Tackling Waste: Community Practices for Food Rescuing and Sharing

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This scenario has been developed on the basis of a real-world case

Pic sharing point Freiburg .JPG


Imagine your city where surplus-food is not being wasted and is instead rescued and shared among (poorer) communities.

Where from and how to get there?

For this to happen, citizens could have the leading role, having identified a social problem in the food sector, i.e. food waste and food insecurity. Whereas these issues are often regulated by governmental policies (e.g. food waste management and food itself), community-based actions could be undertaken by citizens to complement them.

How can such citizens' initiatives thrive?

Such interventions require social resources to develop. For example, relying on a wider-community network could be of great support. Indeed, networks provide social movements with resources (human, material) and legitimacy (in the public opinion and political sphere). In addition, community-based initiatives likely have better chances of success while relying on an established organizational structure, including a well-defined distribution of responsibilities, roles and powers among community members, as well as some operating tools.

What legal obstacles food rescuers may face? And how to cope with them?

Such a project would entail taking actions outside/ at the side of the regulatory framework on the sector of food and as a response to it. However, this legal framework could possibly be an obstacle. Eventually, a problem may arise when community initiatives are asked to comply with regulatory policies, and they often do not have the capacity i.e. handling, financial, to meet these requirements. In that sense, strict regulations primarily designed for bigger interventions i.e. for businesses or big institutions, can hinder or even prevent citizens’ initiatives.

Eventually, facing these kinds of obstacles could reinforce opposition between the intervention proponents and governing bodies. A positive effect may be the strengthening of the political line of the movement and its establishment as an oppositional power challenging (dysfunctional) governmental policy. However, legal pressures to comply with the pre-existing framework reduces to some extent the potential impact of such projects.

How can we learn from such an intervention?

The different processes featured here could be recorded and shared within community networks (Q.29). Thus, similar setups may be likely to spread and develop, facilitated by the local bodies of wider community-networks. Additionally, activists could actively engage in sharing their knowledge and tools for facilitating the replication of the intervention in other urban contexts. Thus, similar initiatives would be likely to develop elsewhere, either by sticking to the organizational structure of the movement or by inventing different ways of operating.

How could this reality be created in your city? What obstacles would have to be overcome?

Do you want to learn more about this scenario?

Take a look at the detailed description of Citizens rescuing and sharing food in Berlin that has inspired this scenario. Foodsharing is a grassroots initiative that thrives to rescue and share surplus food among citizens. Its proponent consider food as a "common good" which has to be exempted from monetary transaction. Check out their website (only in German), https://foodsharing.de/

This scenario relates to some enabling governance arrangements:

This scenario fits under the approach:

It addresses some drivers of injustice:

What do you think about this scenario? Was it helpful to you? Do you find our approach problematic? Send us an email to Philipp Spaeth.