ABSTRACT
This chapter begins by outlining a typology of surplus food redistribution. The typology focuses on the main formats that reflect efforts to utilise surplus foods through either a ‘brokerage’ approach typified by food banking or ‘challenger’ redistribution formats that express a plurality of values and often radical political activism. Following this contextualisation, the chapter turns to exploring theoretical conceptualisations of surplus food and its redistribution. This notes how discussions are often dominated by ideas of economic value, but when it is recognised that a good’s intended use may still be possible this also allows for social, cultural and political values to inform ideas and understandings of surplus food. The chapter then turns to consider some of the policy actions that attempt to govern surplus food and its redistribution. This brings to the fore the tensions between regulating the food as edible food while also placing it within waste policy framings. The chapter suggests that the difficulties associated with surplus food redistribution are to be found in the contestations and tensions generated between the different values and relations that become enrolled in its making and continue to be attached and detached as the food flows from its initial source of supply, onward toward its consumption via different redistribution formats.
