Eating from the Bin: Salmon Heads, Waste and the Markets That Make Them

Abstract

Recent scholarship in the social sciences has begun to question the cultural contingencies that demarcate waste from ‘stuff worth keeping’ (Watson and Meah, this volume). This scholarship has problematized linear discourses of production, consumption and disposal, and interrogated the relationships between objects, commodities and value but has yet to investigate the ways in which place and place-making are complicit in constituting these relationships. This paper explores where and how the lines between foodstuff and food waste are drawn, as well as the role of place and processes of place-making in contesting and reproducing them. Focusing on salmon heads and salmon, this paper examines not only how food becomes waste, but also on the issue of how waste becomes food. Specifically, we analyse the geographical processes through which salmon heads are valued as foodstuffs in some places but waste in others. We argue further that these valuations extend beyond the place of one market to encompass an assembled geography of markets. Further, we suggest that by tracing out the geographies of salmon heads and salmon – and the markets where each can be found – we can better articulate where as well as how it is that waste can become food. Ultimately, we argue that questions of food and waste are not just questions of materiality, but questions of the ways in which the material intersects relations of place, place-making and geography. Salmon heads, we argue, become a matter of geography.

Is it food or is it waste? The materiality and relational agency of food waste across the value chain

“…He notes that the 'shifting socio-material life of food' extends to the indeterminacy of defining when food becomes waste, recognizing that this moment could occur across the life of food. As Coles and Hallett (2012) demonstrate with respect to salmon heads and salmon, the transformation from food to waste is not a one-way process, and waste may become food again under certain circumstances. For example, the authors describe how salmon heads and 'trash fish' are usually discarded early in the value chain, but were used as decorations for a particular fish stall in a London market.…”

Embodiment is Ecological: The Metabolic Lives of Whey Protein Powder

“…What began with a shared curiosity as to how this substance had transcended its niche appeal in bodybuilding subcultures (Atkinson, 2007) became an interest in the 'more-than-human' (Braun, 2005;Whatmore, 2006) embodiment of whey protein that has taken us out onto industrial dairy farms, through high street stores and kitchen cabinets stocked with whey powder, into the messy processes of human digestion, and out, by means of excretion, into wastewater systems. Along the way, we have been impelled to consider connections among the contradictory 'binge and purge' logic of 'agrofood capitalism' (Guthman, 2015(Guthman, : 2523, the uneven socioeconomic contexts in which nutritional supplements are manufactured and then marketed as vital for health (Abrahamsson et al, 2015), the slippery cultural distinction between where food stops and waste begins (Coles and Hallett, 2013;Evans et al, 2013), the multispecies composition of 'human' embodiment (Haraway, 2007;Kirksey and Helmreich, 2010), the 'biocultural' and creative character of proteins (Frost, 2016;Myers, 2015) and political ecological relations between bodies and health (Guthman, 2012;Guthman and Mansfield, 2012).…”

Eating the Ocean by ElspethProbyn. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016, pp. 200. paperback $22.95. ISBN 978‐0‐8223‐6235‐7

“…Probyn states on page 157:

Now some of those little fish do not end up pulped as meal and oil, matter fit only to feed to animals and other fish. They are instead ‘(re)valued as foodstuffs … as (re)formed food’ (Coles & Hallett, : 157).

Here, the reader confronts a question: when the anchovies are here ‘elevated’ from industrial fodder to ‘foodstuff’, is that the only value that they really deserve?…”

“…Now some of those little fish do not end up pulped as meal and oil, matter fit only to feed to animals and other fish. They are instead ‘(re)valued as foodstuffs … as (re)formed food’ (Coles & Hallett, : 157).…”