Creator, saviour, garburator: (Re)imagining the human role in the world through a case of food waste

The contemporary food system relies on a paradigm of human exceptionalism. But living well together with all forms of life would require that we imagine humans’ place in the world as embedded, not as separate. This study explores food waste as a case for how to reimagine humans’ place in the world. Drawing from individual and group interviews conducted in Canada and Finland, I trace the roles that ordinary people assign for themselves when talking about food waste. Humans see themselves as both creators of food waste and as saviours of food that is in danger of going to waste. These images uphold the division between humans and the nonhuman world. As a way of troubling these anthropocentric notions and re-embedding the human in the analysis in a way that transcends hierarchical subject positions, I identify a third role: that of the garburator. This role takes humans seriously as material, embodied, and eventually decomposing beings.