Eating from the Bin: Salmon Heads, Waste and the Markets That Make Them

Benjamin Coles,Lucius Hallett

doi:10.1111/1467-954x.12043

Abstract

Recent scholarship in the social sciences has begun to question the cultural contingencies that demarcate waste from ‘stuff worth keeping’ (Watson and Meah, this volume). This scholarship has problematized linear discourses of production, consumption and disposal, and interrogated the relationships between objects, commodities and value but has yet to investigate the ways in which place and place-making are complicit in constituting these relationships. This paper explores where and how the lines between foodstuff and food waste are drawn, as well as the role of place and processes of place-making in contesting and reproducing them. Focusing on salmon heads and salmon, this paper examines not only how food becomes waste, but also on the issue of how waste becomes food. Specifically, we analyse the geographical processes through which salmon heads are valued as foodstuffs in some places but waste in others. We argue further that these valuations extend beyond the place of one market to encompass an assembled geography of markets. Further, we suggest that by tracing out the geographies of salmon heads and salmon – and the markets where each can be found – we can better articulate where as well as how it is that waste can become food. Ultimately, we argue that questions of food and waste are not just questions of materiality, but questions of the ways in which the material intersects relations of place, place-making and geography. Salmon heads, we argue, become a matter of geography.

Highlights

We’re in the indoor portion of Birmingham’s Bull Ring Market, standing in front of a fishmonger, a ways off of the main centre-aisle
We argue that the relations whereby waste becomes food extend beyond the place of this market, where waste-stuff like salmon heads are materialized into food-stuffs to other sites where salmon-heads are valued as waste and separated from the rest of the valuable salmon
We argue that methodological ‘tools’ often utilized to understand object and commodity processes such as object biographies or commodity chain analysis, are not sufficient to interrogate the transformation of waste into food because they are situated in a truncated geographical perspective that does not reveal the geographical possibilities of an object beyond that of the commodity (Page 2005, Appadurai 1986 (2005), Kopytoff 1986)

Summary

Introduction

We’re in the indoor portion of Birmingham’s Bull Ring Market, standing in front of a fishmonger, a ways off of the main centre-aisle. Through the lenses of salmon heads and salmon, their peculiar material properties, the marketplaces where they are (re)valued and the geographies into which these places and objects assemble, this essay provides an account of what happens to waste for it to become food.

Results

Conclusion