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Beyond the Throwaway Society: Ordinary Domestic Practice and a

Sociological Approach to Household Food Waste
David Evans
Sociology 2012 46: 41 originally published online 27 October 2011
DOI: 10.1177/0038038511416150
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Beyond the Throwaway

Society: Ordinary Domestic
Practice and a Sociological
Approach to Household
Food Waste

Sociology
46(1) 4156
The Author(s) 2012
Reprints and permission: sagepub.
co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/0038038511416150
soc.sagepub.com

David Evans

University of Manchester, UK

Abstract
This article offers a sociological analysis of household food waste and its starting point is a
critique of perspectives in which volumes of waste generation are used to infer the presence of
a throwaway society. Drawing on broadly ethnographic examples, the analysis illustrates some of
the ways in which the passage of food into waste arises as a consequence of the ways in which
domestic practices are socially and materially organized. Specifically, attention is paid to: 1) routines
of household food provisioning and the contingencies of everyday life; 2) the social relations
manifest in the enduring convention of the family meal and; 3) the socio-temporal context of
food practices. Taken together it is suggested that contemporary sociological approaches to
home consumption, material culture and everyday life can usefully engage with public and policy
concerns about the origins and consequences of food waste.

Keywords
consumption, food, material culture, social practice, waste

Introduction

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Sociology 46(1)

1985), the throwaway society thesis takes current volumes of waste generation as
incontrovertible evidence for the excessive, wanton nature of contemporary consumerism as compared to an earlier time in which our thrifty forebears were (imagined to be)
far less profligate (Strasser, 1999). Against this, OBriens work on waste (2008) advises
that moral critique should not be confused with genuine sociological analysis and demonstrates that claims about the throwaway society do not stand up to numerical or historical scrutiny. Allied to this, the throwaway society thesis betrays recent developments in
consumption research that have called for grounded analysis to counter the popular and
academic myths of consumerism (Gregson et al., 2007b; Miller, 1995). Notably, these
developments have shifted the gaze of consumption studies towards ordinary, domestic
and everyday social practices (Gronow and Warde, 2001; Miller, 2001; Shove, 2003;
Warde, 2005). These movements can be cast more generally against a turn in sociology
towards a focus on everyday life (Scott, 2009), personal life (Smart, 2007) and the home
(Hurdley, 2006; Pink, 2004). In spite of the glacial speed at which taken for granted
issues have been engaged with, empirical explorations of the relationships between
everyday life and waste remain thin on the ground (although see Hawkins, 2006 for a
theoretical treatment). The honourable exception is Gregson et al.s (2007a; 2007b)
qualitative study of household divestment and disposal which used empirical materials
to critique the throwaway society thesis and suggest that it confuses the process of ridding with the act (2007a: 283). Their research deliberately excluded the afterwards of
food consumption and so that is where this article takes its first cue.
In contrast to the neglect of waste in sociological approaches to everyday life; the
opening up of the familiar as new terrain of enquiry was highly influential in the appearance of a named sociology of food (for example Murcott, 1983). Moreover, food studies has long been a fertile territory for explorations of domestic practice (DeVault, 1991;
Valentine, 1999), everyday routines (Short, 2006; Warde and Hetherington, 1994), and
family relations (Jackson, 2009; Murcott, 1988, 1995, 1997). To the best of my knowledge, however, these accounts have not considered waste and more generally, very little
has been written about the disposal of food. Notable exceptions include Munros conceptualization (1995) of the conduits through which food can (or not) be physically and
symbolically disposed of, and Cappellinis (2009) analysis of consuming leftovers. Whilst
acknowledging that food waste is an important issue and one that is rightly implicated in
popular and policy concerns about food security and environmental sustainability, this
article is not concerned with discussions of how much food is being wasted. The analysis
that follows explores how and why food that is purchased for consumption comes to be
wasted. To do so, I present three in-depth and intimate snapshots of the households
encountered during a broadly ethnographic study of food waste and discuss some of the
processes, practices and dynamics that accompany the passage of food into waste. To
conclude, I suggest that food waste is a more or less mundane consequence of the ways
in which domestic practices are socially and materially organized.

