Revaluing waste: Care, recirculation, and food politics in Truffles and Trash

Abstract

First paragraphs:

Kelly Alexander’s Truffles and Trash: Recirculating Food in a Social Welfare State traces the move­ment of edible but discarded food through Brus­sels’ expanding network of food-recirculation initiatives. The book enters a global conversation on food waste intensified by the 2011 Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) report estimating that one-third of food produced for human consumption is lost or wasted. Rather than framing waste as the individual consumer’s responsibility, Alexander situates it within the structural logics of capitalist food systems. As she explains, “This project is about innovative and creative ways to recirculate dis­carded food before it becomes food waste, and to do that as a way of caring for other people and for the planet” (p. 41, emphasis in original).

Alexander—an anthropologist and food studies scholar—entered the project curious about how certain foods, especially truffles, acquire extra­ordinary value—or are overvalued. Her apprentice­ship at La Truffe Noire, a Michelin-starred restau­rant in Brussels built around one of the world’s most expensive ingredients, quickly confronted her with a different reality: the sheer volume of edible food routinely discarded. “I felt ill peering into that bin every day, seeing so much good-looking food go uneaten” (p. 12). That encounter became a piv­otal moment, shifting her focus from why some foods are prized to how food gains and loses value along a spectrum of edibility. What began as a fixa­tion on waste in one high-end kitchen broadened into a study of food waste across Brussels, explor­ing how surplus is produced, judged, and redistributed. . . .