Material and visceral engagements with household food waste: Towards opportunities for policy interventions

Current policies and programs to reduce consumer food waste are largely based on changing behaviours rather than addressing the underlying drivers of these behaviours. This article builds on previous structural approaches to understand underlying motivations of food waste-related behaviours. Our findings suggest that efforts to address food waste at the household level must be integrated with broader policies relating to food access and food insecurity, particularly those that seek to address food insecurity at the systems level. We use a visceral material framework to analyze and interpret data from thirteen households, with seventeen participants, in Ontario, Canada, including interviews, participant observation, and food waste measurements. We demonstrate that a visceral-material framework is useful in highlighting complex drivers of household food waste that are often missed in other studies: Although this work confirms previously identified barriers to reduce household food waste (e.g. identity, food packaging, low food literacy), we also draw out multi-scalar and interacting drivers of food waste, such as differing spatial access to food, and complex relationships with food due to past experiences of food abundance or food insecurity.