The Study
The empirical material that informs the analysis that follows is drawn from a broadly
ethnographic study that involved eight months (November 2009 July 2010) of

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sustained and intimate contact with the residents and households encountered on two
ordinary streets pseudonymously called Rosewall Crescent and Leopold Lane in
and around South Manchester. I use the term ordinary to signal that the streets were
chosen because, following Miller (2008), I had no particular reason to choose them other
than attempting to encounter everyday lives as they are found without recourse to the
categories of social/sociological analysis. That said I chose based on my local and
residential knowledge of the areas in which they are located streets that I expected to
exhibit a degree of diversity. Participants were recruited by dropping leaflets through
letterboxes and following this up with successive rounds of door knocking (Davies,
2011). In total 19 households participated in the study (11 from Rosewall Crescent; 8
from Leopold Lane) and whilst this sample is by no means representative, the nature of
the areas in which I was working ensured at least some heterogeneity in terms of income
band, age, housing structure, housing tenure and household composition.
The fieldwork was undertaken to explore household food waste, however I anticipated that a blunt empirical focus on disposal would be problematic insofar as it would
risk foregrounding certain identities and relations that are not necessarily easy to talk
about or comfortable to confront (Hawkins, 2006). Aside from concerns about research
ethics, my suspicion was that this would make it difficult to recruit and retain respondents. Accordingly, I decided to investigate food waste in relation to broader practices of
household food provisioning and so the fieldwork explored the ways in which households plan for and shop for food; how they prepare, consume and eat it; how they store
it; and the ways in which they dispose of the food that they do not eat. In the interests
of informed consent it was made perfectly clear to all respondents that, ultimately, the
study was concerned with food waste.
In terms of carrying out the research I decided in light of sociologys growing dissatisfaction with its go to methods (Back, 2007; Mason, 2008; Savage and Burrows,
2007) that static interviews would not be sufficient. Indeed, a theoretical orientation
towards practice necessitates a focus on doings as well as sayings (Schatzki, 1996)
and this commands (although seldom receives) a methodological approach that locates
talk within on-going and situated action. Logically, this directed me towards participant
observation but it quickly transpired that ethnography in the strictest sense of the term
was not appropriate given the research at hand. Effectively I had decided to explore the
dynamics of what people do behind closed doors and consider the consequences of this
in terms of waste. This decision was informed by the idea that the home is where most
of what matters to people is happening (Miller, 2001:1) and so the most appropriate
place to direct a study of consumption and everyday life. However Miller and others
(Gregson, 2007; Pink, 2004) have also noted that doing ethnographic research in peoples homes is far from easy and not readily amenable to traditional Malinowskian
understandings of ethnography. For example it involves intrusion into private lives/
intimate spaces and this means that researchers are more likely to visit their respondents
than they are to live with them. Caught between the insufficiency of interviews and the
impossibility of ethnography proper, the research design warranted some further reflection on how best to approach an investigation of ordinary domestic practice.
In thinking these issues through, my starting point was Sarah Pinks (2004: 26) observation that ethnography in the home is necessarily multi-sited (q.v. Marcus, 1995) and

