldmere community 1), Ted (Redmoor practitioner 1) and Scott

(Redmoor Community 2) are some of the participants who explicitly followed diets which

constrained what they would or would not reclaim from the bin. The commitment to a

vegetarian or vegan diet was most frequently cited among participants with the consumption

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of meat, and other animal derived products being avoided for moral, political or risk aversion

purposes.

Freeganism is a sub-culture that was initially built on the foundations of veganism. Freegans

argue that all animals are sentient beings that should be valued and respected in their own

right and not for human consumption. The consumption of animal based products is also

constructed as environmentally damaging with livestock producing 37% of the world's

methane and the meat and dairy sector using 70% of agricultural land (Garnett 2007). Thus

the non-consumption of animal derived goods is one way in which freegans reject the

commodity status of sentient animals.

A commitment to improving animal welfare was evident in this study, with the majority of

participants citing environmental effects and animal rights as motives for minimal or non-

consumption of animal derived products. A diet that restricts the consumption of meat, fish,

poultry, dairy or eggs in any form appears problematic when practitioners are reliant upon

the goods that other people throw away. Increased levels of meat consumption and the

heavily processed nature of many goods today which rely on butter and eggs, would suggest

that much of what is disposed of would contain these restricted ingredients. In fact, both

Claire (Greenhill community) and Holly (Oldmere community 2) were ‘surprised’ at the

amount of suitable vegetarian food they were able to provision when they first started

dumpster diving. Similarly Louise (Oldmere community 1) found it ‘easy’ to follow a

predominantly vegan diet. The volume and variety of food that is disposed of appears to

provide dumpster divers with sufficient quantities of food in order to be able to select out the

goods that meet their requirements. Yet for vegan practitioners in particular, surplus food

was often supplemented with protein sources of pulses and grains that they would purchase

from local stores.

Despite much of the freegan rhetoric promoting the vegan diet, this element appears to have

diminished in importance over time, with many freegans now following more nuanced dietary

guidelines (Moré 2011). This flexibility was evident amongst the study’s participants. While

two participants did follow a predominantly vegan diet, the majority of the dumpster divers

identified themselves as vegetarian, while others would eat any food that they reclaimed or

did not pay for.

Lizzy, Oldmere community 1, identified herself as a vegetarian and had been dumpster

diving for two years. Lizzy explicitly talked about her decision to not consume meat, fish or

poultry goods because of animal welfare rights, specifically the conditions in which they are

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reared and perceived inhumane slaughter. However while recounting the food that she had

reclaimed the previous evening, Lizzy recalled taking home a packet of sausage rolls.

Exploring this further, it became apparent that Lizzy will reclaim non-vegetarian goods if they

are of ‘particularly good’ quality or items she knows her friends and family will want. While

Lizzy reclaims non-vegetarian items they are not intended for her own consumption, she will

redistribute them to other people that do eat meat.

Thus Lizzy displayed a more nuanced freegarian provisioning strategy that is more flexible

than vegetarian preferences. This is justified because the food she acquires is ‘post

consumption’ and thus does not support the consumption of animals. This idea of ‘post-

consumption’ emerged at several points during this study, referring to goods that have been

rejected by retailers and no longer held profit value within the market place. These goods

had lost their value for stakeholders within the system and as a result they became viable for

consumption without contradicting the resistance of capitalism or the benefits of plant based

diets. For Lizzy these goods have lost some of their exchange value and been de-

commodified. Lizzy stated that the reclamation and redistribution of these goods would

restore some value to the animal that lost its life for the produce. This statement implies that

for vegetarian freegans, wasting food is even less acceptable than consuming meat.

When Lizzy’s vegetarian diet was discussed in more detail further intricacies emerged. Lizzy

had been following a vegetarian diet for at least 7 years but had also recently attempted ‘to

go vegan’. She was motivated to change her diet because she felt she should try and limit

the environmental effects of her consumption. This was a relatively easy transition at first,

primarily because she was able to reclaim large amounts of vegetables which she

supplemented with produce she sourced from local stores. However it became more

problematic when she went on holiday to a Greek island. Being out of her routine and not

knowing where to get food or what ingredients were in the products, she felt it was inevitable

that she would eat something ‘wrong’. Pre-empting this diversion, she decided to eat what

she wanted. This meant reverting to a vegetarian diet but also purchasing food that she

wanted rather than reclaiming it from the bin and resulting in her ‘over indulging’ in feta

cheese and chocolate, until she felt sick.

This further illustrates a flexible approach to the food provisioned; Lizzy is able to move

through different dietary guidelines based on the food available to her and the wider

environment. Here the environment and her limited knowledge of it created a barrier to the

re-use and re-valuation of food waste. Thus to dumpster dive successfully is also dependent

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upon an individual’s ability to navigate the environment around them to access food waste

and to successfully interpret and assess produce suitable for consumption.

This example highlights parallels with Evans' (2014) recent study which illustrated how

intention and objectives of individuals in households are constrained by their environment.

While Lizzy had a clear desire to follow a vegan diet and to consume surplus food, the new

unknown environment meant she was unable to coordinate her intentions with the resources

available to her. Lizzy no longer had the knowledge she felt necessary to dumpster dive or

knew how to choose appropriate produce. This highlights a need for a greater understanding

of how practices interact with the built environment and tacit knowledge.

Like Lizzy, Si (Oldmere community 1) and Ted (Redmoor practitioner) could be

characterised as following a ‘freegarian’ diet. Si does not restrict his diet to any particular

food groups but will eat all food types as long as he is not supporting the capitalist system by

purchasing it. All ‘post-consumption’ goods are valued as equal as they support his wider

social and political values. Conversely, Ted identifies himself as following a vegan diet as a

risk aversion tactic rather than the moral decision that Lizzy portrayed.

For Ted, the decision to not eat meat and other animal derived products removes the risk

associated with reclaiming food from the bin. The majority of these goods require specific

storage and preparation to avoid contamination and food borne illness, such as refrigeration

and cooking to adequate temperatures. Yet when accessing food from the bin, it is often

impossible to know how long the food has been there or their previous conditions and thus

the freshness of produce is questionable. Furthermore, as freegans seek to minimise their

consumption more widely, appropriate preparation materials are not always accessible. As a

result of this, Ted chooses not to ‘risk’ reclaiming items or needing to purchase more kitchen

materials. Instead he relies on food that remains: fruit, vegetables, baked goods and pastries

and processed savouries, which he argues ‘can last for months beyond their sell by dates’

and still be perfectly edible. When not reclaiming food from the bin however, (for example

when he visits a friend’s house for a meal,) he is willing to consume these ingredients as

they will have been sourced differently and are perceived as being less risky. While Ted

specifically referred to this difference as an evaluation of risk, it is also likely that social

norms play a role in his flexible approach to consumption.

Based on these observations, the flexibility surrounding dietary guidelines seen among the

participants is representative of a modern ‘freegarian’ diet which promotes the re-use of

surplus food over and above animal welfare and a rejection of capitalist food systems. This

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in turn suggests that the process for selecting and rejecting food for freegans is not static,

what is selected or rejected and consumed depends on a range of other factors, including

social norms, perceptions of waste and moral values, which themselves change over time as

the social and political context we reside in, transforms.

Picky eaters

In contrast to the vegetarian and vegan diets highlighted thus far, based predominantly on a

commitment to ethical values or risk aversion strategies, participants were also seen to

select or reject food based on personal likes and dislikes. Si (Oldmere 1) for example, had

almost exclusively relied on dumpster diving and sharing of food for his nutritional

requirements for the 6 months prior to our meeting. Exploring this further, the only

occurrences where Si had purchased food within this period was when visiting family and

selecting coffee. When celebrating his mum’s birthday he had felt unable to refuse the offer

to dine out at a restaurant, as he was concerned he would make his family uncomfortable.

The norms surrounding the social gathering meant that his freegan values surrounding food

provisioning were usurped.

Si also displayed an interesting relationship with the provisioning of coffee. While he had

reclaimed instant coffee in jars and small sachet packs on a number of occasions while

dumpster diving, he did not like this type of coffee. He would reclaim this produce and keep it

for visitors and for when he was ‘desperate’ but coffee was one item that he was willing to

purchase regularly. Si indicated that he ‘needed good quality coffee to get out of bed in the

morning’, thus suggesting that his freegan values could be navigated and managed

according to how integral the produce is to his tastes and daily habits. Yet he did display

other ethical considerations when selecting what coffee to purchase. Si ‘would never buy

Starbucks’ for example, instead he was conscious to only buy Fairtrade stamped produce

from local and community based shops so he was minimising the negative perceived effects

of his consumption. This was sometimes problematic, especially when he was on the move

and could not find a ‘suitable coffee shop’ but was ‘in need of caffeine’.

In a similar vein, John (Pinemead) also demonstrated specific tastes regarding the bread

that he would reclaim. John and a number of other participants, identified bread and other

baked goods as one of the most frequently reclaimed foods. This was seen as a result of the

short shelf life of bread, especially freshly baked varieties which are replaced on

supermarket shelves on a daily if not hourly basis. When John first began dumpster diving

he would often reclaim everything he found, or as much as he could carry. However, over

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time he has developed a preference for certain varieties and will only reclaim bread if it is in

good condition and is ‘a nice batch’. For John this characterization is representative of a loaf

that was freshly baked and that had not gone stale, preferably wholemeal and seeded

varieties.

In contrast to his initial foray into dumpster diving, John would no longer reclaim highly

processed, sliced loaves of bread because he felt confident that he would be able to find

something nicer at another bin. This illustrates how the abundance of food waste has

enabled practitioners to develop preferences for produce as they feel confident they will be

able to source something of better quality or ‘nicer’ elsewhere. This mimics the consumption

habits that can be seen across retail floors the world over, where certain levels of quality and

variety are expected.

Despite this excess of surplus food, two participants perceived dumpster diving as positively

challenging the food they consumed. The unusual or unknown ingredients found when

reclaiming produce from the bin meant that they had to be more creative with what they

cooked and ate than if they were to buy the same goods each week. Bec (Redmoor

community 1), for example was a self-confessed novice cook before she started dumpster

diving, but continued visits to a large wholesale fruit and vegetable market brought her into

contact with a range of produce she had not seen before and did not know how to cook.

Similarly, Claire (Greenhill Community) had never eaten an avocado before she found them

in the bin. As a result of the wide variety and abundance of food wasted, dumpster diving

can both support and challenge individual preferences for certain foods.

Selecting food in consideration of stocks already held

As well as the characteristics of produce and subjective likes and dislike, the consideration

of existing stocks held emerged as a significant factor for participants when deciding whether

to reclaim surplus food or not and what to reclaim.

While removing items from the bin Louise (Oldmere community 1) came across five bunches

of bananas that were turning slightly brown. Discounting the bananas, Louise pushed them

to one side and explained that she already had ‘way more than I can eat’ at home. Delving

deeper it became apparent that Louise had been dumpster diving already that week and had

a glut of bananas that she was struggling to use up. The existence of bananas at her home

rendered the bananas in the bin useless, while on another occasion these goods may have

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been valued differently and reclaimed from the bin. This represents a frugal approach to

reclaiming which can be compared to more dominant food provisioning practices.

For many people, food shopping has become a habitual practice which occurs at the

household level on a weekly or bi-weekly basis. Evans (2014) identified how people

purchased the same food each week, irrespective of whether they had eaten the previous

week’s items, which resulted in a weekly pattern of disposal. In a similar way some

participants dumpster dived on a specific schedule; however items were selected with

existing stocks in mind. This appeared to be a dilemma for a number of the practitioners as

they sought to decide whether it was better to replace existing produce with newer, perhaps

better quality items, or to leave edible food in the bin. Practitioners did not take one

approach or another; they tended to make different decisions depending on the condition of

produce and consideration of alternative uses.

Louise’s decision to leave the bananas in the bin implies that it is in some way better for the

produce to remain in the bin as waste than be reclaimed and ultimately end up in the bin

again. This may be related to the perceived ownership of waste. While items remain in the

bin the waste is ‘caused’ by inefficient food retailers, yet if they were to travel home with

Louise and then subsequently end up in her bin then she would be responsible for the

waste. Thus unless there is an obvious avenue for use of the produce, it remains a ‘problem’

of the food chain.

Scott (Redmoor community 2) explicitly accounted for this, making a note of the number of

people that were visiting the community squat that day or week before dumpster diving so he

could more accurately calculate how much food he needed. This allowed him to only reclaim

the produce he was confident the group could consume. This illustrates that dumpster diving

is not an ad hoc reclamation strategy based on individual desires; it involves an assessment

of need and capacity.

4.3 Conclusion

The decision to select or reject food at the bin initially appears to stand in stark contrast to

dominant food provisioning practices in capitalist society, such as supermarket shopping.

