schaffer_practice


 * Practice: Throwing things away**

You have peeled a carrot. You have left the peels sitting at the edge of the cutting board, spilling off onto the counter and sticking feebly to the Formica. Perhaps you have some downtime while the soup cools and you try to clean the peels up, or perhaps you are grating the carrots onto a salad, which case, you decide to wait until after you eat to take care of them. It’s fine, take your time. You have other things to think about.

But when you do get to them, what do you do? It’s easy to swing toward a “choice” frame for the question, but this moves us toward rational actor territory, and I think that trying to find the right faroff place to send a handful of carrot peels is far from rational, and the choices are often direly limited. On the other hand, it’s not like disposal is simply a sorting behavior, like you’re one of those coin jars that knows where to put the dimes, pennies, nickels and quarters. The options simply aren’t stragithforward enough. There’s the garbage disposal or the trash can, or perhaps a little countertop compost bin, a compost pile out back or in your community garden plot, or a container in the fridge to keep your foodscraps from smelling while you wait to dispose of them correctly. You might even be a rebel and throw the carrot peels in with the newspaper recycling, or put it on your head as a makeshift hairpiece, or toss it on the back porch for squirrels to eat. You might think better of peeling the carrots and eat the peels yourself, having heard somewhere that they carry vitamin B6 or something like that.

Elizabeth Shove describes any of these options as a “habit finding a carrier”; any given disposal practice may be picked up and woven into daily routines, transmuted through repeated enactment, and even dropped after a time (2012). This seems closer to the truth…