What is the problem/issue being addressed?
This research project challenges the popular misconception that food waste is an exclusive peculiarity of the current scenario. Even more so than this, it challenges the commonplace that responsibility for wastage lies with individual consumers’ agency. In so doing it explores reasons, magnitude, and features of food wastage in the past, namely focusing on the cereal food chain.
In order to explore systemic and impersonal meanings of food wastage, the research elects loss, rather than waste, as its real target. Essentially food loss remains distinct from ‘food waste’ since the former takes place at production, post-harvest, and processing stages, whilst the latter only occurs at the very end of the food chain. This project investigates the incidence of grain losses as a whole, its core features, and its main consequences against the backdrop of pre-industrial Europe. The research project is focused on northern Italy, although, whenever allowed, other areas from the European scenario have been included for comparison.
Why is it important for society?
The pre-industrial grain supply chain model provides a number of interesting hints to the current public debate:
- in broad terms the prevailing debate on food wastage is very much focused on quantitative aspects with prominent stress on consumers’ behavior. Among its implicit assumptions we can spot a few popular misconceptions which are openly challenged by this kind of investigation. Firstly the view that food wastage has mainly to do with the consumers’ attitude towards food and – closely related to this former perspective and allegedly due to that – the idea that food wastage is a typical contemporary phenomenon.
- Historical research can prove that human societies have always spoiled a certain percentage of the food they have been able to produce, gained both by agriculture or breeding, as well collected in the wild.
The overall objectives are:
- A couple of goals interact with the state-of-the-art of the discipline (i.e. Social and Economic History), and notably with the debate on food security, food access, and food market.
1) Supplementing the historical analysis of food insecurity displacing the typical view from agricultural output towards the dysfunctional/vulnerable steps throughout the whole supply chain
2) Getting a closer view at the widely overlooked issue of food quality in a given historical setting (here notably cereal quality): considering commodity features and differences, as well as the straight-away impact of quality on stock prices and more broadly on the market