Practitioners are dependent on what produce they find as to what they will be consuming

that day or week, with the frequency of provisioning also dependent upon the ‘success’ of

previous trips. However the data from this study suggests that there is a lot more choice and

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agency involved in alternative provisioning of food than existing literature would suggest.

Similarities between dominant and alternative food practices are evident as dumpster divers

utilise dietary guidelines and subjective taste to decide what food to reclaim. However,

dumpster diving is both a more frugal and cautious provisioning strategy as practitioners

seek to minimise their own production of food waste. This chapter seeks to contribute to the

freegan literature by outlining the characteristics freegans assess when re-valuing and

reclaiming food waste.

This chapter has illustrated a number of different strategies employed by freegans to re-

value food waste as edible food across dumpster diving communities in the UK. While

existing literature would suggest that divers take what they find and are grateful for it, the

participants in this study engage in a more complex decision-making process which takes

into consideration the visual characteristics of the products they access, the embedded risk

of goods and ultimately select to reclaim produce based on their own subjective tastes and

cultural understandings and experiences of food.

The quantity of food found in the bin meant that individuals often had the ‘benefit’ of

choosing what to reclaim and what to reject. Like many everyday practices, these decision-

making processes have become normalised for practitioners and are undertaken habitually –

there are certain produce that divers will always reclaim, certain locations and times when

they reclaim it. However where these practices diverged is in the consideration of

provisioning for other people. If a certain product was not needed or was not liked by a

practitioner, it could still be reclaimed if the individual felt they could pass it on to friends,

family or people within their network. This chapter thus identifies that even with dumpster

divers reclaiming food from retail bins, some food will inevitably be disposed of as it fails to

meet subjective requirements and is placed back in the bin.

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Chapter 5: Re-using Surplus Food

Literature to date tends to address dumpster diving as a single activity, the removal of food

waste from a bin, with little attention to what happens to produce once it has been re-valued

and reclaimed. Following the previous chapter’s account of the processes for re-valuing and

reclaiming food waste from the bin, this chapter addresses the strategies employed for

managing and reusing food waste once it has been reclaimed. Exploring the journeys of

reclaimed food waste (or surplus food for practitioners), this chapter identifies how the value

of and opportunities for reclaimed food changes over time and in different spaces.

All practitioners in this study explicitly sought to minimise food waste by reclaiming and re-

using it for human consumption. A number of different strategies for re-use and re-

distribution were seen. However, as reclaimed food moved across different spatio-temporal

sites, the value of produce and opportunities for re-use shifted. In order to realize the value

of the reclaimed food and avoid disposing of produce, practitioners had to manage these

shifting conditions. The characteristics of produce, and storage or transportation options are

not static they change over time, as food diminishes in freshness or quality or fridge space is

made available, which in turn enables and constrains different pathways for reclaimed food.

This suggests that it is not just a decision making process at the bin which is significant for

freegan dumpster divers but that food waste and surplus food is in a constant state of

(re)assessment.

Following the ‘second life’ of re-valued food, this chapter accounts for how practitioners

manage secondary waste as they must inevitably negotiate the rejection of reclaimed food.

Practitioners must ultimately decide what food to reject and when, as well as the processes

of rejection and how they are justified.

Practitioners displayed both an array of strategies for re-using reclaimed food and rejecting

it. The value associated with reclaimed food and the opportunities for consumption or future

pathways differed between practitioners and contexts. Despite this, a number of themes

emerged across participant’s experiences as enabling and constraining the re-use of food

waste, including the redistribution and collective consumption of food within social networks,

and limited, storage facilities. Some of the different strategies that practitioners employed for

re-using and rejecting reclaimed food, and the changing relationships towards food waste,

are now explored at key points of: the transportation of food waste from the bin to the

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household and storage; the storage of surplus food once it is in the household; strategies for

negotiating secondary waste, and; the tactics for redistribution.

5.1 Transporting and storing surplus food

For freegan dumpster divers, the bin is a viable site for food provisioning. Accessing food

waste from the bin is just one stage in re-valuing and re-using food waste. In order to re-use

the food waste that divers have re-valued as ‘surplus food’, the goods must ultimately leave

the refuse site and be consumed. While some practitioners in this study reported to

consuming biscuits, crisps and cake while dumpster diving (Louise – Oldmere community 1),

and even while still in the bin (Scott – Redmoor community 2), the majority of practitioners

tended to transport reclaimed food to their respective homes for consumption. The strategies

employed to transport goods differed across the participants, as did the methods of storage

and redistribution utilised once the goods had entered the household.

Practitioners walked, ran, cycled, and drove while dumpster diving during this research.

However the bicycle was perceived as the dominant mode of transportation for all but two

participants in this study. The bicycle can be seen as a material item embroiled within the

practice of dumpster diving and in many cases was perceived as a prerequisite for the

performance of it. The bicycle was justified as the mode of transport of choice as it provided

practitioners with the opportunity to visit multiple refuse locations more quickly than walking,

while also providing additional storage options, such as panniers, baskets and trailers. When

questioned, participants agreed that a car or van could be even more efficient; however

bikes were seen to be both more inconspicuous and more environmentally friendly attributes

that practitioners valued highly.

Nonetheless the use of bicycles did raise a number of issues for practitioners. Participants

reported regularly accessing large quantities of produce which were difficult to transport by

bicycle.. Bec (Redmoor Community 1) had been able to manage this issue by persuading

her Dad to drive her to collect and transport large quantities of surplus food for a community

event. In fact, Bec regularly recruited her Dad to support her dumpster diving activities

whenever she was unable to transport sufficient amounts on her bike.

Pete and Greg (Oldmere Community 1) had also experienced the limitations of bicycle

storage on their reclamation and re-use practices. Previously, this had resulted in them

having to leave produce at the bin that they would have otherwise re-used; however they

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had separately overcome this by designing and building additional storage capacity for their

bikes. Pete had built a trailer that attached to the back of his bike, which ‘had room for more

food than (he) could ever eat’ and a separate structure for the gas stove that he used when

running community food events. Similarly, Greg had constructed a side car attachment to his

bike that provided space for a fellow passenger or for larger quantities of produce. In both

instances the structures had been designed and built to maximise the quantity of food that

could be reclaimed and redistributed.

The extension of the bicycle structure to increase the quantity of food available for re-use

was unique to Oldmere community 1 in this study; however similar structures and eco-

friendly transportation developments can be seen by other freegans online and in other

social movement activity groups such as ‘Reclaim the Streets’ (Freegan.info 2016c; Time’s

Up 2002). In this instance, participants had utilised their knowledge and skill in order to

extend the use and function of the bicycle for freegan food provisioning. This in turn has

transformed how that group understand and perform the practice of dumpster diving.

Yet the dominance of bicycles for dumpster diving for Oldmere community 1 also proved

problematic when new members attempted to integrate with the community. Throughout my

first day with the group, several passers-by had engaged with the group for the first time

while a few friends and acquaintances had got involved in the activities. When the group

decided to go dumpster diving later in the day, four of the new ‘members’ also wanted to join

them, the majority of whom got on their bikes to cycle to a bin, leaving only Jack on foot as

he had not brought a bike with him. This posed a problem with the group as they were keen

for Jack to come, and generally to ‘recruit’ more people to the group, however going on foot

would be ‘too slow’. After some discussion the group decided to visit a bin closer to their

current location to allow Jack to participate in the dumpster diving, with the understanding

that they would continue to dumpster dive by bike later in the night.

Transportation was not the only issue for participants when a large quantity of food waste

was reclaimed. The storage of reclaimed produce also emerged as problematic once food

entered the household. For the majority of participants food that was reclaimed was stored in

kitchen cupboards, fridges and freezers following manufacturer’s guidance and existed

alongside food that had been purchased or provisioned in other ways. However when gluts

of singular produce types were reclaimed or accumulations of produce built up, the storage

of surplus food became a problem that needed to be carefully managed.

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For several of the participants, including Bec (Redmoor community 1), storage of surplus

food was particularly problematic when goods were being provisioned for community or

group events as larger quantities were required and the longevity of the produce for specific

occasions was questionable.

Even when produce was only reclaimed for practitioners’ own or immediate household

consumption, the build-up of produce over time meant that strategies for use in addition to

their own consumption often needed to be implemented. In a similar way to that in which Bec

recruited her Dad to help her transport surplus food; the practitioners often overcame

oversupply of reclaimed food by engaging people outside of the freegan community and

redistributing food. Holly (Oldmere 2) reported regularly filling up her housemates’ shelves

and encouraging them not to purchase food when she would be able to provision for them

with reclaimed food. Similarly Claire (Greenhill) used her boyfriend’s house to store food

when she ran out of space (which she would ultimately collect and consume herself).

Storage emerged as particularly problematic when produce require specific storage

conditions, such as refrigeration or freezing. Lizzy (Oldmere community 1) had navigated

this barrier by obtaining two small fridges from the online selling community ‘Gumtree’, which

allowed her to store the large amounts of yoghurts she reclaimed. While Lizzy was able to

obtain these goods free of charge, the glut of food waste available created the need for

additional storage. Even though these goods were second hand, this still led her to obtain

more material goods for storage which is in contrast to the freegan promotion of minimal

consumption and accumulation of material goods.

5.2 Managing and negotiating secondary waste

The reclamation of food waste from the bin does not necessarily stop food from ultimately

ending up in the bin. The previous section illustrated how practitioners implemented

strategies to overcome restrictions imposed by the mode of transport selected and storage

facilities to maximize the reclamation of food waste. Yet even when food has successfully

been transported and stored, the rejection and disposal of reclaimed food was an everyday

practice for freegans in this study.

Following surplus food as it journeys from the bin to the home and onwards to consumption,

this section now addresses the strategies employed by dumpster divers to minimise the

secondary devaluing and rejection of produce. While much reclaimed produce was

consumed, some of it was ultimately rejected as waste. The intention to stop food waste was

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not necessarily sufficient to stop surplus food becoming devalued and rejected as waste

again. Some participants felt wastage was unavoidable, they reclaimed and consumed what

they could and that was sufficient, while others experienced more anxiety ridden

relationships with any food they did waste and engaged in energy intensive and time

consuming practices to minimise this as much as possible. This difference in practice and

perception of food waste illustrates a fluidity and variability seen in the performance of

freegan dumpster diving.

5.2.1 From bin to consumption

The majority of goods reclaimed by participants during this study were consumed by the

practitioner or by people within their immediate household. In some cases practitioners

would immediately eat food they found when dumpster diving, but most goods needed to be

‘treated’ before they could be consumed. For John (Pinemead), treatment involved the

removal of goods from all packaging, the removal of dirt by wiping both packaged and non-

packaged goods with a cloth and submerging it in water, and then placing it in an

appropriate storage container, which might be clean Tupperware or placing items directly in

the freezer. Through this process of cleaning food, the physical and symbolical traces of the

bin are removed from goods. The majority of participants undertook some level of treatment,

yet this was not always as thorough as John’s description and applied predominantly to fresh

food that did not come in packaging, such as fruit and vegetables.

Once surplus food had entered the household and was treated, it was managed as a

standard food item, which could be consumed or not. However, a key difference associated

with reclaimed goods was the sense of time constraint. Surplus goods had often already

begun to deteriorate in the bin and/or had been damaged in some way, which impacted on

their perceived longevity. As a result practitioners reported feeling a pressure to consume

these goods more quickly when compared to freshly procured goods. Yet this shortened

window for consumption was not necessarily considered a negative attribute. The limited

edibility of surplus food encouraged some practitioners to be more imaginative with their

cooking and challenge their tastes as they were driven to maximise the resources they had

and not be subject to cravings or convenience. John (Pinemead), for example, saw the

limited timeframe of reclaimed food as a motivation to develop his cooking skills and get his

friends around to share a meal with him. For participants such as John, minimising the

production of food waste and maximising the value of the food he accessed was more

important than meeting his own preferences or cravings for food stuffs.

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However, the freegans in this study reported routinely salvaging more food than they could

personally consume, resulting in an excess of surplus food. Due to this ‘overprovisioning’,

alternative pathways for surplus food needed to be identified and accessed in order to avoid

the goods being secondarily rejected. The storage methods highlighted in the previous

section are just one way in which practitioners extend the edibility and value of surplus food.

Similarly, participants utilised pickling and preserving techniques to prolong the life of surplus

food and to increase the likelihood of consumption. Kaz (Oldmere community 2), for

example, had reclaimed several chilli plants that she used to make pickle chilli. There were

too many chillies on the plant for her to eat but by pickling she was able to extend the

edibility and re-value the chillies.

Yet these storing processes do not negate the requirement that produce needs to be

consumed to avoid wastage. Extending upon the previous example of Lizzy procuring two

fridges to store reclaimed yoghurts, we can highlight how the extended timeframe offered by

the fridge does not ‘solve’ the problem that her over-provisioning created, these goods still

remain open to rejection. The two fridges full of yoghurts were beyond Lizzy’s own

consumption capabilities; as a result she sought alternative pathways for these goods. The

redistribution of secondary surplus food to friends, family and wider networks emerged as a

pervasive strategy amongst the practitioners to ensure that produce was not discarded.

