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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 actors to tinker with this arrangement.

Paper long abstract

Roughly 30% of pre-consumer food ends up in lesser applications, such as in bio-fuel production or animal feed. The business partnerships, transport routes and processing infrastructures that have been erected to help food production companies get rid of their waste, reveals waste as an anticipated factor in the industry. However, the distribution of responsibility and agency for change is complex. This study zooms in on the vegetable-processing industry to disentangle how pre-consumer food waste continually emerges. We draw on two different (although overlapping) actor-network theory (ANT) approaches to network stability (Callon, Law), in our analysis of two cases in the Dutch vegetable-processing industry, who enrolled in a project that uses fermentation to make food-grade products from their waste. We found that waste initially emerges from “translations” required for two key “intermediaries” (Callon, 1990) that help stabilize and order the vegetable-processing network: public and private standards, and the business case. Public and private standards define what counts as “good” food, while the business case defines what courses of action are economically worthwhile. Together, these intermediaries make safe and predictable production possible, but they also stabilize waste. Informants found hope in enrolling novel actors (cows, researchers, microbes, consumers) into their network to help waste adapt to the requirements of these intermediaries, but these actors have their own conditions of possibility. We conclude with a lesson for future sustainability interventions that tinker with merely a practice itself, rather than unsettling the relations that produce stability in the network in which they are embedded.