Petr Jehlička et al. (2025) Household food waste, frugality and Eastern Europe: Countering the wasteful consumer hegemony from the epistemic periphery. OTB4 conference, 10-13 December 2025, Le Mans

Household food waste, frugality and Eastern Europe: Countering the wasteful consumer hegemony from the epistemic periphery

Petr Jehlička, Evelien de Hoop, Michaela Jaterková, Daniel Sosna, Lucie Sovová, Esther Veen

How would the contours of the household food waste scholarship differ if the knowledge of this topic were derived from research conducted in Eastern Europe? Furthermore, what would it look like if this investigation followed an inductive approach rather than starting from concepts sourced from the epistemic core of Western Europe and North America? The social context of highly wasteful societies offers only limited potential for understanding practices that may limit wastefulness. After all, few researchers would deem a country with high car dependence an ideal social context for researching ways of reducing car use. Based on our current research in Czechia, we contend that rather than searching for ways of waste reduction, such research would engage in the investigation of the reasons for frugality in the use of food as a resource (the annual amount of Czech household food waste per capita ranges between 15 and 40% of the European Union average). Instead of the atemporal and linear household food waste journey originating with food purchases, the investigation would be informed by the profound seasonality of the food waste amount and composition, including the function of the garden both as a source and sink of the waste. Finally, household food waste would need to be investigated as a product of a more complex food system, which includes interactions between the market and non-market food sources, including food produced in the garden, received as a gift and obtained through foraging.