Food sharing is replete with rules; rules around when, how and with whom it is socially, politically and legally acceptable to share. These rules are not fixed, they can change over time, space and in relation to the actors, materials and entities involved in sharing. While formal rules, for example around land-use planning or food safety, are generally explicit (even if not necessarily intimately known by citizens), social rules of sharing are largely unspoken and, as a result, can be difficult to navigate and easy to transgress (Fitzmaurice and Schor, 2018). This chapter interrogates just some of these rules through analysis of ICT-mediated food-sharing initiatives that operate in different urban contexts and are subject to diverse governing regimes.

Key areas of policy emerge – particularly around food safety – as significant in shaping how food sharing is practiced and the experiences of food-sharing initiatives are used in this chapter to exemplify the differentiated roles of supranational (for example, European Union (EU)), national and urban governments in identifying, codifying and regulating both food sharing activities and the urban spaces in which those activities take place operate. First, examples are given from the US of how particular food-sharing practices – such as direct selling from producer to consumer through farmers’ markets or marketplaces for home-cooked food, seed sharing and surplus food redistribution – can come into tension with, resist or reinforce these governing frameworks. Attention is then paid to the internal governance choices made by food-sharing initiatives and the ways in which the rules that initiatives set for themselves emerge and change over time in relation to initial goals and subsequent impacts. It is in this section that the social rules around sharing are considered – although, of course, these permeate all moments of sharing. This is followed by a more considered examination of salient governance issues that particularly affect the redistribution of food surplus within the EU.

Governing urban food sharing: cases from the US

ICT-mediated food-sharing initiatives often reside in relatively unsettled legal territory between private and commercial exchanges.