Daniel Sosna (2024) Resisting the Loss: Creative Encounters with Discarded Food at Landfills. Workshop 'Food, inequality and care in times of crises', 29 September - 1 October 2024, Bergen
The presentation brings to the fore actors who reclaim food from landfills.
Food is unlike other things. It results from and sustains life. Wasting food can be particularly sensitive because of its intimate relationship to life. To resolve the dilemma, humans have developed various ways to turn food waste into a resource. It can become fertilizer, heat and electricity flowing from biodigesters, or a donation to food banks. Despite the official exhortations, a proportion of discarded food is disposed of in landfills and dumps, where the opportunity for revaluation seems to be buried under a thick layer of discarded matter. Based on my ethnographic research at Czech landfills, I argue that this is not necessarily the case. Landfills are surprisingly lively places where discarded food enters new, sometimes unexpected, pathways. The presentation brings to the fore three groups of actors who reclaim food from landfills. The first group comprises landfill workers who do scavenging as an informal perk of their official job. While they target more durable items in the waste mass, they have long-term experience with salvaging packaged food and sharing it within the networks of their kin and friends. The second group comprises informal waste pickers who search especially for scrap metal. These pickers take advantage not only of the food found at the tipping zones but also near the landfills. An intense stench, dust, and plastic strips hanging from the trees discourage visitors from entering these liminal zones, which means that these zones flourish with berries and mushrooms collected by waste pickers. The last group comprises various non-human actors. I will focus on ravens who retrieve food scraps from landfills. They transport the scraps beyond the landfill parameter, which in turn attracts other creatures and creates new ecologies. Although none of these activities fit the formal waste management framework, they demonstrate creativity on the margins. While the official accounts consider discarded food that enters the landfill as being ‘lost,’ my research indicates the possibility of more hopeful scenarios.