Contact with food waste and the non-profit redistribution of surplus: challenges to the neoliberal food regime? The case of RECUP.

Wasted food is a very telling object. As a research object, it is here understood both through the sociological concept of the “ex-” or “postindustrial” commodity that is able to reproduce capital, and through its material status that defies the imposition of standardized rules in the neoliberal food market. In this latter sense, food waste is proposed in this research as “vibrant matter”, i.e., matter that is able to cause a perturbation, that possesses an agency, despite being apparently not alive. This perturbation is a call into question of the meaning that is given to food in our socioeconomic system vis-à-vis what food means to us when we have it in our hands. The latter is explored here through a case study of food recovery, specifically at the Milan wholesale market. Contact or exposure to discarded food within a context of organized activities of recovery and redistribution also implies a call into question of the tradition of allocating discarded food to people facing food poverty. A theoretical insight, through a literature review, of the socioeconomic structures behind this tradition reveals that instead the solution to the twin problems of food waste and food insecurity requires radically restoring food’s dimensions of nourishment and sociality against its commodification, that is framed as the root cause of both problems. This research tries to advance the proposal of “challenger” models of food surplus redistribution that could truly lead to the political and cultural shift required by a just food regime. Yet, in order to focus on what is going on in the present for the advancement of such models, the research tries to assess the political and cultural impact of the Milan-based grassroots association RECUP, which proposes an inclusive and ecological-inspired model of sharing vegetables discarded in markets. Even if RECUP still operates between traditional and “challenger” models of food surplus redistribution, the conduction of ethnographic work in its spaces, with its people, still unlocks the possibility of learning the limits and the room for this shift, not to mention, again, the possibility of learning what the materiality of food can teach us.