Sep 2026: Article by Elena Davydova in Food and Foodways
Food and Foodways, a refereed, interdisciplinary and international journal devoted to the history and culture of human nourishment, has recently published the article “Between food and refuse: Enacting (in)edibility in the Russian Arctic” by InfraNorth researcher Elena Davydova.
In this article, Davydova interrogates the contingent boundaries between food and waste in the Russian Arctic, analyzing how entities are enacted as edible, inedible, or partly edible through multi-species everyday practices in different infrastructural contexts.
Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in Chukotka, her study focuses on the afterlife of food across such settings as a landfill, a slaughterhouse, the settlement’s waste bins, school and kindergarten canteens, and households.
Attending to the material uncertainties of Arctic life such as seasonal shortages and fragile supply chains, the study reveals the processual nature of food and challenges food disposal as a separate stage of food transformation, highlighting the interrelatedness and permutability of food production, distribution, consumption, and disposal.
Building on relational waste studies and Annemarie Mol’s theorization of “multiple realities” and “the politics of labor,” the article conceptualizes (in)edibility as an emergent effect of embodied assessments, regulatory regimes, infrastructural affordances, and local ethics. It argues that (in)edibility is continually (un)made through socio-material work, which produces multiple forms or versions of these products.
Exploring practices of discarding, salvaging, and repurposing of domestic and industrial surplus food products, the research shows that such labor is inherently political, as it silently distributes risks, resources, and values across human and more-than-human actors.
The full article is available open-access in Food and Foodways.
