The Community Fridges
This article reports on the emergence of a discreet practice for managing food surpluses: storage and redistribution from collective fridges. To do so, it relies on an ethnographic investigation that took place between 2016 and 2020 in the cities of Montreal and Quebec. It demonstrates that these practices fit into the gaps of the traditional food redistribution circuit as an extension of dumpster diving to propose an alternative management of surpluses. In a pragmatic logic, the fridges’ actors indeed advocate autonomous organizations to fight waste and/or food insecurity. However, collective fridges appear fragile over time and tend to disappear or become more formalized.