The rules of food sharing: policy challenges in urban food systems

Cities are increasingly under the pressure to deal with food matters, due to the environmental and social costs of established conventional practices that feed today’s urban environments. Food sharing in all its forms – including re-distributing, growing, cooking or just enjoying the pleasure of commensality with others – can have a transformative potential for the making of more just and sustainable cities. Different external regulations, however, can either hamper or enable food sharing initiatives. For example, food safety regulations can become particularly problematic for food sharers willing to cook or redistribute food after its ‘use-by’ date. At the same time, food policies are designed, implemented and enforced at different scales and to varying degrees in different places. This paper will explore precisely how, and across which scales, the regulation of cities actually affects food sharing initiatives. Drawing on extensive and intensive research from a large-scale, multi-sited research project – SHARECITY – comparative international insights on food sharing-related rules and regulations are identified. By presenting empirical analysis of statutory and non-statutory policy documents for selected case-study cities, we explore how rules and regulations of different kinds are shaping the current practices and politics of urban food sharing, revealing the ideological and practical challenges that cities faces when trying to reconfigure conventional food system practices into more sustainable and socially just trajectories.