Paper short abstract:

Using two ethnographic studies (Granada, Spain, and Marseille, France), 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, familiar and economic object.

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 and "familiar" object. I consider the case studies of formal and informal food-recyclers in the cities of Granada, Spain (2011-12), and Marseille, France (since 2014), as emblematic of the production of economic and social rearrangements around food.

Every day, formal food-recycling organizations and informal food-recyclers play with the urban space according to the constraints and opportunities that the city offers them. Rigorous observation of their practices reveals that formal and informal food-recyclers develop specific knowledge that is functional to the social and economic practice of salvaging food. Skills are mobilized to decode and explore the city and its activities; to interact with actors and norms; to reclaim and transform food used, not only for nutrition, but also as a social resource for creating and consolidating groups around food-sharing. Thus, moments and spaces of survival become also moments and spaces for innovation where skills and knowledge related to food-recycling circulate, are transformed, and reproduced collectively within these groups. This way, formal and informal networks become the means of transmission of transferable skills and abilities, providing individuals with support and protection, and promoting inclusion in a specific group (Hurtubise, Laaroussi: 2002).

In this context, food-recycling practices appears as daily tactical practices, aimed at maintaining "activist" groups, in which the production and reproduction of solidarity and sharing networks define a moral economy parallel to market's economy.