Participants reported regularly accessing networks of friends, family and colleagues to

redistribute excess of surplus food. When a glut was identified, practitioners would advertise

the produce available via social media, telephone calls, and text messages and during social

gatherings. Goods tended to be redistributed on a first come, first served basis, unless

certain friends or family were known to have a penchant for specific items.

While for freegan dumpster divers, reclaimed produce was perceived and treated as

qualitatively similar to freshly purchased food, this was not always the case when non-

freegans came into contact with the food. When advertising secondary surplus on social

media sites, practitioners were seen to justify the produce and explain the reasons why it

was still edible despite being rejected by the retailer. Similarly, in more face to face

interactions, participants reported having to persuade friends and family that surplus food

was edible and not of lesser value. When attending a food sharing event hosted by Oldmere

community 2, a young dumpster diver talked to me about her food reclamation activities,

describing how she had duped friends into eating binned food by cleaning it up and

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preparing it so they would not know it was from the bin. She had felt that they would not eat

it had they known and she wanted them to experience the food without judging it first.

A number of other practitioners also referred to a perceived ‘eureka’ moment when

‘outsiders’ engaged with dumpster diving and surplus food non-judgmentally. Participants

tended to describe a negative and conservative approach being unmasked when people

either saw or tasted surplus food for the first time. The physical engagement with surplus

food was seen as an enlightening moment as people realised it was no different to what they

were paying for in the supermarket and that reclaiming food from the bin ‘made sense’.

Claire (Greenhill) in particular referred to this in her own experiences with dumpster diving.

She had ‘turned her nose up’ at a friend who dumpster dived while at university but once she

had eaten some of the food her friend had cooked and saw the amount of food thrown away

she was keen to try it herself. This suggests that it is the physical interaction with food waste,

the sight of edible food being discarded and the validation of tasting food waste that acts as

a transition point where the value of food waste is realised.

5.2.2 From bin to bin

The minimisation of waste is a core objective within the freegan philosophy that was

displayed across all participants in this study, although the rejection of some food emerged

as unavoidable. While all participants cited minimising food waste as a key motivation to

dumpster dive and engaged in an array of strategies to re-value and re-use food, the

rejection and disposal of some food proved to be inevitable. Whether it was the leftovers

from last night’s meal, cut offs from preparing fruit and vegetables, or the shrivelled banana

that they forgot about, rejecting food was embedded in the everyday practices of the

participants. Practitioners responded to the inevitability of food waste in different ways. The

majority of participants felt that they ‘did their bit’ by reclaiming produce from retailers and

justified some wastage at the household level as unavoidable, however two participants

displayed more intensive attitudes and behaviours to any form of food wastage.

We have seen how re-use strategies such as preserving and redistributing goods are utilised

by freegan dumpster divers to avoid surplus food being devalued and rejected. However the

disposal of surplus food is also bound up within these strategies. Everyday waste practices

such as the disposal of packaging, leftovers and waste in the preparation and cooking of

food was seen across the participants interactions with food. While freegans re-value food

rejected by retailers, in many cases food was routinely devalued at the household level.

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Secondary rejection and the devaluation of surplus food were evident within the Greenhill

community. While sitting in Claire’s kitchen drinking tea, a bowl of mottled and blackened

bananas on the windowsill caught my attention. After some discussion it transpired that

Claire had salvaged these bananas four days previously from the garage at the end of her

road. She had eaten a couple when she had first reclaimed them and intended to make a

cake with the remainder, because they were now ‘too ripe’ to eat raw. She had been

particularly busy over the previous days and she had not found the time to make a cake.

When asked what she would do with the bananas now, she shrugged her shoulders and

said she always found a lot of bananas while dumpster diving so knew she could always get

more when she needed them. Claire’s preferences for a certain ripeness of banana, time

constraints and the ready availability of replacement bananas reduced the value of the

bananas and the likelihood that they would be consumed.

A blasé attitude towards the rejection and disposal of surplus food was also evident amongst

Oldmere community 1. When out dumpster diving one evening Greg had located and

reclaimed a bag of red onions. While he had brown onions at home, he preferred red onions

and as they were assessed to be in better condition, he decided he would throw away the

items he had at home and replace them with the newly salvaged onions. Like Claire’s

subjective taste for a certain ripeness of produce, Greg’s preference for red onions over

brown onions changed the perceived value of the goods. Furthermore, these examples

suggest that produce decreases in value over time and is are more easily rejected the longer

it remains unconsumed, and the more frequently practitioners dumpster dive and thus come

into contact with replacement items.

Such practitioners perceive the reclamation of food from the bin as a sufficient waste

minimisation strategy. While they intend to utilise the food they reclaim this is not always

possible and rejection becomes an acceptable pathway for food. These is not to say that

these individuals are not committed to the freegan philosophy and wish to reduce waste but

rather that they have done their bit by reclaiming it from retail waste and displayed its

potential value.

In contrast to this approach, the desire to minimise secondary rejection of surplus food

appeared to be more problematic and energy intensive for other participants. Lizzy (Oldmere

community 1) was particularly anxious about and sought to avoid any wastage of food at all.

Utilising the strategies highlighted previously, Lizzy engaged in storage and preparation

strategies to extend the longevity of produce. Lizzy also accessed a wide network of friends,

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family, colleagues, fellow students and local community organizations via telephone and

social media on a daily basis to advertise and redistribute surplus food. Despite this, Lizzy

continued to reclaim as much food as possible when dumpster diving irrespective of what

she ‘needed’ or could feasibly consume. This ‘overprovisioning’ is in contrast to the freegan

guidance of reclaiming ‘just enough’ and ensuring food is available for others to reclaim

(Freegan.info 2016c). Yet for Lizzy this was justified because if she did not reclaim it then no

one would and the food would go to waste. Delving further, Lizzy felt she was only one of

very few people that reclaimed from the bin and as such, it was her responsibility to reclaim

and redistribute as much food as she could. Thus this ‘overprovisioning’ was not about greed

or not caring about other people that may wish to access food from the bin, rather she felt

that other freegan dumpster divers did not exist in her area and thus she carried the burden

of reclamation and redistribution. This, of course, was not the case as this study alone

identified one other group of freegan food waste reclaimers in the Oldmere area. However,

the perception of being involved in a marginalised activity has driven Lizzy to reconfigure the

performance of freegan dumpster diving into an activity which is anxiety ridden and focussed

on redistributing food.

A number of other participants also engaged their social networks in redistributing surplus

food, with varying success. Similar to the decision process that dumpster divers undergo, the

individuals within these networks must decide whether to accept or reject the goods based

on a set of criteria. Certain goods, such as baked pastries and breads appeared to be more

readily accepted, while others goods were seen to be more difficult to redistribute, such as

yoghurts and vegetables. This appears to be associated with the perception of these goods,

irrespective of the nature of acquisition. For example, fruit and vegetables may have been

less desirable because they are readily accessible and low cost. In contrast, baked goods

are perceived as ‘luxury’ items that are not purchased on a regular basis. As there is no

‘cost’ associated with accessing these goods people are more readily open to consuming

these goods. An alternative justification may be the tendency for these goods to be more

heavily packaged and highly processed which could be seen as a risk aversion tactic.

The different strategies employed by freegan dumpster divers to navigate the disposal of

food illustrate the different trajectories open for surplus food once it is reclaimed from the bin.

Food that has been salvaged from the bin is not necessarily destined to be consumed, rather

the individual owner must continuously manage and value the produce as edible. The

majority of participants felt they were doing their bit by reclaiming food waste in the first

instance and that rejection of some of this food was unavoidable – the point of rejection was

based on subjective preferences and the availability of alternative produce. For some

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dumpster divers, the process of managing surplus food became more energy intensive and

anxiety ridden when limited salvage was deemed insufficient and greater impact was sought.

This difference in practitioners’ understanding of and relationship to unavoidable waste could

be representative of individual’s perception of their autonomy and ability to change the food

waste landscape beyond ‘doing their bit’.

5.3 Communal preparation and consumption of surplus food

The strategies for surplus food re-use highlighted thus far have been predominantly singular

activities that dumpster divers have performed on their own, yet the communal aspect in

reclaiming, re-using and redistributing food is a key factor for freegans.

For all of the participants in this study, dumpster diving was a collective activity. While some

may dumpster dive on their own on occasions, they all referred to other people and a

collaborative endeavour when talking about the re-use and re-value of food waste. The

community feature was not only evident when accessing food waste but also in the

preparation and consumption of surplus food. Surplus food was sought to serve at

community events and vice versa community events were organised to utilise surplus food.

While consuming food in a collective is nothing new, the regularity with which this occurs and

dynamics displayed between groups as they share and collaboratively undertake the

procurement, preparation and disposal of food is distinct.

When I met Bec (Redmoor community 1), she and two friends had been dumpster diving

every couple of days for almost 3 weeks to store up sufficient food for a group lunch they

were planning. During this period some of the items had ‘gone bad’ but these goods had

been easily replaced with other items from the bin. The ease with which they were able to

select and replace goods was partly due to the abundance of produce but also because no

particular recipes were planned or ingredients needed, they were flexible with what produce

they needed to reclaim. Several friends had been invited to attend the party one Saturday

lunchtime where they served a range of dishes including: vegetable and chickpea curry;

spaghetti salad; 3 cheese and onion rolls; and doughnuts. As well as all of the food

ingredients, all of the preparation, serving and cooking utensils utilised were items salvaged

from the bin. Table cloths were made from old shower curtains and curtains, plastic flowers

had been found outside the back of a charity shop along with plates and plastic cutlery,

condiments and dental floss have been found in the waste. The doughnuts were pre-

packaged and were a fall back item ‘in case people didn’t like the food’ they had made. In

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this instance the reclamation of surplus food provided Bec and her friends with the resources

to hold a social event at little cost.

Contrastingly, Emma, Holly and Kaz (Oldmere community 2) first set up their food waste

café concept when they were provisioning so much food from the bin together that they

needed to share it with a wider community in order to utilise it all. Here the collective

structures provide a space to utilise the food resource available to them.

The collective consumption of food in restaurants and at friends’ houses is a common

occurrence. However, the utilisation of surplus food for consumption and the collective

preparation of surplus food makes this distinct.

During Redmoor community’s gathering, everyone in attendance contributed towards the

meal prepared. While Bec had been in charge of obtaining surplus food, everyone else

chipped in to turn the ingredients into a meal. People arrived at various times of the morning,

each bringing some food or drink with them and doing their bit, be it design of the menu,

preparation, cooking or clearing away. The activities people undertook were not explicitly

allocated but people gravitated towards certain areas where they had experience, skill and

knowledge. The organization of Oldmere community 2’s food waste café was similarly

unplanned and organic. The day’s menu would depend on what food they had reclaimed and

what volunteers were around that day to help out.

Surplus food was also utilised to cater for ‘Food Not Bombs’ events in Oldmere community

1. In this instance the food itself and its quality was of far less importance than it was for

Redmoor and Oldmere 2. Excess surplus food provided an opportunity for Oldmere

community 1 to come together to discuss politics, community issues and support the food

poor. Several of the group had dumpster dived the previous week and reclaimed more than

they could consume themselves, so because of this they decided to arrange a ‘Food Not

Bombs’ event in the coming days. Once this information had been shared with the wider

group, 10 or so had got together to prepare the food, before allocating it out in smaller

batches so it could be transported more easily the morning of the event. Trestle tables and a

gas hob were set up in a local park and hot food was handed out to passers-by as a way to

engage them in political discussion. For some of these passers-by the food was a draw while

for others the political nature of discussion was more of an attraction; the free food was

consumed by both. The leftovers from this event were then gathered up and transported to

Greg’s house where it was later consumed along with several bottles of wine.

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Food is not just a nutritional resource for freegan dumpster divers, it is a community

resource that brings people together in the procurement, preparation and consumption of

meals. These are not formal communities which involve membership and hierarchy but are

groups of collective action surrounding political, cultural and leisure activities grounded in the

freegan philosophy and the re-value and re-use of surplus food.

5.3 Conclusion

The reduction of food waste is a key motivation for freegan dumpster diving, yet the re-

valuing of food waste as surplus food does not necessarily result in the re-use of surplus

food. Freegan dumpster divers employ an array of strategies to maximise food reclamation

and to ensure that food that is re-valued and re-used, either by themselves or by other

people in their wider social networks. Despite these strategies, the rejection of surplus food

is an unavoidable outcome of alternative food provisioning, just as waste is an unavoidable

outcome of all food consumption (Evans 2014). The limited lifespan of reclaimed produce

and the continuous availability of more, fresher, better quality food in the bin reduces the

value associated with these goods and increases the risk that these items will be disposed

of. Moreover, some degree of food waste is inevitable as we prepare, cook and consume

food. While some practitioners accepted this wastage as an unavoidable consequence of

their otherwise pro-environmental practice, others were troubled by any amount of waste

and employed additional strategies as they sought to make a bigger impact upon the value

and re-use of food waste. Food waste is not re-valued or re-used by all practitioners in the

same way, or at the same time.

