The amount of statistics that can be found showing the negative consequences of food waste are staggering. This leads us to the following research question: .
How is food waste understood, practised and contested in the UK?.
In our search for an answer to this question, we have decided on three sub-themes we want to investigate: the state, the consumers and the activists. We think that these three areas within food waste will lead us to a conclusion. We believe that by looking into the state, we will figure out how food waste is understood by the members of the government of the UK, the few individuals that can effectively change the current policies. We want to find out what laws and policies have been created throughout the years in connection to food waste. Also, we want to discover how aware the politicians are when it comes to the subject of food waste. We believe that the consumers in the British society will lead us to an understanding of how food waste is practised in the UK. How they are behaving with the knowledge they have about food waste and also what knowledge they do in fact have. And lastly we will go into the subject of interests organisations/activists in the United Kingdom. We want to gain greater understanding on the reasons an individual would be motivated to become an activist. We will discover what is required in the creation of interest groups, and how much power they have when it comes to influencing the state. We chose activists because we see them as a possible answer to the question on how food waste is contested. These subjects will make up for our three empirical chapters: Q1, Q2 and Q3. Since our project mostly will be based on the deductive method (a further explanation on this method will come in our methods chapter), we have processed a hypothesis to each of our three chapters:.
Empirical chapter 1, the state:.
If the State is relied on to enact policies and laws that benefit the majority, then the majority should benefit.