"Foodsharing": Reflecting on individualized collective action in a collaborative consumption community organisation

Food waste is increasingly seen as a social problem. The “foodsharing” collaborative consumption initiative is an attempt to mitigate this societal challenge. This chapter investigates the community structure and consumer culture associated with “foodsharing”. As a collaborative consumption movement, food consumption is politicized in the “foodsharing” movement. With a growing community, the “foodsharing” community in Berlin (Germany) faced a conflict with the executive branch of consumer policy, the local food authorities. This chapter is in general interested in how the “foodsharing” community is set up and how the community organisation is combined with particular consumer identities. The chapter further investigates how politicization and a conflict with local food authorities lead to consumer activism against consumer policy. The chapter concludes with a theoretical reflection on collaborative consumption movements, highlighting how the boundaries between individual and collective action are continuously blurred and what consumer policy can learn from this contemporary empirical example.