Abstract
Food waste is a global issue with serious economic and environmental implications. Although a number of psychosocial and cultural factors have been identified, little attention has been paid to how food waste is culturally presented, circulated, and mediated. In this exploratory study, we consider how food waste is presented in the thriving genre of reality food television. Specifically, we conducted a content and discourse analysis of UK television programme, Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares (RKN). We found that visual and discursive references to food waste are associated with business, food, and personal incompetency in RKN. Furthermore, food handling was constructed as a moral issue. In RKN, food waste is not resolved via specific educational interventions for food waste prevention, but through attention to broader personal, business, and food incompetencies, which are value-laden and morally relevant. We discuss the symbolic dimensions of the transformation of food into food waste by drawing on Mary Douglas’ ideas of matter out of place. We suggest that food waste research and behavior change could benefit from addressing personal, professional, and moral competencies which may not be directly related to food, but which may reduce food waste. Our analysis of food waste in a televised environment extends waste research in specific geographical locations and spatial contexts.
Highlights
Food waste is a significant global issue
We provide an exploratory study of the construction, presence, and significance of food waste through content and discourse analysis of the UK reality television programme, Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares (RKN)
To improve limited understandings about cultural constructions and definitions of food waste [2], this study investigated the ways in which food waste is constructed and represented to public audiences in reality food television
Summary
Some sources claim that approximately one-third of food produced for human consumption is not consumed [1]. This waste has economic and environmental implications. Such research focuses on the results of later stages of the food waste chain, namely disposal [5]. There is considerable potential to reduce food waste via household level intervention in medium/high-income countries, [1,6]. This poses an interesting challenge, as domestic food waste is embedded within complex socio-cultural processes [7,8,9]. In European research, householders identified factors such as temporal work/life imbalances, preferences of other (usually younger) household members, and a disconnection between household needs and product choices (such as not being able to purchase desired smaller products) as barriers to implementing food waste prevention strategies [6]
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