Boxing Clever
I wrote my dissertation on the role of mobile apps in reducing food waste. For ‘The Sociological Review’, I was given the opportunity to write an article based on one of my empirical chapters for their issue on waste. I explored the question:
Do surplus food apps really keep still-fresh sandwiches out of the bin?
I am in a flat in one of the bigger cities in Switzerland. Amy, a woman in her early thirties, shows me her fridge after a pick-up through the app Too Good To Go. Ashamed, she points to three rotten lemons from a previous pick-up at the bottom of her vegetable drawer. She has had them for a long time. Rather than enjoying the lovely fruit basket she had hoped for when ordering a surprise bag on the app, she was burdened with preventing ten lemons from decaying. She gifted two of them to someone in her office and used some in drinks, but still had to throw some away as they were already mouldy.
Too Good To Go claims that it saves food waste. However, I say it is not waste but merely surplus food that has changed hands via the app. This change makes the user responsible for dealing with the becomings of food already labelled as ‘saved’ by the platform. However, this only considers the user as a buyer, not an eater. While the buyer has ‘saved’ ten lemons, the latter has been given a major stressful challenge to use ten lemons (or similar package contents) and fails to do so regularly. Thus, the process of ‘food’ becoming ‘waste’ is reconfigured through the mediation of the app, and thereby, the responsibility and sometimes failure to prevent food from turning into waste is outsourced to consumers. The concept that helps me frame this argument is the transitional process of ‘food’ becoming ‘waste’ from David Evans (2014, p. 92). This concept is a landmark in household food waste studies; however, to my knowledge, it has not yet been used to understand the changing process due to a new actant – mobile phone apps, which I would like to change with this article.
Here, you can access the article.