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clearly, the activity of household food provisioning incorporates sites and spaces beyond
the home. In practice, I adopted a range of methodological techniques. For example I
conducted repeat in-depth interviews with respondents in which we discussed the various ways in which they shop for, prepare, eat, store and dispose of food. Similarly, I
retained elements of the classical ethnographic toolkit insofar as I spent a lot of time
hanging out in respondents homes, their streets and the areas in which the study took
place. Here, my notes and observations were recorded in a field diary. Additionally, the
logic of multi-sited research design led me to take inspiration from the empirical realms
that have been opened up by the mobilities turn (Buscher and Urry, 2009) in sociology.
In this spirit, two of the approaches that I adopted merit further discussion.
First, I conceived of the fieldwork in terms of exploring the cultural biography of
things (Appadurai, 1986; Lash and Lury, 1996). By turning my attention to food itself
and exploring its passage into waste, my intention was to explore its social life and
social death. This involved me following the very literal movements of food for
example by tracking it from the supermarket, to the home, to the saucepan, back to the
fridge and eventually, the bin. It also involved a focus on the ways in which food moves
between categories and evaluations for example from raw ingredients, to a cooked
meal, to leftovers, to past its best and eventually, waste. The analytic thinking behind
this approach was that by turning my attention to the logic of stuff (Miller, 2010) and
following the thing (Marcus, 1995) I would be able to glean useful insights into the
processes and dynamics of household food provisioning. Practically, this involved sustained contact with households over time in order to trace the biographies of certain
foodstuffs from acquisition through to disposal. Seeing as I did not live with the
respondents, I was unable to follow every movement of every item in every household.1
However, I developed a number of techniques diary records, cupboard rummages and
fridge inventories in which foodstuffs could be made use of in terms of their capacity
to elicit talk.
Second, in order to resolve the aforementioned tensions between interviewing and
participant observation, I adopted the hybrid approach of the go-along (Kusenbach,
2003). Go-alongs involve accompanying respondents as they go about doing the things
that they would be doing regardless of the researchers presence and interviewing them/
making observations in situ. Again, the observations gathered here were recorded in my
field diary. The analytic thinking behind this approach was that it would thicken the
interview data by allowing for a focus on talk as part of situated action. Additionally I
anticipated that it would allow me to participate in everyday lives without intruding too
far into the respondents homes and private worlds. Practically, this involved me going
along with participants to the supermarket as they gathered their shopping, putting it
away with them, cooking with them and on occasion, eating with them. Additionally,
several respondents invited me to accompany them when they were having a sort out
of their fridges and/or freezers.
The analysis that follows presents three in-depth and intimate snapshots of the households encountered in order to explore some of the practices and dynamics that accompany the passage of food into waste. Admittedly this representational tactic is far from
conventional. However it is: 1) a logical outcome of a theoretical orientation towards
practice; 2) a suitable reflection of the methodological approach outlined above and; 3)

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the most appropriate strategy for illustrating some of the ways in which waste is the fall
out of everyday life. The households discussed in each case study were not chosen
because they are in any way representative of particular categories of household or
respondent. They were chosen because they exemplify some of the key themes emerging
from my analysis of these data (across all of the households encountered) in terms of the
processes underpinning the social life and death of food within the home.

Routines of Household Food Provisioning

This section explores how a mismatch between the ways in which food is provisioned
and the ways in which lives are lived results in the routine over-provisioning of food and
in turn, its wastage. Tony and Kirsty are a married couple in their mid-30s with two children (two boys, one is 11; the other 9) and at the time of the study, they had been living
on Rosewall Crescent for about five years. Tony is a plumber and Kirsty is a housewife
who assumes most of the responsibility for feeding the family (DeVault, 1991). They are
typical of the families that I encountered on Rosewall Crescent insofar as they identified
themselves as pretty much working class Manc.2 My first meeting with Tony and Kirsty
took place in their home and I was there to tell them a little more about the research that
I had invited them to take part in. After the obligatory small talk, it was Tony who
broached the topic of my research:
So youre interested in wasting food? he begins before quickly announcing Well, if you want
to know about chucking it out at this point Tony laughs and Kirsty smiles awkwardly, rolling
her eyes in a way that suggests she knows whats coming next. You should talk to this one,,
he goes on gesturing towards Kirsty. You could feed a family of four with the food she
chucks out. Its true, Kirsty notes as she fills my mug with a second cup of tea. By now she
seems to be laughing more comfortably. Week after week we buy all these fresh things
apples, broccoli, grapes, beetroot Tony starts and week after week we chuck most of it
out, Kirsty finishes. (Field diary: February 2010)

Immediately there is a hint that they routinely purchase more food than they eat. To
unpack this, the following is a diary entry in which they kept a record of the food that
they had thrown out:
Unopened bag of spinach, half a tub of salsa, hard bit of cheese, half a broccoli floret, leftover
pasta sauce, 4 apples, 5 clementines. (Tony and Kirsty diary: 713th March, 2010)

Talking around this entry, Kirsty explained:

K: This is pretty typical of what we throw out each week, yeah. Bad, I know []
and the trouble is, I know it is there and I worry so much cause I, I know that it
wont get eaten but I cant just chuck it out because of that.
I: Why is that then?
K: Well, there is always the chance that I might use it but beyond that, you uh
you just cant throw good food out. If I wait for it to go bad, off or whatever, I
feel slightly less bad about it.

