EHN Lecture | Food before waste in premodern cities

The next Environmental Humanities Network Talk + Discussion is just around the corner! Make sure to attend!

Food before waste in premodern cities

Historian, arabist and mealworm farmer Willem Flinterman will be presenting his prospective research project:

"Cities transform enormous quantities of food into waste. At what point, however, does food become waste? Waste for whom? What social and cultural factors are influencing the cascading transition from food into refuse? Introducing my contribution to a research project currently in development, I will discuss several practices and discourses related to the reuse and reselling of organic residual matter in the urban centers of the Islamic medieval Mediterranean. I will start with a brief overview of sources that seem promising for this research and show how these can yield new historical value, when approached in new ways.

This research integrates insights gained during my previous work on charitable foundations in Mamluk Cairo with new interests developed during my applied research practice of previous years. In Rotterdam I have run a bio-circular mealworm farm, pioneering organic waste valorization on a local, neighborhood level."