Geographies of fat waste. Or, how kitchen fats make citizens

Abstract

While waste marks the beginning of relocation, re-materialization, and resourcing processes, it is also a set of connections, producing specific figurations of citizenship that follow from, as they inform, waste management strategies. This article regards household practices to do with the disposal of used fats as a site where citizenship forms. The authors see the figure of ‘good citizen’ appear along the trajectory of kitchen fats. They contrast this figure with the ‘re-user,’ who acts by a different set of rules, so as to explore logics and normativities embedded in the mundane processes of discarding fats. Fat waste not only turns out to be different things for different stakeholders; it is in different fat disposal practices that different (kinds of) stakeholders emerge. As the authors situate citizenship in mundane practices, kitchen fats suggest the situational, material-relational character of waste and waste-eliminating schemes – and of citizenship itself.