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The idea that good food cannot be thrown out was common to all of the households
encountered in the study and they variously described themselves as worrying, feeling bad or feeling guilty about wasting food. It is instructive to note that whilst the
vast majority of surplus food ended up in the bin, it was rarely put there immediately.
More commonly it was placed somewhere else first typically the fridge in order to
keep open the possibility that it might be eaten at some point in the future. However in
the meantime, food is susceptible to rapid decay such that it was often rendered inedible
before these possibilities were actualized. To give an example from my fieldwork with
Tony and Kirsty: whilst going through the items in their fridge, they discussed a half
eaten red pepper that had been used for a spag bol that they could not find a use for
because it [the weather] is cold and this is only good for salads. They suggested that
it might get used for an omelette or something but when I returned to their home a
week later to talk through the items in the fridge again, they told me that it had now
gone soft and wrinkly, was no longer of any use and consequently, Tony put it in the
bin. Throughout the study, households enacted the disposal of food via this two stage
holding process (Hetherington, 2004) suggesting that there is nothing careless or carefree about the acts of binning encountered here (see also Gregson et al., 2007a). To the
contrary, it indicates that households are following very specific procedures in order
to manage the residual value of discarded foodstuffs and ameliorate anxieties about
its wastage.
Returning now to the items in the diary, Kirsty discussed each item in turn. First, the
broccoli:
K: Well yeah, you see I use some of it but I, we, dont tend to use the whole thing
before it goes off [] and I am not the type who can just chuck stuff together
out of leftovers and so if there is no use for it, it goes.
Throughout the study, Kirsty continuously affirmed in conversation and through my
observations of how she prepares meals that her cooking style is not one of improvising
meals out of what is left in the fridge or cupboards (Halkier, 2009). In addition to these
issues of confidence and competence (which are most likely matters of biography and
background), the domestic context in which she provisions food helps to explain the difficulties she encountered in trying to find a use for leftover ingredients. Her food practices in common with many of the families encountered were situated in a household
where the culinary repertoire is relatively fixed. It is instructive here to think about the
activity of household food provisioning as a family practice (Morgan, 1996) a way of
doing family in the realm of everyday routines. Indeed, it is well understood that those
who assume responsibility for this activity (typically women) enact familial relations by
giving consideration to the preferences and tastes of others within the household
(Burridge and Barker, 2009; DeVault, 1991). Viewed as such, it is perhaps not surprising
that Kirsty (and others) would cook tried and tested recipes instead of improvising and
cooking a meal that would find a use for leftover ingredients (such as the broccoli). The
fall out of this, of course, is that certain ingredients remain unused and in turn, end up
being wasted.

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Next, she discussed the spinach and fruit:

K: That, well when we shop I always try and get mainly healthy stuff in. That
explains the apples and or er clementines as well before you ask [] and some
weeks we are quite healthy, some weeks we do eat these things.
I: You shop the same each week?
K: Erm, yes [] Well, every week or two, ten days probably.
Tony and Kirsty provision food in line with the imperative to eat healthily. However as the
fruit and the spinach attest, buying healthy food does not necessarily mean that healthy
food is eaten. This alone does not explain why food gets wasted. In common with most of
the families encountered, Tony and Kirsty purchased food at relatively fixed intervals and
through accompanying them as they did so I discovered that they tended to buy roughly
the same things each time.3 Whilst they did not plan what they were going to eat meal by
meal; there was certainly a tacit expectation that certain dishes would be eaten (recalling
the fixed culinary repertoire) in the periods between shopping trips. These repetitive routines of food provisioning were easily thrown out of balance by the rather more fluid
nature of the ways in which lives are lived. To give an example of how this mismatch
results in waste: on one occasion I went shopping with Kirsty at a time when they had run
out of a lot of ingredients required to cook the tried and tested recipes for the following ten
days. However, they had not run out of everything and so they still had items from a previous shopping trip (an unopened packet of green beans and a half eaten bag of satsumas) in
the fridge that might under different circumstances have been eaten before they went
shopping again.4 Given that they purchase the same things each time, this shopping trip
saw the acquisition of a new packet of green beans and a new bag of satsumas. As these
got put in the fridge, Kirsty explained to me that she knew that there was no way that she
would be able to find a use for their older counterparts and so she put them in the bin.
Finally, she discussed the leftover pasta sauce:
That was leftovers from our tea a few nights earlier. You dont just chuck straight out whats left
in the pot, do you? [] it goes in Tupperware and you whack it in the fridge cause you might
have it later, for lunch but [laughs] as you know, that doesnt happen with me.