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Chapter 6: Food Redistribution Organizations and the Transformation of Food Waste Practices

In recent years novel food assistance organizations have emerged which aim to reclaim and

redistribute food waste to vulnerable people. Organizations such as FareShare and

FoodCycle ‘fight hunger and its underlying causes by redistributing surplus food’ from across

the food supply chain (FareShare 2014d). This is a new breed of food support which

redefines certain classifications of food waste as ‘surplus food’ and distributes it to

individuals, community groups and charities in need. For these organizations, surplus food

can include a wide variety of produce, including food that is in oversupply, goods that do not

meet aesthetic specifications, or produce that is not projected to sell based on their expiry

dates (FareShare 2014h). Drawing on data from participant observations and interviews

conducted with two FROs in the UK, FoodCycle and FareShare, this chapter investigates

how food waste is re-valued and re-used as surplus food.

Both social responses to food waste, freegan dumpster diving and FROs challenge the loss

of value associated with food as it is placed in the bin and/or rejected and in turn, seek to

promote strategies for re-use. Similar materials, competencies and skills are utilised across

these two different practice formations, yet the way in which elements are linked and the

relationships practitioners have to these formations suggest they represent distinctly different

configurations. Following Hargreaves' (2011:84) call for greater attention towards ‘how

practices form, how they are reproduced, maintained, stabilized, [and] challenged’, this

chapter addresses how food waste practices transform and looks to account for the

relationship between FROs and freegan dumpster diving.

This chapter begins with an introduction to FareShare and FoodCycle, two linked but

independent food waste redistribution organizations in the UK. FROs engage in business

relationships with food retailers to access surplus food, adopting a formal approach to the

selection and rejection of food. Specific guidelines establish what can and cannot be

revalued and specific roles and responsibilities define who needs to do what to meet the

requirements of the business model. The relationships FROs have with surplus food

providers; the process of food selection and; the relationship with surplus food consumers

are addressed. This analysis is then situated in relation to and compared with freegan

dumpster diving. A number of similarities and differences exist between these two social

responses to the food waste issue which suggest they exist across a linked nexus of food

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waste practice. The chapter concludes by addressing how relationships between food waste

practices may transform in future and some tentative suggestions of the future possibilities

for the freegan dumpster diving practice.

6.1 Introducing FROs

Thus far this thesis has drawn on freegan dumpster diving as a niche practice that re-values

and re-uses surplus food to mitigate the environmental and social effects of food waste.

However freeganism is not the only social response to food waste. An array of practices can

be seen as resisting and reforming normative food waste practices. FROs seek out rejected

food and look to re-value it as ‘surplus food’, which can then be redistributed. Drawing on the

preceding chapters, attention now moves towards FROs and explores their similarities with,

and differences from freegan dumpster diving in order to offer insights into changing

relationships towards food and food waste in 21st century life.

FoodCycle and FareShare are just two of a number of FROs in the UK that seek to tackle

the food waste issue from a social enterprise perspective; others include Plan Zheroes and

Second Chance Smoothies. They can be seen emerging out of a growth in food assistance

schemes which look to tackle the growth of food poverty in developed countries (Cooper et

al. 2014) and provide vulnerable people with a source of food. Unlike traditional food banks,

and government funded emergency food aid, FareShare does not hand out food parcels but

reclaims and redistributes food to other charities and local community groups. While

FoodCycle does redistribute reclaimed food to individuals directly, it does so in more

collective and social environments than traditional food banks. FROs are defined here as

such because they represent formalised charitable organizations that focus on the allocation

of reclaimed food to people outside of the organization itself. These organizations can be

perceived as a response to the UK government’s suggestion that better utilisation of food

waste could generate social, environmental and economic benefits (DEFRA 2006). The

basis of this suggestion is twofold: diverting food waste from landfill increases resource

efficiency while the redistribution of surplus food can support people who are in need.

FareShare has a twenty-year history of supporting people in food poverty, becoming an

independent charity in 2004 with the specific objective of redistributing food waste. A

national charity, FareShare has 20 regional centres across the UK that manage the logistics

of accessing and redistributing food, as well as a social business enterprise arm which looks

to generate income from pallet fees from the food industry (FareShare 2014i). In 2014 this

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resulted in the provisioning of sufficient food for 16.6 million meals (FareShare 2014a).

Utilising the FRO concept, FareShare represents the first formation of a redistribution

organization.

FoodCycle is a more recent addition which first launched as a small community activity in

2009 to cook hot meals from rejected food and which has since developed into a national

organization with 24 ‘hubs’ across the UK (FoodCycle 2016b). Each hub is a local

community group that has bought into membership of the national FoodCycle brand, which

in turn supports local activities and provides centralized access to food waste for use via

national contracts (ibid). There is cross over between the two FROs, FareShare provides

FoodCycle with food for use by their hubs.

FareShare secures surplus food through partnerships with the food industry which it then

redistributes to some 1,711 charities and community projects across the UK, supporting

82,000 people a day (FareShare 2014e). The food that FareShare collects and redistributes

tends to be raw ingredients or packaged food such as tinned goods, this is then passed onto

charities and projects to be managed and prepared appropriately. In contrast, rather than

distributing raw ingredients for follow on preparation, FoodCycle aims to develop a network

of hubs across the UK ‘to create nutritious meals for people at risk of food poverty and social

isolation’ (FoodCycle 2016c). The central FoodCycle team coordinates national reclamation

of food and redistributes ingredients to one, or a range, of their hubs where it is then

prepared and sold or freely distributed as prepared meals to vulnerable individuals.

As charitable organizations, both FareShare and FoodCycle are presided over by a board of

trustees that drive the strategic decision-making on a national scale. The day to day

activities of reclaiming and preparing produce are coordinated by local teams of volunteers

while the administration, marketing and operations teams are made up of paid employees.

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6.1.1 Elements of FROs

Drawing on the participant observations and interviews, the elements outlined in Table 6 can

be seen to represent the core configuration of FROs practice.

Table 6 – FRO elements

Competence

Development of relationships with

retailers

Health and hygiene training


Preparation of produce


Storage methods

Surplus food access

Meaning

Charity

Community support

Food access


Retail partnership

Variety

Volunteering

Work

Material

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At risk/vulnerable people

Human body

Large scale transportation

Preparation facilities

Refuse site

Retailer

Storage mechanisms

Surplus food

Volunteers

Recipes

Guidelines

6.1.2 Relationship with surplus food providers (access)

FROs obtain surplus food through a formal contract with the owner of the produce, be it

retailers, restaurants, food processors or individual giving. This food is then utilised by FROs

to provide a resource to other partners, such as community groups, food banks, and

playgroups, or individuals. To access a sufficient quantity and quality of food waste for the

associated activities, these organizations engage in direct partnerships with a variety of food

companies across the supply chain.

As identified in chapter 1, the production of food waste is endemic at numerous points

across the supply chain. Food can be identified either through contact from FROs to food

providers, or vice versa, by food retailers as solutions for their food waste management. A

one off or continuous contract is then established whereby the liability of food donated is

removed from the retailer. FoodCycle has partnerships to reclaim the food wasted from

Waitrose, Sainsbury’s, Mr. Organic and London Food Market, among others (FoodCycle

2016e), while FareShare has partnerships with Sodexo and Cargill (FareShare 2014b).

These organizations rely on the formal relationships they develop with food companies to

access food waste. The decision to access food does not lie with the organizations here but

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with the food companies deciding when they are ready and willing to hand over waste. As a

result, FROs are keen to satisfy the needs of food owners, stating ‘we need to ensure that

we manage our relationships with the food industry so that they continue to see us as a key

partner in the management of their surplus food’ (FareShare 2014j).

The type of contract established with food providers can impact upon the routinisation of the

FROs practices. Some of the contracts appear to be continuous, where similar goods would

be collected from retailers once or twice a week. These pick up points would be organised to

ensure sufficient volunteers or paid employees were available and redistribution pathways

were identified. If one off or ad hoc contracts were established then additional staff would

have to be sourced and the redistribution of goods would be dependent upon the type of

goods on offer. This meant a flexible weekly schedule of activities needed to be established

across these organizations.

Combined, FareShare and FoodCycle diverted 8,081 tonnes of food waste from the bin and

provided 16.7 million meals in 2014 alone. Despite these impressive figures, up to 80% of

food organizations choose not to redistribute surplus food to such organizations (Morenoff

2002). This lack of take up tends to be attributed to the health risks and liability should

people get ill from ingesting unsuitable food. Those organizations that have overcome this

barrier, and do provide food waste to FROs, often implement strict guidelines surrounding

what can be redistributed in order to reduce the risk associated with it. This would suggest

that despite the FROs being in increasing demand, they still have a relatively small impact

on the scale of the issue and a large percentage of food is still wasted across the food

supply chain.

The reclamation of surplus food is promoted as beneficial for food businesses as it provides

a social service to people in need which is good for their image, while simultaneously

reducing the requirement for them to manage the disposal of produce, and the associated

costs. Thus FROs provide an alternative pathway for food waste that is both financially and

socially desirable. From the perspective of food businesses, this can be perceived as a

‘corporate social responsibility’ strategy, designed to promote the perception of the brand as

socially responsible which ultimately drives profit.

6.1.3 The process of food selection

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Through partnerships within the food industry, FROs intervene in the rejection of food waste

before it is placed in the bin. However not all surplus food is revalued in the same way by

FROs. FROs themselves and their network of food industry partnerships implement stringent

restrictions surrounding what can and cannot be salvaged and re-used.

FareShare can accept surplus high quality food that is packaged appropriately and date

labelled, including:

➢ Fresh fruit and vegetables

➢ Fresh meat/fish/dairy products

➢ Beverages

➢ Ambient (dry) foods

➢ Frozen food (food designed to be kept frozen)

➢ Chilled food (as long as adequate records of temperature control are provided)

(FoodCycle 2016d)

FareShare are unable to accept:

➢ Food that has exceeded its use-by date

➢ Raw shellfish

➢ Sushi

➢ Unpackaged prepared food

➢ Buffet food

➢ Damaged tins

➢ Split or damaged packaged food packets

(FareShare 2014g)

Each individual contract undertaken between FROs and food businesses will set out the

conditions of what is and what is not reclaimed. Food businesses and FROs themselves

have conditions that must be met in order for food waste to be re-valued as surplus food.

One of the UK’s leading supermarket chains, Tesco for example, have made a nationwide

pledge to provide FoodCycle with ‘fresh produce (e.g. fruit, vegetables and bread) and dried

goods (e.g. pasta, lentils and spices)’ (FoodCycle 2016b). Yet with FareShare, Tesco have a

more specific contract which redistributes only limited produce obtained from their online

store. This difference is a result of the business relationships set up between the two

partners as the conditions imposed by the different FROs are the same. Both FareShare and

FoodCycle will only re-value produce that is in date, packaged properly and not damaged in

any way (FareShare 2014f).

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Food that does not meet these specifications is not diverted or re-used, irrespective of

whether volunteers or a consumer would deem the food edible. This was visible within the

practices of FoodCycle when a donation of cream buns was made by a local bakery. While

the produce looked edible for the volunteers working that day, it was deemed unsuitable

because the dairy ingredients contravened the classifications for surplus food. The cream

cakes would have ended up in the bin were it not for one volunteer who offered to take them

home to his housemates. Thus it is the organization’s rules that constrain the re-valuing of

food waste, not individual practitioners.

For FROs this rigid characterisation, which separates food waste from surplus food, is a

necessary requirement to secure access to food waste. The guidelines they utilise are

complicit with health and safety standards which are employed to reduce the risk associated

with surplus food. FoodCycle’s CEO, Kelvin Cheung felt that without them ‘food businesses

wouldn’t take them seriously’ and that they needed to ‘work with not against retailers’ if food

waste was ever going to be reduced. This assessment constructs certain types of food

waste as unavoidable if any waste is to be salvaged. Tesco, for example, have made strides

towards reducing their production of food waste. However they do not seek to redistribute

meat, poultry or dairy produce, or goods past their use by dates (Tesco 2016).

