Formal Food Rescue in Lebanon: Present Practice and Future Visions

Abstract

Food rescue is used the world over as a win-win approach to addressing both food waste and hunger. There are many critiques of food rescue, including that when centred in public policy and social understandings of the issues of waste and hunger it can replicate the conditions that create hunger and needless waste. Despite these critiques, food rescue practice is still widely employed and enjoys broad support from people, businesses, and state actors. Previous research, both theoretical and empirical, has focussed almost exclusively on global north contexts of strong governance, some level of social welfare, and mature waste management systems. This study uses three methods to research the activities and visions of formal food rescue organisations in Lebanon. The first is a critical review of relevant literature; the second is an analysis of texts created by the organizations; and the third is semi-structured interviews with staff of three food rescue organisations in Lebanon. There are four key findings from this research. The first is that the food rescue system in Lebanon is broadly the same as in the literature in many ways, but that the state is absent, creating a vacuum that simultaneously makes food rescue harder while positioning it as a realistic option. Following from this, common critiques of food rescue in the literature, while not easily mapped onto the Lebanese context, reveal decades of entrenched issues beyond the scope of food rescue organisations. A significant finding from this study is that food rescue seems unable to operate in contexts of armed conflict due to the upheaval that this creates. One of the key critiques of food rescue is that it requires orthodoxy; the findings from this study provide some empirical basis for this. The final finding is a proposal that food systems that create hunger are constructed as structurally violent in order to open up new avenues of inquiry, and to argue that hunger as an outcome is a choice. Food rescue is not an appropriate tool to reckon with this as it does not have the capacity to create new social imaginaries. This study has further significance in that it is one of the few studies empirical on food rescue outside the global north and likely the first in the Middle East North Africa region.