“Exercises in Excess” - Food waste and the value of food in the affluent north: A perspective on value chains and their disruption

Abstract

This dissertation examines reasons for unnecessary food waste generation on a household level in Tromsø, Norway. Applying a holistic perspective, we follow the food throughout parts of the food cycle; from its entry into the household until its exit, studying the matter in the social contexts where decisions and acts take place. The study analyses the underlying premises of food management through the lens of everyday practices and priorities, viewing these as manifestations of the valuations of food. It is argued that the low priority given to food management, and the subsequent levels of food waste, reflects the value currently assigned to food. Generational differences in current practices and valuations of food are set against a contextual backdrop of several interconnected large-scale developments in Northern Norway, gathering pace from World War 2 until the present. These developments provided a much welcomed increase in regional and national standard of living and easy access to affordable food. Using this generational perspective, the study then investigates how contemporary households manage these developments and the changes in values. The welcomed increase in standard of living experienced locally also harbours an increased distance from both nature, as the source of food, and people involved in the food cycle, providing it. This distance influences the food management priorities and valuations in the households. It is argued that a scalar gap between the individual households and larger, increasingly global, infrastructures of production and distribution has arisen, also contributing to a state of alienation on a consumer level, increasing waste levels. The thesis then explores the more careful management of seasonal gifts of food received via networks of kin or other social relations. Gifts of food, predominantly locally harvested, hold a higher value compared to food purchased through formal market infrastructures. They have a higher threshold for being wasted, still engulfed in social, historical, geographical dimensions. Ose argues that these gifts offer a reminder of the essential social and ecological interdependency that are veiled in most contemporary formal exchanges of food.