In some instances the aesthetic characteristics of produce were also perceived as a

justification not to reclaim for FROs. When collecting the ingredients to make an apple cake,

one of the volunteers, Cat (FoodCycle), sifted through the crate of apples they had received

from a large food market, rejecting items that were bruised and questioning the market

owner’s decision to pass it on, wondering ‘why do they bother passing this stuff on’. By ‘this

stuff’ Cat was referring to the deteriorated quality of the item. Similarly, bulk produce would

not be accepted if one or two of the items in the pack were severely damaged or past

expiration dates. These examples suggest that the re-valuing of food waste occurs at two

different points during this process, firstly when a food business decides to redistribute their

food waste, and secondly when FROs utilise the produce. During these two points, the food

is opened up to differing interpretations which may result in it being opened up to secondary

rejection.

The different processes for re-valuing food waste represents a key difference between

freegan dumpster diving and FROs. As identified in chapter 4, dumpster divers assess food

and decide whether to reclaim it or not based on a combination of moral, social and

subjective values. This may or may not include meat, poultry or dairy produce past its use by

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date which increases the amount of food that could be classified as valuable. Freegans seek

to reclaim as much food as possible and assess food to identify any reasons not to reclaim

produce (see chapter 4). In contrast FRO’s undertake a more critical and prescribed

assessment on produce which has been established to reduce the health risks associated

with surplus food.

Despite this rigid assessment, the scale of reclamation and redistribution employed by FROs

suggests they may have a greater impact than freegan dumpster divers in terms of the

quantity of produce diverted. However the diversity of both produce reclaimed and food

businesses accessed by dumpster divers suggests that they reclaim a greater range of

produce than the FRO guidelines will allow. This suggests there may be a complementary

relationship between these two different responses to food waste where the breadth and

depth of the issue are tackled simultaneously.

6.1.4 Volunteers and the relationship with surplus food consumers

A core value for FROs is the redistribution of surplus food to vulnerable or at risk individuals.

FROs promote their service as ‘turning an environmental problem into a solution, helping to

feed thousands of vulnerable people every day’ (FareShare 2014k). This has undoubtedly

been successful with 15.3 million meals provided and 7,360 tonnes of food waste diverted in

2014 by FareShare alone (FareShare 2015). This is an attractive prospect when considering

the increasing trend towards food insecurity and resource depletion in the UK (Lambie-

Mumford & Dowler 2014). As a result, food waste and food poverty are constructed as

intertwined societal issues across FRO discourses.

In order to distribute food to people in need, FareShare and FoodCycle rely on a nationwide

network of volunteers. To enable this, FROs are ‘always looking for energetic and

enthusiastic individuals to join’ them (FareShare). Roles were advertised on social media

sites, locally in supermarkets, on job boards or through word of mouth, which asked for

interested parties to register their interest online or in person. Emails and notifications would

then be sent out with details of upcoming activities, asking individuals to highlight their

availability for specific shifts or roles.

The distribution pathways for surplus food within FareShare are highly diverse, with

numerous charities and community groups across the country as potential sources for food.

In contrast, FoodCycle promotes a closed community organization where disparate groups

can buy into ‘membership’ and become ‘hubs’. This provides the ‘hubs’ with access to

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surplus food that FoodCycle has accessed, as well as benefitting from FoodCycle’s brand

affiliation and other resources such as training and merchandise. Depending upon the

amount of surplus food that is accessed and the requirement for produce within a

geographical proximity, food will be spread between communities and/or hubs nationwide.

This is in contrast to freegan dumpster diving whereby the redistribution of food tends to be

more geographically constrained, as food is prepared and handed out in local public spaces

or between friends and family.

A key difference here is the construction of two different roles: the reclamation/distribution of

surplus food and the consumer, or in other words the service provider and the service user.

Within these discourses is an implicit assumption that surplus food is only appropriate for

people ‘in need’ who do not have access to higher value (better quality, fresher, aligned to

taste) food. This can be illustrated by the tendency for volunteers within FROs to provision

surplus food but not consume it.

During observations with both FoodCycle and FareShare, the consumption of reclaimed food

by volunteers was both implicitly and explicitly deterred. The unprepared nature of much of

the produce handled across FareShare implicitly deterred consumption of produce by

volunteers as food tended to need additional preparation and/or it was not easily accessible,

such as tinned goods. In contrast, FoodCycle volunteers were explicitly asked to avoid

consuming food until after a service period to ensure that the people ‘most in need’ had

access to it (Lucie, FoodCycle).

FoodCycle’s then CEO, Kelvin Cheung, explained that anyone could access the food service

should they need to but that they encouraged staff not to consume any food themselves as it

was for ‘people in need’. Here surplus food/food waste is constructed as qualitatively

different to the food that volunteers themselves would eat as they ‘were not in need’. This

implicit characterisation could stigmatise ‘vulnerable people’ and stop individuals engaging

with the service. This is in contrast to the freegan dumpster divers in this study who all both

reclaimed and consumed surplus food.

FRO participants were motivated to be involved for two dominant reasons, either to develop

skills and/or earn money or to contribute towards society by helping people worse off than

themselves. While themes of environmental protection and food waste reduction were

raised, all participants reported wanting to do something to help other people. The provision

of surplus food was one way in which to do this.

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Participants had responded to adverts for ‘transportation’, ‘cooking’, ‘café coordinator’ and

more general roles of ‘volunteer’ which encapsulated collecting, cooking, serving and

cleaning. All of these roles are advertised as contributing towards ‘Fighting hunger by

tackling food waste’, ‘where communities unite so that no good food is wasted’ (FareShare).

These statements highlight food waste, food poverty and community cohesion as key

meanings, in direct parallel with freegan dumpster diving. However FROs appear to promote

a formal and shared understanding of the work to be done and individual roles that are

required to work towards that.

Thus unlike freegan dumpster divers, FRO participants did not engage with these activities

as part of their lifestyle, or as a leisure activity, meanings tended to be associated with paid

or unpaid ‘work’. Cat for example, first got involved with FoodCycle because she wanted to

‘do something to help’ people in food poverty. While some of her colleagues had become

‘friends’ it was an ‘added bonus’. While Kelvin had first created the FoodCycle ‘brand’

because he saw a business opportunity, and he wanted to do something to solve the food

waste issue for retailers and consumers alike.

FoodCycle also took the innovative step of setting up the ‘Pie in the Sky’ food waste café in

Bromley by Bow, London. Set up in 2011 the café aimed to provide nutritious and affordable

food to the general public (FoodCycle 2016f). In addition to reducing food waste, FoodCycle

also seeks to provide a space to build social relationships and social cohesion within

communities by bringing ‘older people, mental health service users, people affected by

homelessness, low-income families, asylum seekers and refugees, and people who are

long-term unemployed’ together and giving them opportunities to learn new skills through the

preparation of food (FoodCycle 2016c). As Hannah (FoodCycle) describes it, FoodCycle is

‘helping people that can’t help themselves’, both directly through access to food but also by

challenging perceptions surrounding food waste and improving the lives of volunteers.

Thus for a number of the FoodCycle volunteers, participation with FROs was also motivated

by the training opportunities on offer. For these volunteers, participation was motivated by

self-improvement. These themes suggest that participation with FROs are not necessarily

centred upon food waste, but that the re-value and re-use of food waste is a by-product of

volunteerism. This is in contrast to the freegan dumpster diving practice which was explicitly

associated with re-valuing and re-using food waste for social, political and environmental

objectives. The Pie in the Sky café has since closed down after an internal strategic review

found that they were not making sufficient impact (FoodCycle 2016a).

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While FROs are not-for-profit organizations, the organizations must make money in order to

ensure that staffing, building, facilities and logistical requirements are met and that

community projects can be invested in. The Pie in the Sky café was just one example of how

FROs have done this, other financial strategies include government funding or grants,

private donations, selling food palettes (FareShare), celebrity endorsed fundraising events

(FoodCycle), food drives (FoodCycle and FareShare) and selling surplus food at events

(FoodCycle).

The attribution of financial value to surplus food in these examples contradicts the perception

of surplus elsewhere within FROs and freeganism. For freegan dumpster divers, surplus

food is post-consumption, it no longer holds value within the market place. While this

emerging trend does explicitly bestow surplus food with value, it does so by situating food as

a resource of monetary value to be exchanged, which freegans explicitly reject.

Both freegan dumpster diving and FROs transform our understandings and practices of food

waste by recasting it as a resource for human consumption. However, FROs further alter this

by re-valuing food waste as surplus food for vulnerable people. The act of reclaiming

rejected food for people who are unable to provision food for themselves otherwise is

promoted as more legitimate than freegan dumpster diving. As FoodCycle’s then CEO,

Kelvin Cheung, stated ‘we are stopping people having to rummage in bins… we are

legalising it’.

6.1.5 Shared elements

Exploring the relationship between FRO’s and freegans further, the perceptions of each

other were somewhat mixed. While both FROs and freegan dumpster divers were keen to

support all food waste initiatives, the method for accessing unwanted food and the desired

objectives were critiqued by the other.

The freegan participants in this study were not directly involved with any FROs, when asked

about to comment on FRO activities, freegans tended to perceive them as beneficial in

raising awareness of the food waste problem and supporting people in need. However, the

relationships FROs have with food businesses was questioned. Greg (Oldmere community

1) challenged these organizations for providing food businesses with ‘an easy option’, they

don’t need to change their food production or processing behaviours, but just find someone

else that can use it, at very little cost. Ted (Redmoor) criticised FROs for reinforcing

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consumerism by allowing volunteers to make themselves feel better about their own

consumption.

This is a strong criticism of FROs, however similar themes emerged in the narratives of

some FRO volunteers when they talked about their motivations for getting involved. A female

FareShare volunteer in her early 20’s reported feeling guilty about how much ‘rubbish’ she

bought, which had motivated her to want to give something back to society. Similarly FROs

could be critiqued for providing a service that should be the responsibility of the government

and the welfare state. For Emma (FareShare) the lack of action by ‘people in power’ and

‘retailers’ that waste so much food when so many people were going hungry in the world,

motivated her to ‘try do something to help’. While this was a positive motivator for Emma, the

increased role of volunteers could be perceived as depoliticising food waste and poverty as it

becomes the responsibility of civic volunteerism.

Meanwhile, FRO volunteers tended to have negative perceptions of freegan dumpster

diving. FoodCycle volunteer Hannah, had volunteered with a number of different food

charities since graduating from university 5 years previously, but dumpster diving was not a

viable option being perceived as ‘dirty’, ‘hippy’ and unnecessary when more effective

strategies were available. FoodCycle’s then CEO, Kelvin Cheung, also used this discourse

when arguing FROs ‘legalise dumpster diving’, enabling people to take action against food

waste without needing to trespass on private property, get dirty or redistribute excess.

FROs are able to reclaim a larger proportion of food waste by accessing and establishing

links with ‘national retailers’ and coordinating activities on a national basis. Furthermore by

promoting configurations that are more socially acceptable to wider society they are able to

raise awareness and engage a wider audience in affiliated activities, such as annual food

drives located in supermarkets as both FareShare and FoodCycle have previously done.

Thus FROs can be perceived as representing a transformed freegan dumpster diving

practice, which has in turn set in motion new hybrid formations where food is reclaimed with

the consent of food businesses. These transformed formations open up different pathways

for revaluing and re-using food waste. Yet some of these pathways and future practice

configurations could be detrimental to the practice of freegan dumpster diving as key

elements could be omitted.

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6.2 The transformation of food waste practices

Practices are not static they are fluid, emerging and transforming through a process of

negotiation between an individual’s existing commitment to everyday routines, subjective

norms and values and the contextual environment. Thus a snapshot of a practice, such as

this investigation of freegan dumpster diving, becomes outdated as soon as data collection

has been conducted, as practices are transformed through everyday performance. However,

trends across the data collected highlights different potential pathways that practice

configurations may take.

Identification of changing elements or practices can be problematic as it is often incremental

and concealed, only visible once a transformation has taken place. This means that the

conditions and processes under which change takes place are only visible with the clarity of

hindsight. Existing as we are within a period of transition surrounding our understandings

and interactions with food waste, a focus on change that is occurring at the niche level

provides a unique insight into the transformation of practices and could be useful in

recognising how food waste behaviours could be changed on a wider scale.

Changes in practice formations are emergent ‘both from the inside – as practitioners contest

and resist routines and conventions and as they improvise new doings and sayings in new

situations – and also from the outside, as different practices come into contact with each

other’ (Hargreaves 2011:83). Attention to the ‘entity’ and the ‘performance’ (Schatzki

1996:90) of freegan dumpster diving is a useful delimiter here as there is an explicit

interrogation of structural and agentic factors. Thus changes to the dumpster diving practices

are emergent outcomes as practitioners embed the practice in their everyday lives, linking

elements slightly differently, and wider social factors change the landscape in which the

nexus of practices exist and structure everyday life. Change thus occurs when the

embedded norms, values and existing practices of an individual practitioner interact with new

or transforming elements and/or shifts in the wider landscape.

