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Short abstract:

Why did OLIO, an app that aims to reduce food waste, fail in Switzerland? In this paper, we ethnographically examine the food waste reduction app OLIO as an infrastructure for ‘ontological experimentation’ and highlight the neglect of local everyday practices in ‘infrastructural encounters’.

Long abstract:

Food waste assemblages can be seen as ‘capitalist ruins’ (Tsing, 2015) that hold potential for a more sustainable and equitable food future. Food waste reduction apps aim to use this potential by preventing food from turning into waste. In this paper, we explore the case of an app that focuses on household food waste reduction and ask how and why its digital infrastructure failed. We first provide a short overview of current research on digital failure in ‘digital foodscapes’ and on ‘app glitches’ more broadly (Sörum, 2020; Goodman & Jaworska, 2020; Fuentes et al., 2021). We then introduce our case OLIO, a community-based sharing platform for food and other consumer goods that redistributes household surpluses for free. We have taken an (online) auto-ethnographical approach to study this app, including the app walkthrough method and semi-structured interviews (Hine, 2015; Light et al., 2018). By considering the digital infrastructures of OLIO as a platform for ‘ontological experiments’ (Bruun Jensen & Morita, 2015; Schneider et al., 2018), we attend to the tinkering and failing of infrastructuring. In our analysis, we show how the app, just like the food it hoped to save, came to perish in Switzerland resulting in a digital infrastructure ruin. We conclude by elaborating why the concept of ‘infrastructural encounters’ (Simonsen Abildgaard, 2023) is promising to look at these ontological experiments, as attending to infrastructural encounters sheds light on neglected local everyday practices and relations.