Collective fridges: An autonomous practice in the landscape of food redistribution in Montreal and Quebec

Collective fridges represent a discreet resource for managing food surpluses at the local level that can lead to social transformation on food practices. These surpluses are defined as “food that is edible and safe for human consumption and has been generated by different failures within food industry supply chains and their practices” (Midgley 2020, 349) and are handled by a complex local governance. Collective fridges’ actors seize these resources and create “parallel social infrastructure” (Fornabaio and Poto 2016) of redistribution to fight waste and poverty. Grounded on ethnographic investigation that takes place from 2016 to 2020 in Montreal and Quebec cities, this paper shows that actors collect, store in fridges, and redistribute food at the margin of dumpster diving practices and traditional networks of redistribution such as food banks. It is based on a census of fridges in the two cities, observations in 13 digital groups and 31 semi-structured interviews. Those data allow us to establish a typology of fridges, then to report the (political) motivations of the actors involved, and finally to follow the redistribution process. Each fridge sets up its own standards of redistribution that sometimes prioritizes social ties, saving food or social justice. Those organizations tend to emphasize the autonomy and dignity of the beneficiaries, contrary to the practices of food banks. Although these practices are intended to be informal, they may endorse light forms of institutionalization, whether by the formalization of refrigerators in registered associations, or the establishment of formal agreements with grocery shop. They navigate through the interstices of politics but can nevertheless bring about changes at the local level. For example, one of the participants sent a petition against waste to local and provincial authorities, which led to a new regulation. In summary, this paper describes how the actors involved in collective fridges are committed to a sustainable transformation to fight against food waste and for (food) social justice.