6.2.1 Shifting practices of the dumpster

For the freegan participants in this study, dumpster diving simultaneously represents an

alternative strategy for accessing food and is symbolic of a wider rejection of consumerism

and capitalism. Yet reclaiming food from the bin has previously been situated within

discourses of homelessness and economic instability, and for many people still is. Greater

attention towards environmental sustainability, food poverty and the freegan rhetoric in the

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last twenty years has enabled food reclamation from the bin to be understood as a viable

political and environmental strategy. While it still remains a niche practice, the political and

environmental meaning is becoming more visible as news media portrayals become more

frequent and supportive of re-using food waste.

While practitioners situated dumpster diving as a resistance against dominant food practices,

numerous elements are shared with more dominant food provisioning practices, such as

supermarket food shopping. Food, food waste, supermarkets, bins, cleaning, preparation,

nutrition, health, storage, and resistance are just a few elements that emerged as co-existing

across freegan dumpster diving and are visible within dominant formations of food

provisioning. Similarly while a range of elements were shared across performances of

dumpster diving, variances were also visible as differing elements were embedded in some

individuals’ enactment of dumpster diving and not others.

These insights suggest two things: firstly, those elements coexist across different practices;

the same elements can be connected in different configurations which represent different

practices. Secondly, there is not necessarily one dumpster diving practice, which consists of

exactly the same elements; performances differ as individuals embed new elements into

their practice. Yet these differing configurations can still be understood as the same practice.

Therefore a practice entity could be better understood as encapsulating a cluster of core

elements which can be connected together, or to peripheral elements in slightly different

configurations to represent the same or differing practice.

We can think of this as a network of overlapping and interconnected practices. Practices link

together because elements co-exist across different practices. When elements are

repeatedly connected they form clusters. This is not one configuration of materials, meaning

and competency but a group of elements that are regularly joined together. Figure 6a is a

crude depiction of core elements that are clustered together in groups which relate to, and

overlap other clusters. If we were to view this as 3D then these clusters would have layers of

elements circulating within them which can hold different levels of prominence depending on

the person performing that practice at a given time.

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Figure 6a – Practices are formed of clusters of elements

It is via these circulating elements, which are shared across clusters, where transformations

of a practice can occur. Previously unrelated elements can become linked in an individual’s

performance which shifts the network of practices an individual performs (Figure 6b). This

shift can either be small and not noticeable or large and impactful. For example, the

movement towards a more ‘freegarian’ diet (see chapter 4) transforms the practice away

from animal rights movements and the cluster of elements associate with that, and requires

additional materials and competences in the assessment and preparation of animal based

goods. This can be realized at different levels depending on an individual’s already existing

cluster of elements surrounding the practice.

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Figure 6b – New elements integrating into a cluster

6.2.2 Future shifts for dumpster diving

The recognition of shifting practices over time implies that future transformations are

possible. Looking towards future manifestation of freegan dumpster diving, a number of

elements across participant observations could provide a basis for transformations.

Chapter 3 identified the emergence of ‘organised food reclamation’ practices for a number of

the freegan communities suggests that more collaborative relationships with food retailers

are viable within the freegan practice. Thus this emerging dynamic has the potential to

diffuse across freegan practitioners and freegan practice more widely. This variation of

dumpster diving provides access to food waste before it ends up in the bin, which

overcomes some of the perceived barriers of dumpster diving, such as the illegal and

unhygienic nature of the practice.

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Conversely, this transformation could also reduce the political nature of freegan dumpster

diving as there is no explicit resistance of the wider food system by ‘salvaging’ unwanted

food, or potential radical attribution through participation in an undercover or illicit activity. As

a result, this transformation could jeopardise the future of the practice for current

practitioners as the political motivations it currently satisfies may be eradicated. Similarly,

dumpster diving in its current formation could become obsolete as food waste is no longer

disposed of in refuse sites because the food industry will have passed it on to individuals or

charity groups before it is perceived as valueless. Consequently, this transformation could

open dumpster diving up to ‘fossilisation’ as elements no longer connect to form a coherent

practice and is no longer carried by practitioners (Shove & Walker 2007).

To some degree, freegan practitioners within the study desired the fossilisation of the

dumpster diving practice. Practitioners were aware of a contradiction inherent within their

practice where they sought to resist food waste yet were also living off of it. Greg (Oldmere

Community 1) argued that this contradiction was necessary to ‘kick start’ change, that if the

benefits of food waste were to be embraced on a wider scale then freegans needed to

illustrate how it could be used. For Greg this was a short term strategy to create awareness

of alternative pathways of food waste. The personal benefits associated with accessing food

from the bin would be replaced by the wider social benefits and he was happy with that.

Similarly Greg’s fellow diver Louise was explicitly aware that while ‘it’s great to have so much

food choice, ultimately we want to have no choice’. Thus freegans appear to embrace the

fluidity and temporal nature of the practice.

In addition to ‘organised food reclamation’, alternative future pathways for dumpster diving

could be realised with the increasing legal scrutiny of the practice. The legality of dumpster

diving is currently ambiguous: while many dumpster divers are reportedly escorted away

from refuse sites, very few are arrested or prosecuted. The practitioners in this study

reported increasing attention from the law and physical barriers from retailers to curb

dumpster diving and criminalise practitioners. The increased use of CCTV and security

guards in refuse areas, as well as locks on bins and barbed wire on fences, were reported

as strategies implemented by retailers to stop people accessing their waste.

If this trend continues and dumpster diving is confirmed as a criminal activity, the meaning

surrounding the practice could alter dramatically, with potentially differing outcomes. The

illegality of the practice could further promote the political ‘resistance’ of dumpster diving,

increasing participation by a more radical cohort as ‘political transformation’ is sought.

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Alternatively, this transformation could reduce uptake of the practice as those individuals

who seek environmental and social equity by more collaborative modes may avoid this food

waste and re-use strategy. Whatever the future pathways of the practice, the emergence of

‘organised food reclamation’ and the implementation of physical barriers opens dumpster

diving up to transformation and can create spaces for both fossilisation and diffusion.

6.3 Conclusion

This chapter has outlined FROs as an emerging response to the food waste issue which re-

values and re-uses food waste as a resource to overcome food poverty. The practices FROs

engage in to access and select surplus food and the subsequent relationship with surplus

food consumers have been identified. While there are similarities between FROs and

freegan dumpster diving, FROs re-value food waste as a commodity that, if better managed

could be financially and socially beneficial to retailers and consumers alike. Contrastingly,

freegan dumpster diving actively resists the commodification of food, and looks to re-value

food waste as a resource of social cohesion and environmental benefit.

Similarly, these social responses to food wastes differ in the role the practitioner takes on

when performing the practice and in the ultimate objectives for participation. Freegan

dumpster diving is an everyday practice of civic solidarity and provision whereby

practitioners and consumers become intertwined; they reclaim and consume the food and

share it wherever possible. In contrast more business orientated and structured

configurations are based on civic volunteerism. Individuals volunteer their time to reclaim

and redistribute food specifically for other people who are thought to be ‘in need’; reclaimed

food is constructed as illegitimate for consumption by non-vulnerable people and is thus

implicitly de-valued.

This chapter illustrates that food waste practices are possible on a larger scale and that food

businesses can play a role in this transformation. However, where FROs represent a more

socially acceptable configuration of food waste reclamation and redistribution than dumpster

diving, they do so at the expense of social equality and social transformation. The alternative

strategies employed within the freegan repertoire thus provide useful insights into how

norms surrounding waste are understood, enacted and resisted. Attention to both FROs and

freegan dumpster diving suggests that these practices can exist in unison as a large

percentage of food waste is unsuitable for FROs. Furthermore, greater attention towards the

coherence and clarity of risks and associated labelling information, could extend the

longevity and the future re-use of produce.

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Employing a practice based framework, the differences between freegan dumpster diving

and FROs and how practices are (trans)formed and (re)linked are explored. Resisting the

tendency to look back upon broad practice transformations, this chapter addresses how

different manifestations of dumpster diving at the local level could be suggestive of future

transitions and pathways for food waste practices.

While we cannot account for large shocks on the system, such as unexpected food waste

regulation, this investigation could prove useful for identifying how to steer the system and

promote more desirable pathways by addressing how elements and practices transform in

relation to each other.

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Chapter 7: Practice in Everyday Life and Across the Life-Course

Just as practices can transform over time, a practitioner’s performance and relationship to

practices can change. Drawing on participant observations and interviews with freegan

practitioners, this chapter explores how the formation and continuation of dumpster diving

can change in everyday life and across a practitioner’s life course. Commitment to dumpster

diving for food provisioning is fluid and sensitive to the wider social environment,

performance is open to cycles of cessation and re-uptake as practitioners move through

different phases of their lives and/or environments.

The existence of freegan communities supports this fluidity. The community structure

provides an informal space for new and/or returning practitioners to (re) engage with other

practitioners, the philosophy and how to ‘do’ freeganism in different contexts and or periods

of time. Informal access to a shared repertoire of food waste re-valuation and re-use

strategies enables movement in and out of performance over time. Community thus is a key

attribute for the continued existence of the freegan practice. In contrast, initial explorations

into FROs suggest a more temporary performance associated with scheduled volunteer

work. While allowing practitioners to move in and out of the practice, this relationship

suggests that it is less a lifestyle and more synonymous with civic obligation.

The following sections situate freegan dumpster diving as enabled and constrained by

practitioners’ everyday lives and in turn, how the performance of practices change over time

as they attempt to navigate barriers. The chapter concludes by addressing the role of

community within FROs and freegan dumpster diving.

7.1 Practicing dumpster diving in everyday life

For many people, dumpster diving would be perceived as an unhygienic, socially

unacceptable and marginalised practice. Within the freegan philosophy, however, dumpster

diving is a logical and legitimate activity that is regularly performed for social, political and

environmental justifications. This statement challenges some assumptions embedded across

news media and literature surrounding freeganism which treats it as a radical practice that

individuals engage with to signify their difference. While participants in this study outwardly

exhibited their dumpster diving practices and sought to educate the public and create

change by redistributing food and promoting the practice in a number of ways, for the

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majority of the time participants sought to embed dumpster diving within their everyday

routines of employment, housing, leisure time and friends and family. For many practitioners,

dumpster diving is just another food provisioning strategy that is more in line with their

environmental and social values. The practice has become part of their routine, regularly

enacted so that it has become less distinct and more normative over time.

Yet this normalisation and routinisation of dumpster diving is context specific. Participants’

engagement with dumpster diving for this study, at this one point in time, will not necessarily

result in a commitment to the practice across their life course. Practitioners can ‘carry’, ‘drop’

and, ‘re-engage’ at different points in their lives for differing reasons.

7.1.1 Starting to dumpster diving

Much of the existing literature surrounding freegan dumpster diving has sought to account

for why people are motivated to dumpster dive. Themes surrounding environmental

sustainability, social equity, economic resources and leisure have previously been identified

as driving participation and are evident across the participants in this study. However there

has been little attention towards when initial engagement occurs and how this manifests.

Drawing on data collected with freegans across the UK, this section accounts for the

conditions for engagement and how these change over time, identifying practitioners’

upbringing, higher education and engagement with social groups as key points of

intervention for initial engagement with freegan dumpster diving.

For some participants salvaging food from the bin was a practice they had been brought up

with. Scott (Redmoor community 2) had grown up in a communal living group and had learnt

to salvage food and materials from bins from a young age. Similarly Ted (Redmoor 1)

referred to salvaging bike parts and shelving units with his Dad when he was younger. This

had spread to salvaging food as he got older and became aware of the social and

environmental effects of food waste.

For those participants who had not been introduced to dumpster diving during their

childhood, university represented the next significant point for interaction.

The majority of participants in this study were undergraduate/postgraduate students or had

graduated from university within the last 2 years at the time of initial meeting and based in

medium to large cities in South -East England. These characteristics were not sought out in

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the research design but emerged as a trend from the data. Specific locations were not

specified at any point in the data collection; however freegan activity was most readily visible

in larger cities where several high education institutions were also based. As the data

collection progressed the South-East became more readily accessible due to financial and

time resources.

A link between freeganism and studentship can be seen within the existing literature where

many participants are in higher education where (Moré 2011) and youths are chosen as a

specific freegan audience (Edwards & Mercer 2007). Yet this literature does not delve into

why this proves to be such a significant point for freegan dumpster diving. A number of

themes emerged from this data to suggest that this is related to financial restrictions, identity

and values and the availability of leisure time.

Financial restrictionsThe monetary savings involved in accessing food from the bin are extensive and were

reported as a key motivation for engagement with dumpster diving. The average household

in the UK spends in excess of £85 on weekly food shopping, while for the majority of

participants minimal food is purchased in addition to the food they access from the bin

(Victor 2015). These savings were of particular importance for individuals in higher education

or those that were unemployed, due to limited monetary resources. The benefits associated

with cost savings were characterised as either a ‘necessity’ in order to access nutritional

food, or as an ‘added bonus’. The differences in perception appeared to be dependent upon

whether the practitioner committed to a freegan lifestyle beyond dumpster diving, and thus

relied on alternative provisioning, or if they were willing to consume in mainstream

configurations and had the resources to do so.

