Tracing Waste: Using Post‐It Notes and ‘Fridge Maps’ to Record Food Waste in Household Refrigerators

This paper presents a novel, material method of replacing food waste with Post‐It notes inside domestic refrigerators to trace food as it is transformed in the home, both through regimes of value and physically out of the fridge to become food waste. Over 10 million tonnes of food are wasted every year in the UK, of which 60% is attributed to households, and more examination into the socio‐material factors of this waste is warranted. ‘Fridge maps’ were then sketched of the Post‐It notes inside the fridges, and these methods together investigate the spatial arrangements in which food items divest from being a valuable item to a waste material. Previous studies have found that visibility and access inside the fridge can mean food is hidden and forgotten in deep shelves and drawers, and this method interrogates how the materiality of the space itself can play a part in this waste. However, in placing Post‐It notes inside the fridge to represent ‘matter out of place’, Post‐It notes become ‘matter out of place’ themselves, and the paper reflects on how participants accommodated and resisted this method, and the consequent implications for the data collection. The method gave fruitful insight not only into the role of the fridge in household food waste, but what ‘waste’ means in different contexts, and contributes to debates around the lives and movements of things and acts of disposal in the home.