Is it food or is it waste? The materiality and relational agency of food waste across the value chain
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Food waste has serious economic and environmental repercussions, and there is growing policy attention to this issue in Canada. This study investigates how the material characteristics of wasted food influence its circulation and management in the City of Guelph, Ontario. Based on interviews with informants across the food value chain, we learned that there is a high reliance on systems and techniques to determine when food becomes waste (including cold chains, best before dates, and aesthetic standards). We document how these systems pervade the food chain and food recovery efforts, and also note attempts to disrupt their momentum. Our analysis emphasizes the relational agency of food waste: how social and cultural contexts interact with food’s vital materiality in the determination of when it becomes waste, the circumstances under which waste can become food again, and how organic matter can find a second life as a source of energy and nutrients.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.026 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".