Waste as Food

Social Concepts of Food

Humans choose their food mainly for reasons other than nutrition. For example, people may choose food because of taste, availability (cost as well as climatic and geographic factors), religious restrictions, or because it conveys a sense of identity or a certain status. One of Mary Douglas's key points in her 1966 work Purity and Danger is that food avoidances have important social functions in creating and policing group boundaries between castes, classes, or religious communities. In other words, distinguishing food from waste—as well as categorizing others’ food as waste with respect to one's own group, or vice versa—is central to the way human beings connect themselves to some people and separate themselves from others.

Freegans

An example of a subgroup in contemporary Western society that consumes waste is freegans. Freeganism is a series of strategies based on limiting one's participation in the monetary economy and reducing one's consumption of resources. It often includes urban foraging or dumpster diving for food. Although eating others’ garbage saves money, this is more of a counterhegemonic form of activism that rejects disposing of perfectly edible food (e.g., because it has reached a pre-ordained “sell by” date without actually spoiling) rather than a survival strategy. Freegans would not consider the discarded things they eat to be waste; rather, they disagree with their classification as such by others.

Hardship

Unlike freegans, the homeless, elderly living on insufficient pensions, or whole populations during times of hardship may have no choice but to eat things normally considered waste. Some examples include consuming taboo animals, stretching edible ingredients with nonfood items (as when sawdust was mixed with flour in Athens during World War II, or spoiled milk mixed with sugar became a dessert in the United States during the Great Depression), or scavenging the leftovers and scraps of the privileged few who have access to food. Shifting the boundary between waste and food when facing starvation or extreme poverty is an adaptive strategy, not an ideology.

Symbolic Eating

Waste is also consumed, at times, for symbolic reasons. When Catherine of Sienna reproached herself for feeling revulsion at the wounds of the sick and poor whom she was tending, to prove her commitment to charity, she deliberately drank a bowl of [Page 974]pus. Muslim followers of north African saints at times consume the saints’ vomit or dirty bathwater as a way of acquiring their blessings. In India, a holy woman may be honored by her hosts’ act of washing her feet and then drinking the dirty water. Paradoxically, a consumed substance signifies internalization, incorporation, and acceptance for precisely the same reasons that make it polluting—the way it penetrates the body and is absorbed into it. Those who consume such wastes not only take into themselves an emanation of that person's body—an intimate act—but also signify acceptance of the other by conveying that they experience no distaste at what would normally be disgusting or repulsive about them.

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