The multiple ontologoies of surplus food

Global estimates suggest that approximately one third of all food that is produced is wasted (Parfitt et al 2010, Gustavsson, et al. 2011). Alongside this, a myriad of concerns, not least a concern for people who struggle to access food that is safe and healthy, has given rise to a host of organizations operating across the world that seek to move food that otherwise would be wasted from the commercial supply chain to the not-for-profit sector. This short article seeks to lay bare an ontological transition in the fundamental qualities of food as it makes this shift from being commercial food loss and waste to food that feeds people and has the capacity to support social good. Drawing on Mol’s material multiple ontologies approach (Mol, 2002, 1999, also see Law 2009, Jackson, et al. 2019), the article argues that once food has left the commercial supply chain and enters the surplus distribution network it ceases to be food loss or waste. In the chain of practices that move food along, throughout each step, food becomes a new thing with new affordances for enacting new effects, which are fundamentally different from those that arose in the previous step. As such, this article is not concerned so much with how food becomes wasted, but instead with what it becomes and the effects of that becoming as it moves from the commercial supply chain into the non-commercial sphere of surplus redistribution.