Week 8 Session: Personal waste audit

This week’s question: if the fridge preserves, why does the household throw away more than it did before?

Inherited from week 7: the date label is the trigger. This week is the system the trigger sits inside — costed, in your own kitchen.

Before the session#

Keep a record for the seven days before this tutorial of everything you discard from your fridge. Start now; this cannot be reconstructed from memory, and the attempt to reconstruct it is itself a demonstration of week 4’s argument about visibility.

For each item record:

• what it was, and roughly how much
• how old it was, or your best estimate
• why it went — spoiled, date passed, forgotten, cooked too much, went off before you got to it, no longer wanted
• what it cost, as best you can establish

Weighing is ideal. A daily photograph works if weighing is impractical.

If you throw out nothing in a week, record that too and bring your reasoning. A genuine null result is interesting and rarer than people expect.

Read Bauman on consumerism and the Stuart household chapters.

In the session#

• Costing the week (30 min). Convert your records into a monetary total and a caloric total. We put both on the board anonymously. The money is the number that lands; the calories are the number that lingers, because they translate into how many days of eating you threw away.
• Why it went (25 min). Sorting the room’s discards by reason. The categories are rarely “it spoiled.” They are far more often forgotten, bought too much, or date passed while still fine — which are failures of attention and provisioning, not of refrigeration.
• Bauman (25 min). Liquid modernity and the illusion of abundance. If nothing is meant to be permanent and the consumer’s job is to keep choosing, then a fridge full of half-commitments is not a malfunction — it is the system operating correctly. Test this against your own audit.
• Relocation, not prevention (15 min). For your three most expensive discards: what would have had to happen at the point of purchase for that item never to exist? The fridge moved the decision from the shop to your bin.

Afterwards#

Keep the audit. It is the strongest quantitative material most people generate in this course, and it is directly usable in both the Critical Essay and the Final Project.

If the total was uncomfortable, that is the ordinary result and not a personal failing — the entire argument of week 8 is that the number is structural. Say so in the essay; do not apologise for it.