Making the Consumption of Food Circular: The Karma App and the Re-qualifications of Surplus Food

Several smartphone applications have been launched focused on ‘fighting’ food waste by creating digital platforms that allow restaurants and retailers to sell unsold surplus food to consumers at a discount. Through these apps, food products go from being surplus, soon to be discarded, to become valuable goods again. This re-qualification of food, when successful, enables the circular consumption of food, arguably promoting a more sustainable mode of food consumption. In this chapter, we ask: How is this accomplished? What processes make the re-qualification of surplus food possible? And in what way, if any, is this circular food consumption also an example of sustainable food consumption? The aim of this chapter is to empirically explore, conceptualise, and explain the digitally enabled re-qualification of food waste and enabling of circular food consumption. Combining theoretical resources from constructivist market studies with insights from the sociology of consumption, we analyse and show how the Karma application—a food redistributor platform—works to re-qualify food waste as editable, economic, and sustainable, and how this food is again re-qualified by consumers in and through their food practices. Critically, the analysis shows that while the mode of food consumption accomplished is indeed circular, it is not necessarily sustainable.