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Paper short abstract

In the context of an unfolding effort to upcycle vegetable-processing waste using fermentation, this paper explores what makes some arrangements of a (food) system particularly resistant to change, despite desired intervention. It explores efforts by diverse actors to tinker with this arrangement.

Paper long abstract

This paper disentangles what makes some arrangements of a (food) system particularly resistant to change, in the context of an unfolding effort by Wageningen University and Dutch vegetable-processing companies to “valorize” processing waste by fermenting it into food products. Drawing on actor-network theory and speculations on how network stability is manufactured (Law, 2009), we aim to identify the (material, discursive) structures that have stabilized a food system in which waste is allowed to systemically emerge, despite moral objections to wastefulness. Based on interviews with, and participant observation among, two vegetable-processing companies and their networks, our analysis is organized along three structuring factors: specifications (or “specs”) in vegetable supply-chains, the “business case” trope, and the attempted enrollment of new actors in pursuit of systemic rearrangement. We argue that by excessively demanding (quantified) cosmetic or convenience features in natural produce from the processor, their clientele's specifications generate unnecessary waste, especially when specifications are met with the real limitations of automated processing technologies. However, we observe that specifications also discursively order (Law, 2009) and therefore stabilize the diverse supply-chain networks that processing companies are embedded in. Further, we investigate how processors' verbalized concern with their "business case", and the calculative practices behind it (a model adapted from other industries), structures decisions about food waste while foreclosing many alternatives. Finally, we discuss whether enrolling new actors (e.g. fermentative microbes, and the scientists that specialize in them) offers a fraught industry a way to generate and structurally stabilize a more circular system arrangement.