ValuesFor some participants, dumpster diving when in higher education was their first foray into

freeganism. These individuals tended to participate in some paid employment and/or

received financial support from government bursaries while in full time education (Claire and

Adam Greenhill community). As they had alternative incomes, the monetary savings of

reclaiming much of their food from the bin was an ‘added bonus’ that came with displaying

their political and environmental values. For these practitioners, not purchasing food meant

they could save money and as a result have more disposable income for social activities and

products that they would not have otherwise been able to afford (Claire, Greenhill

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community). Therefore, these participants do not reject consumerism but reject food as a

commodity.

In contrast, individuals who reported a stronger affiliation with the freegan lifestyle and not

solely dumpster diving, rejected consumerism and full time employment, instead seeking to

live ‘simply’ (Si, Louise and Greg, Oldmere community 1). This approach intensified the

reliance on dumpster diving to access the majority of food they consume as they reported

limited resources available to them.

TimeThe increased time available to individuals while in higher education also emerged as a

factor in the uptake of freegan dumpster diving. Undoubtedly it takes longer to provision food

by dumpster diving than it would to purchase items at a supermarket or market. Broadly

speaking, a number of retail bins would have to be accessed to obtain the same variety of

produce and items have to be sifted through and cleaned to identify what is edible and what

is not. For many people today, time is regarded as a scarce resource. Daily life is filled within

increasing working hours, and pressures to be successful, healthy, sustainable, political,

which is perceived as leading to a decrease in time for food preparation and in turn the

demand for convenience foods. Whether we are in fact busier today than we have been or

whether this is used to justify behaviours is arguable (Jabs & Devine 2006). Whatever the

‘reality’, students in full time education tend to be perceived as having more leisure time. The

time required for studying is thought to be less than typical full time working hours in the UK,

so students are thought to have a greater amount of leisure time available to participate in

provisioning activities that are more time consuming (Jabs and Devine 2006).

IdentityFurthermore, university is often a time when young people explore their identity and form

opinions about the world outside of the immediate household. New experiences, people,

ideas and expectations circulate and are ‘tried out’. Greg (Oldmere community 1) is one

example of this, first coming into contact with the freegan philosophy while at a university

seminar. Greg had never heard of freeganism or dumpster diving before but he felt like there

were some interesting points and made arrangements to attend some events the speaker

was running to see if it would suit him.

Participants who were neither students nor had been introduced to salvaging as part of their

upbringing, reported that their first contact with freegan dumpster diving occurred while

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engaging with other pro-environmental activities and social groups later in life. John

(Pinemead) had been part of a community ‘food growing group’ and had heard about

dumpster diving when another member had reclaimed fruit and vegetables from a corner

shop bin for fertiliser. When John went to do the same he noticed bags of edible bananas

and apples, reclaiming it for baked goods. While Jo (Oldmere community 1) had been

introduced to the freegan lifestyles having joined an ‘intentional living community’ in her late

20’s and started dumpster diving with ‘housemates’.

By no means exhaustive this section has outlined some of the key points of interactions with

freegan dumpster diving and made some initial insights into why participation is likely during

these key phases in a person’s life. This analysis supports the existing literature in

identifying higher education as an integral phase for initial engagement with freegan

dumpster diving, however it also raises questions as to what stops people from engaging

with freegan dumpster diving. Where existing literature would imply that practice cessation is

related to the end of university life, the majority of participants in this study had already

finished their degree and were still dumpster diving. Similarly, with a number of participants

that had never been to university or had re-engaged with the practice after a period of

cessation, this raises questions as to the factors that enable and constrain the practice over

time.

7.2 Changing practice across the life-course

Irrespective of the initial point of engagement with freegan dumpster diving, practitioners do

not necessarily perform the practice in the same way across their life-course. Performance

of dumpster diving can ebb and flow under certain conditions and cease to be carried out at

all.

The tendency for existing literature to situate dumpster diving as a youth based practice

implies that practitioners cease engagement at a certain point, yet how, when or why this

occurs is unknown. The recruitment of previous practitioners to explore this theme proved

problematic as individuals are not necessarily connected to networks anymore and

advertisements for ex- or non-performance would likely prove unfruitful. Instead this theme

was explored with existing practitioners who identified periods of cessation and with all

practitioners to identify what factors might change their relationship with dumpster diving in

the future. A number of factors, including: time, children, lifestyle, and location emerged as

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barriers that have contributed, or may contribute towards the cessation of freegan dumpster

diving.

7.2.1 TimeAvailable time was identified as a key barrier for the continued performance of dumpster

diving. While many of the practitioners worked in some capacity, be it part time or in

voluntary position, they envisaged a time in the future when they would need to engage in

full time paid employment. Full time paid employment and dumpster diving were perceived

as incompatible due to the timings and duration of their current configurations. All

practitioners with the exception of Bec (Redmoor community 1), preferred to dumpster dive

late at night or in the early hours of morning. Kaz (Oldmere community 2) felt that she

wouldn’t be able to continue with this if she were working early because she would be too

tired. Similarly Greg (Oldmere community 1) already reported struggling with the timings and

duration of dumpster diving for his postgraduate studies. Greg also felt that his fellow

postgraduate students judged him for coming into the office covered in ‘bin juice’ and looking

bedraggled after a night of dumpster diving. This fear of flouting social codes of conduct and

expectations was also identified by other practitioners as challenging their future

commitment to dumpster diving.

7.2.2 ChildrenThe introduction of children into the household was another dominant theme, perceived to

be a barrier for dumpster diving in the future. For Jo (Oldmere community 1) and Bec

(Redmoor community 1) the decision to have children and/or more widely the requirement to

feed young children would likely limit or stop them dumpster diving in the future. They both

felt that reclaimed food would be unsuitable for children. This suggests that there is

something different about the perceived needs of children and pregnant women that makes

surplus food unsuitable for them, while remaining legitimate for other adults. Bec (Redmoor

community 1) predominantly accesses fresh fruit and vegetables from a wholesale market

and felt that while an understanding of these issues from an early age would be a good

learning opportunity for children, she would not want to take the ‘risk’.

Furthermore the very act of obtaining food from the bin while pregnant would be problematic

due to the physical nature of accessing refuse sites, and dumpster diving. Further

exploration into this theme and validation of these fears was difficult to ascertain as none of

the participants had children. Since completing this study I have since come into contact with

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two dumpster divers who have a young child; how parents negotiate the risks associated

with binned food would be an interesting extension of this work.

7.2.3 Lifestyle Three participants identified periods where they had stopped reclaiming food from the bin.

John, Jo and Ted all referred to going for periods of between 9 months and 5 years where

they did not dumpster dive. For all three participants, the reason for cessation can be

characterised as a ‘change in lifestyle’. Jo (Oldmere community 1) made the decision to stop

dumpster diving because she wanted to focus on growing her own produce and limit the

amount of ‘junk food’ she was consuming. Jo dumpster dives now occasionally when with

people from Oldmere community but less frequently. In contrast, John (Pinemead) perceived

dumpster diving as politically ‘weak’ and not enough of a stand against the capitalist system.

For John the people that he previously dumpster dived with were more interested in having a

laugh and enjoying themselves. When he wanted to wear a high visibility jacket and engage

in dialogue with security guards and police, his fellow divers wanted to run away. He decided

to dumpster dive again after meeting a radical group in Pinemead that stole food alongside

dumpster diving.

7.2.4 LocationSimilarly Ted stopped dumpster diving for almost 5 years when he moved to a new city and

he no longer had people to dumpster dive with. This element of re-location as a disabling

factor in the performance of dumpster diving was also evident when Greg (Oldmere

community 1) relocated to a new town to undertake his postgraduate degree. He felt alone

and unsupported in his values and was unable to engage in dumpster diving. Both Greg and

Ted overcame this by joining pro-environmental groups in the region, seeking out like

minded individuals who might be interested in freeganism.

The role of other individuals and collectives thus emerges as a key factor in accessing,

withdrawing from and returning to freegan dumpster diving. This suggests that the freegan

community provides a key factor in providing a repository of knowledge and experience

which allows individuals to move in and out of freegan dumpster diving.

7.3 Community

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The importance of other people and a collective freegan presence displayed by practitioners

echoes the promotion of community cohesion and community action across the freegan

philosophy. However there is little agreement about the definition of a community, not least

because the very concept of ‘community’ has changed dramatically over recent decades.

Throughout the thesis thus far each group of participants engaged with has been referred to

as a community, but the validity of this description and level at which freeganism is a

community more widely is debatable. Where once the concept of community was embedded

within notions of geographical proximity and ‘neighbourliness’, a plethora of formations,

motivations and outcomes now exist. The groups introduced in this thesis can be described

as communities as they regularly interact with each other and share experiences of

freeganism and dumpster diving. These communities are informal, they were not designed

or recruited for; they are emergent, formed through the everyday performance and

interactions between people who are motivated around food waste issues (Brown & Duguid

1991). However these groups are not static, they continue to transform as membership

changes and people learn from each other. This makes it difficult to identify the boundaries

of the community and when change is occurring.

There is some advantage to theorising freegan communities as ‘autonomous geographies’

whereby individuals can access freedom, self-organization and support, ‘through a

combination of resistance and creation’ (Pickerill & Chatterton 2006:730). As well as

challenging the dominance of capitalism, freeganism is also active in constructing new

spaces in which to perform. The community structures displayed amongst the participants

are aligned to more creative environments for collective identities within the cultural turn

(Melucci 1995). While there has been a tendency to distinguish social movements as either

culturally or politically orientated movements (Snow 2004; Diani 1992) freeganism is both; to

be political in driving social change is part of the freegan lifestyle.

Using Lave & Wenger's (1991) ‘community of practice’ concept, the distinct freegan

communities in this study share a repertoire of resources surrounding dumpster diving.

However they also exist on a wider scale as all communities share an identity and practice of

freeganism. Here freeganism represents a ‘network of practice’ which links these disparate

communities, providing access to and the development of shared knowledge across

performances (Duguid 2005).

Situating freegan dumpster diving as existing within different levels of communities is useful

when considering top down interventions and information surrounding food waste.

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Communities foster more trust and represent a more deliberative context for individuals

(Middlemiss 2011). Unlike marketing campaigns which are designed and unleashed with a

specific objective and responding audience in mind, the community formations offer a

discursive environment. Rather than encouraging individuals to reduce their food waste in

the household through an information campaign, freegan communities enact and circulate a

stronger discourse of waste minimisation, creating a shared space to discuss and share

experiences and overcome obstacles, likely to be more successful than a leaflet. Through

this shared experience then, freegans are able to generate and maintain social norms

(Hargreaves et al. 2008). The foundation and structure that the freegan community offers

practitioners could be utilised to inform interventions for more widespread pro-environmental

food waste practices.

7.4 Conclusion

Drawing attention to what dumpster divers ‘do’ highlights a complexity in the practice which

has not been addressed to date. Data from this study opposes the suggestion that freegans

‘are predominantly male, in their mid-20s and from well-educated middle class backgrounds’

(Moré 2011:85). While the practitioners were predominantly in their early 20’s, a mix of men

and women from different socio-economic backgrounds were seen. Rather than this being

representative of a freegan demographic, the early 20’s age group and in particular the

attendance of higher education appear to be a significant point for initial engagement with

freeganism and dumpster diving.

Furthermore while freegan engagement does continue beyond this one point in time,

relationships and configurations change. Practitioners move through periods of intense

activity and periods of cessation or weaker activity of dumpster diving. The repository of

knowledge and experience held within freegan groups and their flexible and informal

structures, enables practitioners to easily move in and out of performance, despite practice

configurations existing in constant reconfiguration. The informal and multi-level structures of

the freegan community provide useful insights into shared practices and the negotiation of

everyday life.

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Chapter 8: Discussion

Freegan dumpster diving is a social response to the global food waste issue. Individuals

access retail bins to re-value, reclaim and re-use food waste for human consumption.

Existing literature surrounding freegan dumpster diving has tended to focus on individual

motivations for engagement. This literature has provided an insight into the factors that drive

individual practitioners to access a bin for food consumption at a particular point in time, but

fails to account for the complexity of the practice. This thesis has sought to add to the

literature in a number of ways by exploring: what freegans do when they dumpster dive

(chapter 3), the strategies for selecting and rejecting food waste (chapter 4), and the

pathways for re-use or rejection once food waste has been reclaimed (chapter 5). To enrich

this analysis, freegan dumpster diving has been situated in relation to the emergence of food

redistribution organizations (FROs), illustrating that food waste can be re-valued and re-use

in different and linked configurations (chapter 6) and furthermore, that individual

performance of a given practice can transform over time in response to life-course

transitions (chapter 7). Combined, this thesis contributes to the existing literature by

addressing how novel food waste practices are formed, transformed and performed in the

UK.

