Moving from Risky to Response-able Care

Food rescue is commonly depicted as a means of caring for the hungry and “the environment”. By paying close attention to care practices in food rescue through a review of international literature and fieldwork in Australia’s capital city, we highlight the dominance of risky care. For “Good Samaritan” donors, risky care enables the problems generated by surplus food to be transferred to food rescue organisations. This transferral focuses attention on the materialities of surplus at the point of collection, effectively obscuring and contracting the spatial, scalar and temporal becomings of excess food. Repeated practices of risky care are shown to: normalise reliance on rapid, agile food rescue organisations; negate human/more-than-human entanglements in mutual relations of care; and compromise fulfilment of recipients’ right to food. Instead, we identify the need to support and amplify modes of response-able care to more equitably distribute risks throughout food flows.