Her laughter refers to incidents elsewhere in the study where she had made light of my
being around when she was doing something that would prevent her from eating leftovers.
To give a notable example:
Following my interview with Sadie,5 I take myself off to the greasy spoon down the road from
RC to kill some time and write some notes. Whilst there, I see Kirsty in the takeaway section. I
smile at her and she throws her arms up, laughs and announces You got me! before explaining
that she often comes in here on the days that she is at home to get out of the house and treat
herself. (Field diary: February 2010)

Those who are given to moralizing about acts of wasting would no doubt suggest
that Kirsty could just as easily have stayed at home and eaten the leftovers. However

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suggestions such as these miss the point that Kirstys position as housewife carries
certain structural risks of boredom and isolation (Oakley, 1971; Pink, 2004). In the
example above, she went on to explain that getting out of the house allows her to feel
part of the world and so here, the perfectly understandable expectation of taking respite
from the home and the work of household management can be used to explain why certain
foodstuffs go uneaten and in turn, wasted.

Eating as a Family?
This section illustrates how the social relations manifest in the enduring convention of
the family meal can result in food waste. Heather and Phil are a married couple in their
late 30s who have a seven-year-old son and five-year-old daughter. At the time of the
study, they had been living on Leopold Lane for just a few months having relocated to
Manchester from a semi-rural town in the West Midlands. Phil has a managerial role in
an I.T. firm although he identified himself as having solid working class roots. Heather
described herself as coming from a well to do family and at the time of the study, she
was taking time out of paid employment in order to be around more for their children.6
Heather assumes the bulk of responsibility for feeding the family and the following
excerpt from my field-notes provides a glimpse at how she goes about doing so:
As we go around, Heather offers detailed reflections on what she is buying. All of these
descriptions involve balancing out concerns about her family eating properly with concerns
about her family eating at home or at all. She explains how Phil tends to eat out if there is too
much rabbit food at home and how she is trying out new foods on her children, who are
quite fussy and would rather not eat than eat something that they do not want. She explains
how she goes off plan (that she and Phil put together) and ends up buying more food than they
really need. (Field diary: February 2010)

Immediately there is a hint that Heather buys more food than the family can or will
eat and that this is a result of her continuing efforts to ensure that they eat properly
coupled with her having to buy fail safe ingredients for back-up meals in case (or
when) Phil and the children refuse what she is trying out. These observations are borne
out in the following excerpt of recorded conversation:
H: [A]nd we end up with just way too much food, simply food that just isnt or, uh,
wont be eaten. I mean, I, theres food that I cook for the kids that they just dont
touch or ingredients going unused cause Ill say to Phil I dunno Shall we
have a moussaka? to which he will ask whats in it, I will tell him and he comes
back with I dont like aubergine.
P: Im not that bad.
H: Well, you dont always want to try new things.
Phil responded by suggesting that the picture offered by Heather does not adequately
explain why they end up with too much food:

