Abstract
Drawing on empirical research, including interviews with 38 key informants, this article examines how the challenge of food waste reduction has come to be framed, interpreted and responded to in the United Kingdom, focusing on household food waste and the interface between supermarkets and households. We identify a ‘discourse coalition’ arising from collective actors central to the issue that has achieved discursive hegemony over the framing of food waste as a problem. We analyse this discourse coalition – its core storylines, actors and practices – and the conditions that have enabled its emergence. Critical accounts of sustainable consumption commonly note the ‘responsibilisation of the consumer’: or the reduction of systemic issues to the individualised, behavioural choices of the ‘sovereign consumer’. We find, by contrast, that the ‘responsibilised consumer’ is by no means the discourse coalition’s dominant framing of the problem of household food waste. Instead, its dominant framing is that of distributed responsibility: responsibility distributed throughout the production–consumption system. The article also contributes towards understanding why retailers have embraced household food waste reduction as an object of intervention without framing the issue as one of, primarily, consumer responsibility.
Highlights
Food waste has come to assume a growing significance over recent years in the public sphere, in public policy circles and in the initiatives of food retailers and producers
Our research suggests that while in food waste discourse we do find responsibility being apportioned to the consumer, the responsibilisation of the consumer is by no means, or no longer, the dominant framing of the food waste problem
We note the suggestion made by Evans et al (2013) that the emergence of political and cultural interest in food waste might be generative of new political and ethical possibilities
Summary
Food waste has come to assume a growing significance over recent years in the public sphere, in public policy circles and in the initiatives of food retailers and producers. Our research suggests that while in food waste discourse we do find responsibility being apportioned to the consumer, the responsibilisation of the consumer is by no means, or no longer, the dominant framing of the food waste problem (see Evans et al, 2017) We note in this context retailer initiatives addressing marketing practices. Were technical practices for mapping, quantifying and analysing food waste, such as product life-cycle analyses and other techniques related to the supply chain, and third, marketing and communicational practices (including social marketing addressed to consumer audiences, employee or supplier engagement activities and sustainability reporting) These practices embody and carry the dominant storylines of the coalition. We see here that the very ambiguity of this foundational understanding of the coalition accommodates otherwise antagonistic positions
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