When Food Waste Goes to Work

Abstract

Food waste is embroiled in a wide array of social efforts and actions in the contemporary EU. This article considers one site in the EU’s capital where surplus supermarket food that is no longer sellable but is still edible is being used to fuel a job training programme. It argues that, rather than understanding the state’s role in this process as a purely neoliberal tactic or as a capitalist profit-driven action, the repurposing of discarded food in order to create job opportunities and feed new populations has moral contours and enables specific forms of care.