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P: OK, thats fair, but my line is that I hate that we end up with lots of food that we
end up throwing out. Thats not right in my book but then neither is wasting the
amount of money that we must be. Maybe I could be a bit better but I suppose I
just like what I like simple stuff that probably isnt Same for the kids I
mean, kids they dont like rich food or poncy stuff.
H: Hmm, not sure I am trying to inflict anything too pretentious on you all, I am just
trying to make sure we all eat right.
P: Fine, and I appreciate that but me and the kids are happy with meat, spuds and
two veg and that never harmed anyone.
In Phils account, the problem is not his unwillingness to eat properly; it is the conflict
between his definition of eating properly (simple, traditional foods that he positions as
perfectly healthy) and Heathers (healthy food, cooked from scratch and incorporating a
variety of ethnic cuisines see Bugge and Almas, 2006; Halkier, 2009; Mitchell, 1999;
Short, 2006). At issue here are differences in taste and according to Bourdieu (1984, see
also Warde, 1997) tastes are social, representing a key mechanism through which classbased processes of classification and distinction take place. In the example above, this
point is highlighted by Phil and Heathers categorization of food as (or not) poncy and
pretentious. These conflicts in taste were a consistent feature of my encounters with
this household. On one occasion, Heather broached the issue and informed me that they
come about due to Phil having a different background to her and suggested that he
reverts to type when they argue about these things.
Returning to the excerpt at hand, Phil went on to explain:
P: If we ate that and you had what you wanted, we probably wouldnt end up buying
so much food.
H: Perhaps, but it is important to eat as a family, together dont you think?
Notwithstanding the fact that it would be Heather who cooks the meals, Phil is probably
right and more to the point, this suggestion could well reduce the amount of food that
they waste. However in the time that I spent with this household, they continued to
provision and waste food in the ways described above. Of course deeply entrenched
household routines are not likely to change automatically in light of the recognition that
they could waste less and again, it is important to recognize the family context in which
their food practices are located.7 It is well understood that the family meal is a site
through which family relations are constituted and expressed (DeVault, 1991; Jackson,
2009; Murcott, 1997). Indeed, it is useful to interpret the family meal as an activity
through which families are displayed as well as done (Finch, 2007: 66) insofar is it carries
strong cultural connotations of and meanings associated with family. Viewed as such,
and despite her dislike of wasting food (and money, and time), Heathers commitment
to the idea of eating as family can be seen as an allegory for her commitment to Phil and
their children. Her expressions of love and devotion are manifest in her continuing
efforts to ensure that her family eat properly (Charles and Kerr, 1988; Murcott, 1983)
but also in her provision of back-up meals to avoid complaint (Burridge and Barker,

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2009). In the meantime the food that Phil and the children refuse to eat becomes obsolete
and, ultimately, wasted.

The Rhythms of Everyday Life

Staying on Leopold Lane, this section explores the socio-temporal context of food
practices and food waste. To do so, it moves away from discussions of feeding the family
and instead focuses on a single person household. Tamsin is in her mid-20s and at the
time of the study she had been living in a rented one bedroom flat in a converted Victorian
property for about nine months. Tamsin identified herself as terribly middle class and
as such, is broadly typical of the single people, young couples and house-sharers that I
encountered. She first came to Manchester as an undergraduate student and following
her graduation, she decided to stay because she got a job in marketing that she really
wanted. Her employment requires her to travel away from Manchester frequently and
she told me that she does not know where she is going to be from one moment to the
next. This sense of dislocation characterized her discussions around food provisioning.
Looking through her fridge, she explained that:
T: At any point in time, there is very little in my fridge just a bit of booze, condiments erm, probably some cheese and something going off that I will have to
throw out sooner rather than later [] The way my life is, I just try not to buy too
much that can go off fresh and perishable stuff so I try to avoid it.
I: But you do buy perishable stuff, right?
T: Yes, sorry wasnt clearwhen I am at home for a few days in a row I will get
stuff in to cook properly
I: Properly?
T: Uh-uh, yeah, I like to look after myself properly.
I: Uh huh.
T: Yeah, you know cooking meals from scratch, healthy meals using fresh ingredients and not toast or takeaways or snacks or pasta with nothing [] but when
you are [on your] own, you end up buying too much and cooking too much.
I: How do you mean?
T: Erm well if a recipe calls for, say, like, five different ingredients and you buy
them all then, um, well you dont buy them in the quantities that you need them
so there is always five lots of stuff left over.
At one level, the problem for Tamsin relates to material infrastructures of provision insofar as proper ingredients are not made available in quantities that are suitable for single
person living. At another level, the problem is one of time. She went on to explain:
T: [A]ll this food then sits in the cupboards or fridges when I go off to London or
Leeds or wherever again.
I: Uh huh.
T: So when I go away, right, I simply have no memory um recollection of whats
going on in my fridge. Or what I have that I can eat in the flat. Shit, I dont even

