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Paper short abstract

This paper critically interrogates the role of quantification in managing food systems. Juxtaposing the genealogies of food waste quantification in Czechia and the Netherlands, the paper shows ties between quantification and urgency, distribution of blame, and obscuring capacities of quantification.

Paper long abstract

Waste prevention and reduction have become an inherent part of food systems. A crusade against food-related profligacy and wastefulness relies on a notion of urgency. This paper examines the role of quantification in invoking urgency. A contrasting semiotic pair of food and waste, as life-giving and life-abandoning, provides a potent resource for crafting urgent messages, which can be magnified by the power of numbers. The authors approach quantification as a technology of urgency that awakens society and calls it into action. They analyse the contingencies of quantification in two countries, Czechia and the Netherlands, that have different histories and approaches to food-related policies. The paper traces the emergence and formalisation of key enumeration categories, as well as their use in number narratives to convey a sense of urgency across diverse actors, including researchers, representatives of NGOs and businesses, and state officials. Although the two case studies demonstrate shared patterns of responsibilization, particularly of households, they also reveal differences in the framing of number narratives and the degree of quantitative dependence. The paper concludes that as a technology of urgency, quantification not only reveals but also diverts attention from powerful sources of wastefulness that may include those embedded in the economic systems in which we live (e.g. hegemonic market logic, profit-making, and growth imperatives), in the material-spatial realities of life in which food-making and eating are increasingly separated from one another, and in linear modes of living and thinking (as opposed to circular).