Free lunch, structural violence, and normalization: A neo-Gramscian analysis of food waste and dumpster diving

Abstract

Augmenting Antonio Gramsci’s concept of hegemony with Johan Galtung’s concept of structural violence and using multiple data sources this study examines the structural phenomenon food waste and the agentic phenomenon dumpster diving. I derive my interpretations from an analysis of reports on food waste by international organizations, US media coverage of food waste, and interviews with dumpster divers. At the structural level, the analysis shows how international organizations and media frame food waste as an economic and environmental—rather than a social justice issue and how they reproduce hegemonic neoliberal conceptualizations and discourses of food and food waste. At the agentic level, the analysis shows how these hegemonic conceptualizations and discourses affect dumpster divers and how an environmental ideological motivation contains an anticapitalistic ideological motivation. Building on my neo-Gramscian analysis, I highlight the potential threat that environmental discourses might stabilize neoliberal hegemony by offering appealing consent-structures and contain more fundamental, social justice-based, critique of the neoliberal social order. To preserve its inherently critical and counter-hegemonic potential, I develop a conceptual model of food waste and discuss its relevance for critical management and organization studies.