This chapter draws on some of the key themes that have emerged in this thesis and looks to

make suggestions for future research. Firstly, this chapter suggests that freegan dumpster

diving should be approached as an everyday food provisioning practice rather than as a

radical niche. Secondly, greater attention needs to be paid to the changing dynamics of

practices within everyday life and the configurations that emerge and fossilize overtime.

Thirdly, while the food industry has made movements to divert surplus food from landfill, this

could be of limited use if we also fail to critically address understandings and connected

practices of food waste, for surplus food is only a small percentage of the food disposed of

by food retailers. Fourthly, while the use of practice theory to investigate the dynamics of re-

valuing and re-using food waste has provided insights, greater attention to how

transformation in practices occur and whether they can be encouraged or constrained

depending on their ‘desirability’ for sustainability.

8.1 Dumpster diving as an everyday practice

Freegan dumpster divers think about themselves and their food provisioning differently to

how ‘we’, as outsiders view them. Using a practice based framework and focussing on what

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practitioners do and how they do it, this thesis gives a voice to freegan dumpster diving as

an everyday food provisioning practice for participants. Here freegan dumpster diving is

viewed from the perspective of the practitioner, as a habitual and normalised strategy to

obtain food that is embedded in everyday routines of behaviour.

Attention to the everyday practices of freegans also provides insight into pro-environmental

strategies for managing food at a grassroots level. For example, dumpster divers value food

waste differently to many. Food waste holds potential value; each item is individually

assessed for suitability to be reclaimed with an appreciation for the use-value of food across

a product’s lifecycle. In particular, while a product may not meet one individuals (or

organization’s) subjective tastes and classifications of edible food, participants considered

the value of the produce to other people and sought to re-use and divert food to other

freegans or friends and family wherever possible.

The greater appreciation freegan dumpster divers display for the use-value of food, both for

themselves and others, is a key point as it means that the provisioning of food is

simultaneously bound up with social and environmental equality, community cohesion,

political resistance, and leisure. Thus freegan dumpster diving is not just the act of accessing

food waste for individual human needs or desires, it involves dynamic and linked

relationships across time and space. Dumpster divers must negotiate accessing food waste

sites, accessing food waste in bins, re-valuing food for selection or rejection, transportation

of food and the consumption, redistribution or rejection of reclaimed food.

The waste minimisation strategies employed by freegan practitioners, such as redistributing

food, provide useful lessons surrounding better resource management which could be

employed on a wider scale outside of the freegan ethic. Similarly, the related social and

environmental benefits that such practices promote, such as collective food provisioning,

community cohesion, and package recycling, suggests that freegan dumpster diving

practices have much wider benefits than just reducing food waste. However, how these

practices can be maintained and scaled-up for wider social benefits is unclear.

Taking this into account, this thesis does not attempt to suggest that freeganism is a

scalable solution to the global food waste issue. Ultimately freegan dumpster diving relies on

the inefficiencies and ineffective management of food across the supply chain. However it is

interesting to look at this small sample of individuals and groups because they are largely

ignored by both society and the social sciences. If we are in a position to understand them

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better we can reflect on how we might encourage more socially and environmentally

sustainable behaviour on a national or global scale.

Yet, despite these sustainability credentials, freegans also appear to get locked into

everyday routines and habits which undermine their efforts to provision food in socially and

environmentally equitable ways. To successfully salvage food from the bin requires

commitment across several phases to access, re-value, reclaim, prepare, consume and/or

redistribute food. Food waste can appear as unavoidable to practitioners during any of these

phases. The time specific nature of much reclaimed produce also adds a limited time

dimension which makes wastage of reclaimed food increasingly likely. For some

practitioners, a commitment to re-valuing and re-using food waste is an anxiety ridden

complex decision-making process which requires the implementation of numerous further

strategies to minimise their own and food retailers waste production. For other practitioners

their aspiration and attempts to limit retail waste is resistance enough for there will always be

more food waste for them to try and reclaim.

This suggests that greater attention towards how different people manage food waste in

different environments and in different contexts is needed if we are to intervene to promote

more sustainable food practices in the UK. Attention to the different pathways of food waste

illustrates numerous alternative uses of food waste for freegans. Yet, ultimately, some food

will always be secondarily rejected and discarded.

8.2 Changing practices

Freegans can be seen as opportunistic, they reorganize elements of mainstream food

provisioning, making ‘use of the cracks that particular conjunctions open up in the

surveillance of the proprietary powers’ (Certeau 1998:37). The food waste practices

displayed during the data collection were both resistant and normative – they use materials,

meanings and competences that are recognizable to the mainstream but they reconfigure

the relationships in order to construct alternative pathways for food waste that challenge

existing food practices.

Practices like dumpster diving do not just appear fully formed at one point in time, they are

nurtured out of everyday patterns that reconfigure, reconstruct and transform everyday life.

Following this, it is logical to suggest that freegan dumpster diving has impacts on and

transforms other elements and practices as it is increasingly performed.

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FROs emerged as a pertinent example of transforming practices of food waste. FROs reside

somewhere between traditional food banks that hand out food packages to individuals in

need and freegan dumpster divers who reclaim food waste to reduce social and

environmental degradation. FROs develop relationships directly with businesses across the

food industry to reclaim unwanted produce before it enters the bin, reducing the edible food

placed in the bin and thus food resources available to freegans. FoodCycle and FareShare

are two examples of FROs which represent an alternative relationship with food waste which

could ultimately make dumpster diving obsolete.

Interestingly, dumpster divers themselves appear to have begun to engage in similar

activities whereby direct relationships with food retailers are formed to access waste before it

enters the bin. However FROs promote this engagement with food retailers on a larger

scale, while dumpster divers are able to accept a wider variety of produce via this route of

food reclamation. The FRO formation offers opportunity for wider engagement as it

minimises many of the radical features of dumpster diving and could implement strategies

across retailers nationwide. Yet this development could also be perceived as simultaneously

negative as it minimises the radical and resistant characteristics which are key facets in the

freegan toolkit.

FROs are in ‘competition’ with freegans for discarded food. However, this does not have to

be the case. In its current configuration, FROs will always reject some food which freegans

can reclaim. One option could be for dumpster divers to access goods perceived to be too

risky for FROs, such as meat and dairy; while some practitioners already do this, it is limited.

It is clear that further information from retailers could support this practice. Cooperation from

retailers would in turn reduce the resistance of the practice and again threaten the current

configuration of the practice. Ultimately, should wider food waste reduction practices be

imposed by retailers, freegan dumpster diving has a limited life in its current formation.

8.3 Changing practices of food retailers

The rejection of dumpster diving as a viable food provisioning practice on a wider scale is

based on cultural classifications of food in the bin as socially and microbiologically risky.

Freegans successfully challenge this characterisation by re-appropriating discarded food as

edible food.

Freegans implement a number of risk avoidance strategies to minimise microbiological risks

associated with food waste, including visually assessing produce, a critical review of product

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labelling and food preparation techniques. Such processes are standard throughout

mainstream food provisioning; however for freegans these are performed slightly differently.

For example, expiration dates are routinely ignored and their validity questioned.

Bananas, for example, were frequently reclaimed by all communities in this study. When

assessed by practitioners, the cause for rejection appeared to be the result of bruising or

ripeness of the produce. Whilst this limits the timeframe for consumption, for freegans these

characteristics do not make the bananas inedible. However from a retail perspective these

goods could be considered of lesser quality and value when compared to fresher stock

coming into retailers on a daily basis.

Recent developments have raised the profile of re-valuing and re-using food waste within the

public sphere and have highlighted the quick and easy social and environmental wins that

reclaiming unwanted food (by some) could hold. Campaigns, such as the introduction of

‘wonky veg’, and partnerships with FROs have been implemented with some of the UKs

leading supermarkets chains.

However, the abundance of food freegan dumpster divers come into contact with, and safely

consume, suggests that there is still a big challenge ahead if we are to limit the negative

effects of excessive food consumption and disposal. In particular, the rejection of the

reclamation of meat, fish and dairy is pervasive due to the higher risk of food borne illness.

This is mirrored across the freegan practice where this produce is also avoided or is

managed more carefully. For a number of practitioners this produce would be reclaimed if

the cause for rejection was known and/or it was stored appropriately in between the points of

rejection and reclamation. This suggests that alternative pathways for food could be possible

if stock management and food disposal processes were better managed by the retailer.

The outcomes from this thesis suggest that it would not be sufficient for retailers to limit their

disposal of ‘surplus food’, as this is just another socially constructed definition which only

factors in a very small proportion of food that is thrown away, and which freegans would

readily reclaim. Rather we need to address the very understandings and definitions of ‘edible

food’ and ‘food waste’ and explore how the food supply chain (as a cyclical relationship

incorporating all stakeholders from cultivation to consumption and back again) manages

these definitions.

However were this implemented it could ultimately result in the fossilisation of the freegan

dumpster diving practice as no edible food would be available to be salvaged. For some

121


practitioners this outcome was identified and appreciated as a ‘successful’ transformation,

however this raises questions about how individuals who rely on food ‘post consumption’

would access the food they rely upon to survive.

8.4 The application of practice theory

The utilisation of a practice framework in this study has been useful in addressing how

dumpster diving is performed and how formations change. I have illustrated the key

elements involved in the practice of dumpster diving across freeganism and the more

localised context specific elements, identifying how elements link together across different

practices. Employed as a framework for analysis, this has been invaluable. Typically in

theories of practice, practices are separated into specific domains with little attention to how

these crossover. By accounting for dumpster diving as a practice that reaches across

spaces prior to and after the bin, this thesis adds to research on how spaces and practice

domains are negotiated, from transportation, to storage and cooking. This requires further

extension to incorporate the practices of retailers.

These elements can connect in different ways for different people and can change over time.

If a transformation takes place between two elements it can have subsequent effects on the

ability of a practitioner to undertake the practice as it destabilises the wider network of

elements and practices that they are linked to. The effects of these changing relationships

between elements cannot be predicted as they occur within and as part of constantly moving

social and political environment, where a small change in one individuals linkage of elements

could be inconsequential, remaining as a one off or a locally specific manifestation of it could

instigate a transformation that ripples out and diffuses, impacting other linked practices as it

does so.

It should be noted that, a practice based approach also has limitations in understanding how

practices change beyond practitioners ‘carrying’ practices and transformation occurring as

they connect to already existing practices, routines, values and norms. Furthermore, the

boundaries between practices are often more difficult to identify than theory would suggest.

When addressing the relationship between freegan dumpster diving and FRO, for example,

it is difficult to identify a specific point at which the practices differ and when they might

become one and the same. This is not problematic when considering broad historical

transformations, as many applications have done. However, when addressing current

transformations at the local level this feature necessitates attention. The linking of a practice

122


approach and a multi-level perspective has been advocated by some scholars and may

prove useful for addressing how niche practices can diffuse (Seyfang & Haxeltine 2012).

In conclusion, freegan dumpster diving re-values food waste by rejecting the cultural

construction of food placed in the bin. A range of subsequent uses are employed by

practitioners, beyond the habitual and routine, to continue to divert food away from the bin

and realise the value it offers. Whether it is exploring new recipes, ingredients or preserving

techniques, and sharing food with friends, family or the wider community, food waste is re-

valued and re-used to reduce the social and environmental effects it imposes. As a result

food waste becomes a resource of political transformation, social cohesion and

environmental sustainability. Thus, while ‘waste is a logical and unavoidable consequence of

eating’ (Evans 2013:9) edible food waste is an unavoidable consequence of a dominant food

retail mode. Freegan dumpster diving illustrates how the negative effects of excess food

waste can be limited for social benefit.

123


Annex A

Community pseudonym Member names (pseudonyms) Interviews Participant Observation

FareShare Emma; unnamed volunteers Participant observation - 10.08.14

FoodCycleCat; Kelvin Cheung; other unnamed volunteers

Interview with CEO - 18.06.13; Interview with volunteer - 18.06.13 Pie in the Sky Participant observation - 18.06.13

Greenhill community 1 Claire; AdamInterview with individual participant Participant observation - 7.06.14

Oldmere community 1 Si; Pete; Louise; Greg; Lizzy; Jo

Interview with Pete; Greg and Lizzy - 13.05.13 Participant observation - 12.05.13

i


Oldmere community 2 Emma; Holly; KazInterview with one participant 10.03.14 Participant observation - 17.01.14; 10.03.14

Pinemead practitioner John

Interview with individual participant - 12.07.13

Redmoor community 1 Bec Participant Observation - 17.04.14

Redmoor community 2 ScottOne interview with member - 18.07.13 Participant observation - 18.07.13

Redmoor practitioner Ted

Interview with individual participant - 16.04.14

ii


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