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know if I have anything in at all and if I think about it, well, I [laughs] just dont
really think about it [] so when I get back into Manchester, the train gets in and
all I really know is that I am tired and hungry and in desperate need of food.
I: So what do you do?
T: Well, generally one of two things. Either I go for something quick and easy from
the local supermarket perhaps a ready meal and a bagged up salad or if its the
weekend, I can justify a cheeky takeaway. Actually, sometimes I try and tie in a
meet up with a mate and eat out so that I dont have to cook or wash up.
Again, those who are given to moralizing might argue that food is being wasted as a
result of Tamsin choosing to purchase surplus items instead of finding a use for those that
she already has. Arguments such as these, however, fail to recognize the socio-temporal
context of food practices. Aside from not necessarily having the time to cook proper
meals from scratch; there is a more subtle point to be made about the mismatch between
the rhythms of everyday life and the temporalities of food. It is worth re-iterating that a
lot of so-called proper food imposes its own demands in terms of the timeframe within
which it must be eaten. Indeed, the materiality of food is unforgiving insofar as the temporalities of its decay render it unable to accommodate erratic work schedules such as
Tamsins. Viewed as such, for reasons that are fully understandable (being tired and
hungry), food that is sitting in the fridge or cupboard requiring time and effort to cook
gets displaced by food that does not. Consequently it goes uneaten within the timeframe
required, decays and goes to waste.
In a subsequent interview, Tamsin returned to the food that goes uneaten:
One of the things that I try to do is batch cook stuff so I dont have like four or five half used
ingredients kicking around. And then what I do is put the leftovers in the fridge so I can just
chuck it in the microwave when I get back.

At first glance, this appears to be a strategy for circumventing some of the tensions that
are created at the intersection of foods materiality and the rhythms of everyday life. In
line with Southertons analysis of the time squeeze (2003), domestic technologies are
being used to save time and shift time, enabling her to treat proper food as convenience
food and so overcome some of her difficulties in scheduling everyday life (Warde, 1999).
However, our discussion continued:
I: So you end up not throwing out the ingredients?
T: [laughing] Not the ingredients, no but I dont, I do end up not eating the stuff in
the fridge.
I: Why is that then?
T: Really, I dont like eating the same thing again so I end up not eating it and throwing it out anyway.
In this example she finds a use for the ingredients that would otherwise be displaced by
something quick and easy from the local supermarket, however her taste for variety
means that she is unwilling to eat the same thing more than once within the timeframe

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that the batch cooked leftovers command. Once again, the fridge is being used to defer
the (perhaps inevitable) disposal of certain foodstuffs. It is instructive to note that
although the fridge is designed to preserve food (at the very least, it has historically been
marketed as such), it can be viewed here as an active participant in the processes of
devaluing and decay that work to ameliorate anxieties about acts of binning.
Another strategy that Tamsin deployed in order to allocate time across practices was
to meet with her friends by arranging to eat out with them. She informed me that she does
so on occasions when she has been working away from Manchester because the train
brings her back into the city centre and this is where many of her friends work:
See we live all over the place. Some live in [lists various suburbs in and around Manchester].
If we arrange to meet in town, it means that we actually might spend, erm, see, see each other
[] in the week we, I, um dont have time to try and get from, around each others houses and
[laughing] probably cant always be arsed.

If she were to commit herself to coming home and eating the batch-cooked leftovers in
the fridge before they decay (and so save them from being wasted), she might miss out
on opportunities to meet up with a mate. This scheduling tactic explains further the
perfectly understandable reasons why certain foodstuffs remain uneaten and, in turn,
wasted.

