Paper short abstract:

Regulation and practices concerning the global circulation of food frame the flow of edible goods excluded from the official consumption chain. Starting from two ethnographic sites in Europe, this intervention explores food recycling practices, and the circulation and valorisation of unsold goods.

Paper long abstract:

This paper analyses food-recycling practices: the research, reclamation, circulation, and consumption of food rejected from the urban food cycle and the transformation of "garbage" into an edible, social and political object.

Regulation and practices concerning the global circulation of food frame the flow of edible goods that are excluded from the official consumption chain. This situation produces new practices around food through which social actors «constantly manipulate events in order to turn them into 'opportunities'» (de Certeau: xix).

Through a rigorous observation of food recycling practises we discover that food-recyclers develop specific knowledge that contributes to their social, economic and political practice of salvaging food. They mobilise skills to decode and explore the city and its activities; to interact with actors and norms; to reclaim and transform food that they use, not only to secure nutrition, but also as social resource for creating and consolidating groups around food-sharing (and specific ideologies) of each group.

The ways of knowing and evaluating reality, the skills and knowledge concerning food-recycling circulate, are transformed and reproduced collectively in groups.

In conclusion, starting from a good that has lost its market value and from practices that surround it, we can identify different political and economic practices, aimed at the maintenance of individual and "activist" groups, in which the production and reproduction of solidarity and sharing networks design morals and political economies parallel to the market economy.