Paper short abstract:

This paper analyses food-recycling practices. It focus on the inclusion and exclusion experience embedded in the pursuit, reclamation, circulation, and consumption of food rejected from the urban food cycle and the transformation of garbage into an edible, social, economic and political 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, social, economic 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 nourishes new practices through which social actors produce economic and social rearrangements around food.

Every day, food-recyclers play with the urban space. Rigorous observation of theirs practices reveals that they 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 and specific ideologies of each group.

Thus, moments and spaces of survival become also moments and spaces for innovation where skills, abilities and knowledge related to food-recycling and urban reality circulate, are transformed, and reproduced collectively within these groups. This way, interpersonal networks become the means of transmission of transferable skills and abilities, providing individuals with support and protection, and promoting inclusion in a specific group

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