The “Prevention Paradox”: food waste prevention and the quandary of systemic surplus production

Preventing food waste is a major global challenge to the sustainability and security of the environment, society and economy. In response to that challenge, a plethora of initiatives addressing food waste have formed in recent years. These initiatives focus on aspects such as the efficiency of resource use, reduction of supply chain food waste, food donations and rescue, consumer behaviour, and above all, innovative ways to add value to food surplus and waste. What many initiatives have in common is that they mainly deal with food waste once it exists rather than preventing it from occurring in the first place, which might thwart efforts to increase long-term food systems sustainability. The idea of food waste prevention itself is beset by several conceptual paradoxes: it is considered the most preferred method to manage waste—which it was supposed to prevent in the first place, and it is an ambiguous ecological behaviour lacking the tangible characteristics of waste composting or recycling (i.e. prevention by its nature is invisible). Most importantly, food waste prevention, like other major sustainability challenges, appears to be in a fundamental conflict of interest with current economic norms and practices. In response to these dissonances of prevention and the inability of waste management to reduce the creation of food waste, researchers have proposed a number of new approaches, including the re-appraisal of food overproduction as a key cause of food waste. Accepting Mourad’s (Environ Soc Berkeley J Sociol 59:26–33, 2015) challenge to “think outside the bin”, this work proposes a “Prevention Paradox” framing as a conceptual link between the bodies of research on food overproduction and food waste prevention, offering a more holistic approach to this major sustainability challenge.