A ‘Lasting Transformation’ of Capitalist Surplus: From Food Stocks to Feedstocks

Abstract

In this article I link surplus food with the politics of capitalist production and consumption in order to shed some useful light on the strange case of food not being food once it has been discarded but not thrown away. I develop an analysis of waste policy as a dimension of capitalist surplus management (after Sweezy, 1962 ) by reconfiguring Claus Offe's (1984) essay on the state and social policy and construe waste policy as effecting a ‘lasting transformation’ of non-accumulating capital into accumulating capital. My intention is to provide a sketch of the labyrinthine semantic and political structures emerging around waste (in general) and waste food (in particular). I show that transforming waste food into capitalist surplus is a multi-layered and multi-stranded endeavour embedded in larger political, economic and cultural arrangements and cosmologies. I undertake this analysis of the transformation of waste into surplus by exploring, first, waste as an imaginary construct; second, the strange case of discarded food not being ‘discarded’ (and not being ‘food’, either); third, the convoluted cosmology of European waste policy; and, fourth, aspects of political sociology which help to reveal the status of waste as a source of capital accumulation. I conclude by proposing a sociological account of food waste that situates the critique of excess not in the ignorant, sordid voraciousness of individual citizens but in the structures and institutions of capitalist accumulation.