Kelly Alexander. Truffles and Trash: Recirculating Food in a Social Welfare State. The University of North Carolina Press. 2024. ISBN: 9781469678597
Nafsika Papacharalampous (SOAS Food Studies Centre, University of London, UK)
How does a food journalist become an anthropologist? How does a kitchen apprentice at the high-end La Truffle Noire restaurant becomes an ethnographer conducting fieldwork on waste in Brussels? As we begin to read Kelly Alexander’s Truffles and Trash, we are introduced to the author’s very personal journey. Clear on her own positionality from the start and throughout her writing, Alexander narrates to her readers the making of the book, and her own becoming. Leaving behind a career in journalism and her chef’s apron, Alexander spent time at the Food Bank of Brussels, at Bel Mundo (a social restaurant where people on social assistance can intern and cook and serve low-cost meals to those in need), and at Cultureghem, a nongovernmental organization that sets up mobile kitchens serving up simple meals and soups to the city’s poorest areas. Having a parallel journey of ‘becoming’ myself, I was eager to follow her following the food waste. This was a very pleasant endeavour, as her style of writing is distinctive, and makes this book feel both like an academic textbook, but also like something one would very enjoyably read on a lazy Sunday morning (which I happily did).
The first chapter sketches the issue of food waste, situating it between the demand to feed those in need and to protect the environment, embedded in capitalistic systems and gastropolitics, also acknowledging how it can constitute a moral panic directed towards individual consumer wastefulness. The chapter that follows introduces us to the city of Brussels as not only the capital city of Belgium, but also the capital of the Flanders region, capital of the Brussels-Capital Region’s nineteen communes, and of the European Union.[1] Here, Alexander presents a brief cultural history of the city, illuminating the tensions that exist in its colonial past and its linguistic diversity. She also notes food justice issues that arise as the city—in 2018 when she conducted fieldwork—hosts 25 Michelin-starred restaurants, while 33% of its residents live below the poverty line. Both chapters are very interesting to read and provide useful context, though I found myself eager to get to the ethnography, which only begins after quite a few pages, in chapter 3.
Here, we enter the world of the Food Bank of Brussels and meet its volunteers and employees (also social service recipients). We accompany the author at the bank’s food distribution sites where she describes some of the tensions in convincing people to take home expired frozen lasagna, fighting over codfish (when the pork alternative was not appropriate for Muslims), and how recipients of aid are “strongly encouraged” to attend a sermon before they receive food. We then head to the bank’s internal store where we read the story of an employee who took food that was destined to go to recipients. Following these ethnographic vignettes, comes a very interesting discussion on the complexities of the role of the state, Catholic church and private sector (mainly supermarkets) in the (re)distribution of food waste. Alexander analyses the complexity in church ethics and state politics, and presents the two kinds of responsibilities: for feeding the hungry and reducing waste, both of which are handed over from the state to the Catholic church. The food bank of Brussels relies on church networks to feed those in need and, by reducing food waste it achieves the prevention of environmental pollution.
In Chapter four we change fieldsites and spend time at Bel Mundo, the zero-waste social restaurant that offers low-cost dishes. It surely makes a profit though, as all costs and the salaries of interns are covered from funding from the Flemish government (but with a catch – Flemish must be spoken whenever possible). Ingredients are received for free (including even New York Strip steaks!). We meet the head of Bel Mundo, and the liminal interns who are yet to be qualified for official employment but work at Bel Mundo feeding other immigrants. Alexander concludes these ethnographic passages presenting the complications in the interlinking of care, morality, capitalism and moral economy.
In the fifth and final ethnographic chapter, we spend time at Cultureghem, an NGO based in the city’s historic meat market, also known as “the Abattoir”. There, amongst the offerings of produce to those in need, we hear people’s screams for mint (and the cultural hunger that often supersedes physical hunger):
“All the mint was gone in a moment, and the women wanted more. “Encore de menthe! Encore de menthe! Encore de menthe!” they began saying, at first quietly, and then more loudly when none was immediately forthcoming…After two hours of offering “mercis” for watermelons, carrots, and tomatoes, the women had clearly had enough. Those who had previously been pushing one another were now bound by a desire for an herb that connected them to their culture. “Encore de menthe!” they persisted.” (p.154).
We see migrants demanding more soup having escaped a police raid; we feel the author’s parental fear as her 12-year-old son becomes part of the volunteer group and is asked, along with other kids to chop and fry food (sharp blades! Hot pans!). Here, Alexander analyses how by balancing between relying on the market’s excess food and federal and other funding, the NGO manages to revitalise urban spaces and bring people together. All by redistributing and repurposing surplus food among and for the local communities.
As the author sketches the different arenas of waste in her cartography of the zero-waste initiatives in the city of Brussels, the structure of these ethnographic chapters (3-5) is surprising. She begins with a series of -often- seemingly unrelated ethnographic stories (all taking place in the same space), descriptions which are sometimes accompanied by her own reflections. These often “quite different” fieldsites, as Alexander notes, are “characterized by messy intersections of food and people” (p.162), which left me confused in the beginning, as instead of weaving in her analysis, she only proceeds to bring everything together in the last part of each chapter, meticulously composing her argument.
The conclusion is carefully and eloquently crafted, and the reader will definitely engage with the discussion on the degrees of state intervention in different cultural contexts (EU/US). This is inspired by the author’s own efforts to answer the “why don’t we have this” question she received back home in the US, as she described all the initiatives around food waste that she encountered in Brussels. But the ending of the book is much more than this, as Alexander clearly saves the best for last. Her thought-provoking discussion that follows is fascinating. If I were to select my favourite chapter, to my surprise, this would be it. So much so, that I wonder if the book would perhaps benefit from less writing spent on the historical/context chapters, and allowing more space in the ethnography and in the expansion of what I felt was the author’s most meaningful ideas for the scholarship, which sadly only appear briefly and not fully developed in the conclusion.
There, the author manages not only to bring together all her fieldsites, but also reframe recirculated food waste as an “actant” (as per Jane Bennett), offering social belonging to those who share it and make use of it or “oddkin” (as per Haraway) to remap and reconfigure social relations in the city of Brussels while nodding to Heather Paxson’s and Marianne Lien’s works. These intellectual avenues offer the readers, and all of us working on food waste, a lot to think with. What if we approach waste not only as a cultural phenomenon, linked to values and practices, but also as an active agent of change? What if we decentre human agency and, engaging with food waste in a different way, revisit ideas around identity, power and sociability? I would have loved to have read more of Alexander’s thoughts on this.
With the book still in my coffee table, I felt inspired and look forward to reading Alexander’s next work.
[1] It is also the home of the headquarters of NATO and of more than one thousand NGOs linked to the UN!
FoodAnthropology 