Pépin Lecture Series - Truffles and Trash with Kelly Alexander

Kelly Alexander is a writer and an anthropologist of food based in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. For many years she was a senior editor at Saveur magazine, during which she became the youngest writer to win a James Beard Journalism Award for reporting. Her essays and articles on food have appeared in the New York Times, the New York Times Magazine, Gourmet, The Oxford American, The New Republic, O: The Oprah Magazine, Newsweek, and many other publications. Her dissertation fieldwork focuses on a network of activists, cooks, and volunteers working to recirculate food waste in Brussels, Belgium.

On a fragile planet with spreading food insecurity, food waste is a political and ethical problem. Examining the collaborative, sometimes scrappy institutional and community efforts to recuperate and redistribute food waste in Brussels, Belgium, Kelly Alexander reveals it is also an opportunity for new forms of sociality. Her study plays out across a diverse set of locations—including a food bank with ties to the EU, a social restaurant serving low-cost meals made from supermarket surplus by an emergent immigrant labor force, and a social inclusion program in an urban market with a “zero food waste” pop-up café. Alexander argues that these efforts, in concert with innovative policy, effectively recirculate wasted food to new publics and produce what she terms a “spectrum of edibility.”
According to Alexander, these models face challenges—including reproducing the very power dynamics across race, class, and citizenship status they seek to circumvent. They also mirror the challenges of the everyday operations of the European social welfare state, which is increasingly reliant on NGOs to meet provisioning promises. Yet she finds that they also move the needle forward to reduce food waste across one city, providing an example for major urban centers around the world.

Know what’s Happening Next — before everyone else does.

Get App

Host or Publisher Boston University Programs in Food & Wine