Food waste reduction and discursive change: reconstituting the cultural norm of not wasting food

Abstract

Recently food waste has been raised as a major sustainability problem: roughly one third of the food produced globally ends up lost or wasted. In this article, I analyse the ways interested citizens attach meaning to food waste reduction, based on eight qualitative interviews conducted with people attending a consumer education event in Helsinki in 2017. Adopting a discourse studies approach, I ask how the rationale of food waste reduction is constructed in the interviews. I present three discourses in which it is constructed and discuss a discursive change constructed in the data. I interpret the change as reconstituting the traditional cultural norm of not wasting food. It is connected to (hopes for) a wider sustainability transition and a related cultural change.