Conclusion and Discussion

The preceding analysis does not dispute that current volumes of household food waste
are problematic in a number of registers. It does however question the tendency to
observe levels of waste generation and then read back to make unsubstantiated inferences about the nature of modern consumers and food practices. The emphasis here has
been on reversing the linear thinking that is implicit in the throwaway society thesis by
exploring the dynamics of domestic food practices and considering their consequences
in terms of waste. In summary, a number of points can be drawn out of the previous
three sections. First, that the respondents appeared not to hold a callous or careless
disregard for the food that they waste. To the contrary, the process of ridding was shown
to be anxiety laden, with households following complex procedures in order to enact
the disposal of food in ways that ameliorate concerns about its wastage. Second, that
despite these anxieties; every household encountered in the study and not just the ones
presented here routinely provisioned more food than they could find a use for and that
the vast majority of this surplus ended up as waste. Third, that in order to make sense
of this apparent contradiction, it is important to recognize the social and material contexts of food practices. The analysis here has drawn attention to the social context
through reference to discussions of time, tastes, conventions, family relations and
domestic divisions of labour. Similarly, it has drawn attention to the material context
through reference to discussions of domestic technologies, infrastructures of provision
and the materiality properties of food itself.
Whilst my arguments are based on a small scale study and a non-representative
sample, I am nevertheless inclined to suggest that the throwaway society thesis does not
stand up to empirical scrutiny (see also Gregson et al., 2007a). The case studies illustrate
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Evans

that it is not satisfactory to position food waste as a matter of profligate consumers being
lured in by Buy One Get One Free offers and then being too lazy to cook properly or
find a use for every last scrap of foodstuff before mindlessly throwing the discards in the
bin. Taken together, they suggest that the passage of food into waste occurs as a
consequence of households enacting ordinary domestic practices and negotiating the
contingencies of everyday life. More generally, in a parallel point to the idea that consumption is a moment in virtually every practice (Warde, 2005) - the analysis here offers
a tentative suggestion that disposal (and wasting) is a necessary moment in the competent enactment of domestic practice. For example, Tamsin needed to waste food in order
to make the time to spend with friends just as Heather needed to in order to ensure that
her family eat properly, eat together and at the very least, eat at all. Viewed as such, it
becomes clear that a sociological approach to household food waste drawing on
contemporary perspectives on home consumption, material culture and everyday life
has much to offer. In moving beyond the throwaway society thesis, a more subtle and
nuanced account of how and why food gets wasted begins to emerge.
Acknowledgements
This research was made possible through funding from the Sustainable Consumption Institute at
the University of Manchester. Additional writing was undertaken when I was a visiting researcher
on the Economic and Social Research Council funded Waste of the World programme
(RES000232007). Thanks must go to my colleagues Katherine Davies, Nicky Gregson, James
Rhodes, Dale Southerton and Alan Warde for various forms of help, support and guidance.
Thanks must also go to the anonymous referees whose feedback has no doubt strengthened the
quality of this article. The usual disclaimers apply. Most importantly, I am indebted to those who
accommodated my sustained presence in their homes during the course of the fieldwork.

Notes
1 As such, the commodity biographies gathered in this study should be treated as partial and
truncated. More generally, it should be noted the technique of following the thing is typically
employed in consumption studies to explore processes of production, distribution and retail
by working backwards along commodity chains (e.g. Cook et al., 2006). In contrast, this study
explored the processes that follow purchase and acquisition with a particular interest in how
households get rid of things.
2 Colloquial term for somebody from Manchester.
3 These intervals varied across households but typically it was every 710 days.
4 They speculated that it might have been a parents evening that prevented the green beans from
being eaten.
5 Another participant from Rosewall Crescent.
6 Elsewhere in the study, she informed me that their move to Manchester was accompanied by a
rise in Phils salary and a reduction in their mortgage payments such that they were no longer
dependent on having a second income.
7 Here it is worth noting that of the nineteen households encountered, only one articulated the
connections between how they provision food, the waste it generates and the impacts of this
on the environment. Moreover, it is worth noting that as a middle class (self-identified) couple
with no children, a relatively egalitarian domestic division of labour and a shared interest in
environmental issues; their capacity to reflexively modify their practices accordingly can be
attributed to the very specific domestic context in which they provision food.

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David Evans is a Lecturer in Sociology and a Sustainable Consumption Institute

Research Fellow at the University of Manchester. His research explores how consumption relates to the dynamics of everyday practices and the ordering of social relations.
He is particularly interested in material culture perspectives and broadly ethnographic
approaches to empirical research.
Date submitted August 2010
Date accepted May 2011

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