Tag Archives: waste

Participants needed for online survey about sustainable urban and peri-urban food provision!

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SUPURBFOOD logo

SUPURBFOOD is an international research project carried out by a consortium of ten research and ten SME (small and medium-sized enterprises) partners, in which novel solutions to urban and peri-urban food provision have been examined in three thematic areas. These thematic areas are: (i) nutrient, water and waste cycles, (ii) short food supply chains, and (iii) multi-functional land use. While positive developments are found in all of these, additional steps are needed to make full use of the potential of these innovations. Hence, the project team formulated a set of recommendations and would like to ask relevant stakeholders (e.g. policymakers, entrepreneurs, civil society organisations) for their opinion about their effectiveness. For that purpose an online survey has been launched, which takes 10-15 minutes to complete. If you considers yourself to be a relevant stakeholder, you are kindly requested to complete the online questionnaire, which is available in seven languages: English, Dutch, German, Italian, Latvian, French and Galician.

Celebrating the Ugly Carrot in the European Year Against Food Waste

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Much of the discussion around reducing  food waste has focused on the individual household consumer – after purchasing food at the supermarket. An important avenue for addressing the problem lies, indeed, with supermarkets themselves. Supermarkets have strict cosmetic standards about what they will accept from their growers and suppliers. Farmers know that fruit and vegetables that do not conform in size, shape, and colour – even if perfectly good to eat – will not be accepted by the supermarkets. In turn, supermarkets also lay the “blame” on picky consumers. (The power of supermarkets in dictating terms in their contracts with growers is for another blog post.)

The French supermarket chain Intermarché has designed an interesting and successful campaign against food waste. It is designed to raise awareness among consumers and to provide an outlet for food that would otherwise be thrown out before getting to the farm gate. Using a multi-pronged marketing approach (including cheaper prices, special branding, and recipe and product development), Intermarché is showing that even an ugly carrot can be a beautiful thing. You can also learn more about the European Year against Food Waste here.

 

 

Tasteful waste

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Earlier this month, we had a fun food culture class on the topic of waste and edibility. The writing of Mary Douglas on Purity and Danger was useful in order to think about how the definition of ‘waste’ is in fact a social construction which depends on social relations and thus varies from context to context. We looked at the various stages in the cycle from production to consumption where ‘waste’ is created by some, but sometimes turned into food by others. Waste, or ‘dirt’ in the words of Mary Douglas, is ‘matter out of place’. For a thing to become out of place, there needs to be an order with normalities such as, when a food is beyond its expiration date in a supermarket it will be thrown away. Anomaly then is all that does not fit the order (or who order differently). Examples are gleaning practices on agricultural fields, food collection for food banks and dumpster diving in retail waste.

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Worm farm

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Making your own vermiculture or ‘worm farm’ is not very difficult (see the many instructions on internet). Maybe the most difficult bit here is acquiring the right type of worms. The ‘red wiggler’ which you can order by mail in Australia, US or the UK is not available through the mail man in the Netherlands. The manure heap – a left over of last year –  in the corner of our allotment garden proved the solution. The red wiggler likes manure. We dug in and ‘harvested’ around a hundred last year september and again a hundred in the spring. By now we have a healthy population which reproduces and soon we might need to expand our farm or donate worms to a new farm…. Continue reading →

Metabolic rift

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Organic recycling was part of the urban ecology during the middle ages. “However, as cities grew larger, their self-regulatory ecosystems began to break down” Carolyn Steel writes in her instructive chapter ‘Waste’ in Hungry City (2008:251). “If the ‘filth and muck’ of fourteenth-century Coventry caused a nuisance, that of London, a city 10 times the size, can be readily imagined.” (ibid). The other side of the coin was the state of agriculture, which was facing a rapidly decreasing soil fertility (see earlier blog 18-8). It was what Marx called ‘metabolic rift’ a rift in the metabolism of the human relation to nature through labor which “disturbs the metabolic interaction between man and the earth, i.e. it prevents the return to the soil of its constituent elements consumed by man in the form of food and clothing” he wrote (cited in Foster 1999:379).

Marx was not alone in his opinion and he himself was greatly influenced by Justus von Liebig. Proposals to compost human waste as part of the design of the urban waste disposal system were propagated and sometimes tried in the UK, France and Germany (see Steel chapter Waste) and in the Netherlands (in Groningen see earlier blog 16-8). The sewage system with no in-built recycling won, most of the world sewage is dumped in the ocean untreated. The metabolic rift in terms of Marx widened and its effect is only delayed by chemical fertilizers and global transport. Yet, “nutrients found in sewage are a finite commodity” (Steel 2008: 259). In a few decades when the mines with phosphates are empty and the oil has leaked away in the sea, human sewage will most probably become a valuable resource again.