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-3Contextualizing Household
Food Consumption

The participants in this study routinely purchase more food than they are able
to find a use for. This is not surprising, however the simplicity of this obser
vation belies its importance in terms of theorizing household food waste.
In order to understand how food becomes waste, it is important to first
appreciate why households consistently acquire it in quantities that exceed
their perceived and immediate requirements for consumption. I am inclined
to frame this as a matter of exploring the processes through which food
becomes surplus, and this chapter begins the work (Chapter 4 completes
the picture) of doing so.
My starting point is that notions of "food choice" do not adequately explain
why households consistently find themselves in a situation where they have
surplus food to deal with. It makes little sense to think that people make
deliberate and "irresponsible" choices to purchase too much food when they
know that they may end up wasting it. Models of individual consumer choice
have long been criticized within social science approaches to food and by
way of summary, Shelley Koch (2012) points out that the activity of grocery
shopping can be located at "the intersection of individual choice, cultural
reproduction, and the larger political economy" (2012: 12). Indeed, it is well
established that patterns of food purchasing are an extension of household
dynamics and family relations (Devault 1991) just as observed "food
choices" should not be separated from "social influences" (Murcott 1995)
such as income, ethnicity and education. More generally, differential and
stratified tastes can be identified across different groups of people (Warde
1997). Similarly, the socio-economic patterning of food purchases indicates
that there are differences (along the lines of class, ethnicity and geographical
location) in access to foodstuffs and by extension people's ability to make
"the right" and "responsible" choices (Murcott 2002). Beyond these social
and cultural factors, attention has also been drawn to the vertical patterning
of food consumption (Fine 1995) and the integration of food production and
consumption into broader systems of provision (Spaargaren et al. 2012). This

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32

FOOD WASTE

ROUTINES

To see how the relationship between understandings of "proper" food and

surplus are manifest more generally, it is important to consider the routinized
nature of household food provisioning. Marjorie DeVault's influential Feeding
the Family (1991) locates the work of grocery shopping at the intersection of
the household and the market economy, and illustrates how routines develop
that extend relations of family and domestic life into commercial spaces
such as supermarkets. In the majority of households encountered, the work
of grocery shopping is heavily routinized insofar as it tends to take place at
relatively fixed intervals (it varies across households but it is commonly every
seven to ten days) in the form of a "big shop" at a large out-of-town super
market. 4 I was able to accompany several respondents doing their grocery
shopping on more than one occasion, and so observe that they each tend to
follow a fixed route through the supermarket and purchase roughly the same
things each time that they go. The routinized nature of grocery shopping,
however, is not always a good fit for the rather more fluid ways in which lives
are lived and this mismatch can result in food-especially "healthy" items
creeping into the category of surplus.
This can be illustrated through reference to the workings of Kirsty and
Tony's household. Kirsty and Tony are a married couple in their mid thirties
with two children who have been living on Rosewall Crescent for around five
years and proudly identify themselves as lifelong residents of Manchester.
Both Kirsty and Tony think it is important to eat healthily and to this end,
they deliberately purchase "healthy stuff" when they go to the supermarket.
However in common with many households, they often end up not eating
these healthy items-especially fruits. At one level, this can be viewed quite
simply as the gap between "good intentions" and real life. Certainly they
report specific instances of not eating apples, peaches, grapes, bananas and
clementines that they had in the house because they fancied a chocolate
bar or bit of cake instead as a snack or their "something sweet." 5 In Kirsty's
own terms, they have "healthy weeks" where they eat all of the fruit that they
purchase, but they also have "bad weeks" where they do not. Either way, they
always purchase the healthy items because more often than not they will eat
them, and they do not know "in advance" if they are going to have a "bad
week." Further, Kirsty suggests that it is important to keep fruit in the house
on the grounds that they would never eat it if she didn't6 and that the guilt
she experiences when she throws it out makes her try harder for the whole
family to eat healthily the following week. Although the routine acquisition
of fruit intermittently leads to instances in which it becomes surplus, these