When it Stops Being Food

Abstract

The paper examines how Western consumers ideologically and culturally construct edibility, and discusses how this affects household food waste. Consumers' enactments of food waste range from hedonist to altruist ideologies, anchored in a continuum ranging from "disgust" to "duty" and "respect." Furthermore, consumers' categorizations of food as edible or not depend on their self-enactment of competency, leading to internalization or objectification of such assessments. Finally, across altruistic and hedonistic ideologies, interviewees use procrastination in order to reduce feelings of guilt when throwing away food.