Waste has come to shape our experience of space and time, but recognizing this state of affairs remains difficult thanks to our tendency to only see waste in one or the other of these dimensions. Indeed, the properties of waste are connected to space and time: what was once a mere waste of space or a waste of time has grown as waste has scaled up to unprecedented levels in a 24/7 culture of excess. Like Whitman, we are also compelled to wonder about the Earth’s powers of “waste management” and of renewal, of the Earth’s ability to convert waste into new life. Our own wastes include metabolic waste, industrial waste, medical waste, nuclear waste, and food waste. Though the nature and scope of our waste may differ from those of Whitman’s time, like Whitman, we live surrounded by waste. Whitman’s terms are organic, but we grasp in them our contemporary condition: a world populated with a history of Love Canals, unclaimed garbage barges floating forever off our coasts, CAFO farms spraying acres of manure, and the glowing specter of Yucca Mountains. Walt Whitman’s 1856 poem “This Compost!” expresses waste as a problem of physical, even chemical, recycling and regeneration, the perpetual exchange of divine materials and such leavings as the corrupted human form becomes after death. It gives such divine materials to men, and accepts such leavings from them at last. It renews with such unwitting looks its prodigal, annual, sumptuous crops, It distills such exquisite winds out of such infused fetor, It turns harmless and stainless on its axis, with such endless successions of diseas’d corpses, It grows such sweet things out of such corruptions, Now I am terrified at the Earth, it is that calm and patient, Though probably every spear of grass rises out of what was once a catching disease. That when I recline on the grass I do not catch any disease, That the winds are really not infectious, Where have you drawn off all the foul liquid and meat? Those drunkards and gluttons of so many generations? Where have you disposed of their carcasses? Is not every continent work’d over and over with sour dead? How can you furnish health you blood of herbs, roots, orchards, grain?Īre they not continually putting distemper’d corpses within you? How can you be alive you growths of spring? O how can it be that the ground itself does not sicken? We conclude by reflecting upon the characteristics of an “ideal” food waste system. Opposition of the two paradigms, which differ with respect to where organic materials should be located in this typology, exacerbates the tensions between them. Waste, we propose, is best conceptualized in terms of binary tensions and opposites, as represented by nodes on Griemas’s semiotic square: food/not-food/waste/not-waste. We provide an overview of two contrasting paradigms of the concept of waste: the industrial and the agrarian. In this paper, we deconstruct commonsensical understandings about food waste from humanistic and experiential perspectives. Yet Whitman connects food and waste, and our culture has scaled up these myriad connections to such an extent that we are paying increasing attention to macroscopic food-waste connections as part of a system. As such, it opposes waste, which is associated with death, pollution, and poison. Stephen Rachman, Robert Chiles, Gretel Van Wieren, Tiffany Tsantsoulas, Renee Wallace Abstractįor Walt Whitman, as for us today, food takes the side of life, nourishment, and nurture. Industrial” and Moving Towards a New Food Ethics