Food waste - an introduction to contemporary food waste studies

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