Lohnes Joshua D
Department of Geology and Geography, West Virginia University, 98 Beechurst Ave, Morgantown, WV 26506 USA.
Agric Human Values. 2021;38(2):351-363. doi: 10.1007/s10460-020-10150-5. Epub 2020 Sep 12.
Food charity in the United States has grown into a critical appendage of agro-food supply chains. In 2016, 4.5 billion pounds of food waste was diverted through a network of 200 regional food banks, a fivefold increase in just 20 years. Recent global trade disruptions and the COVID-19 pandemic have further reinforced this trend. Economic geographers studying charitable food networks argue that its infrastructure and moral substructure serve to revalue food waste and surplus labor in the capitalist food system. The political-legal framework undergirding this revaluation process however is still poorly understood. Drawing on a 6-year institutional ethnography of the food banking economy in West Virginia, this paper takes a supply-side approach to examine the material and moral values driving the expansion of food waste recovery as hunger relief. Empirically, it focuses on the laws, contracts and fiscal incentives regulating charitable food procurement at the U.S. Department of Agriculture and Feeding America. The assemblage of government agencies, private businesses and non-profit organizations enrolled into this gift economy at different scales I argue, serves to enclose food waste into a public-private governance structure that regulates food surpluses and ensures these will not disrupt the scarcity logics driving profitability along primary food circuits.
美国的食品慈善事业已发展成为农业食品供应链的一个关键附属部分。2016年，通过200个区域食品银行网络转移了45亿磅的食物垃圾，在短短20年内增长了五倍。近期的全球贸易中断和新冠疫情进一步强化了这一趋势。研究慈善食品网络的经济地理学家认为，其基础设施和道德基础结构有助于在资本主义食品体系中重新评估食物垃圾和剩余劳动力的价值。然而，支撑这一重新评估过程的政治法律框架仍未得到充分理解。本文以西弗吉尼亚州食品银行经济的六年制度民族志为基础，采用供应方的方法来研究推动将食物垃圾回收作为饥饿救济手段而进行扩张的物质和道德价值。从实证角度看，它聚焦于美国农业部和“美国粮食救助”组织中规范慈善食品采购的法律、合同和财政激励措施。我认为，不同规模参与到这个馈赠经济中的政府机构、私营企业和非营利组织的集合，有助于将食物垃圾纳入一个公私治理结构，该结构对食物盈余进行监管，并确保这些不会扰乱驱动主要食品流通环节盈利能力的稀缺逻辑。
