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Wasteful or sensible? Donor imageries in İstanbul’s food banks

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 April 2020

Candan Türkkan Open the ORCID record for Candan Türkkan [Opens in a new window]
Candan Türkkan*
Affiliation:
Ozyegin University, Department of Gastronomy and Culinary Arts; e-mail: [email protected] and [email protected].
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Abstract

This paper explores how the staff of İstanbul’s food banks perceive the donors and the donations. The paper begins by exploring the literature on food banks; what food banks recover and redistribute; and the role food banks play in managing food insecurity. Next, how these three issues are represented in different models of food banks are discussed: in the non-profit model, the donors are “socially aware citizens” who contribute to the common good by helping to feed the hungry; whereas, for the for-profit model they are “caring capitalists” doing their best to reduce their carbon footprint and eliminate food waste while effectively managing the costs of waste disposal. In the municipal social markets, in contrast, the donors are “prodigal consumers” who cannot make correct resource allocation decisions and waste food as a result. For all the models, the donors are predominantly individuals or households and waste generation is perceived as a consumer problem, whereas in practice the donors are mostly corporations giving away their surplus stock. The paper concludes by underlining that this misperception shifts the conversation on waste generation and management away from production and supply chain problems and disciplines individuals as consumers.

Keywords

Food banksİstanbulfood wastefood aid
Type
Articles
Information
New Perspectives on Turkey , Volume 62 , May 2020 , pp. 51 - 73
Copyright
© New Perspectives on Turkey and Cambridge University Press 2020

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Footnotes

Author’s Note: I would like to thank the three anonymous reviewers who have helped me improve this paper. I would also like to thank Samarjit Ghosh for his unwavering support throughout the fieldwork and my assistants Elif Birbiri and Alperen Buğra Yılmaz for helping me along with the interview transcriptions.

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