annie scott

bitten off, 2024

3 hour performance piece at paresky student center

this food waste performance piece began as a project engaging with audience discomfort. i had also for a while been interested in the process by which our relationship with food shifts from "nutritious" to "abject" in a moment of seconds– as well as how we navigate our relationship as organic bodies and how that implicates us in waste. this performance thus emerged as an interesting intersection of both. my plan was to collect food waste on trays from my peers during the entirety of one lunch period at one of the dining locations on campus. i would then line up the trays on the porch of the building. during the process of performing, i was confronted by many interesting strands tangling consumption, guilt, and complicity together. i began by standing at a compost bin by a waste disposal station at one of paresky student center's many dining venues. even the initial action of simply repositioning a compost bin felt almost ritualistic—an invitation to notice, to make visible what usually goes unseen. as i began approaching students and collecting their discarded food, i was drawn into the quiet performance of waste itself, something both personal and collective. the act of retrieving the leftovers became a subtle confrontation with the invisible consequences of daily consumption.

what struck me early on was the self-consciousness people exhibited in relation to their waste. many apologized for how much food they had discarded, almost as though the waste itself was a transgression—a personal failing. this gave me pause: why does waste make us uncomfortable? why do we feel the need to hide or downplay it, as though the leftover food on a plate is somehow an embarrassment? some people even lied about how much they had thrown away, which felt like a quiet negotiation with their own sense of guilt. it was as though they were participating in a performative dance with waste—acknowledging it, but only in socially acceptable ways. the contrast between different types of waste—obscured in disposable clam shells versus visible on plates—revealed something i hadn’t anticipated: how consumption is (in)visible in so many different forms, yet we often gloss over its true scale. people would often say, “oh, there aren’t many leftovers,” only for me to discover whole boxes of discarded food. the gap between what was claimed and what was actually thrown away fascinated me. it felt like a metaphor for the ways we underestimate our own involvement in systems of waste and consumption, as though we convince ourselves that our individual actions are too small to matter.

halfway through the lunch period, the dish carrier stopped working at the clear station i had positioned myself next to. from my past experience in the dining hall, i knew when this happened in the past it usually bottlenecked food clearing and created extreme amounts of work for dining staff. however, this chance event opened up a new layer of engagement with the piece. my role shifted and accumulated (because my own position both physically and interpersonally) the act of managing and sorting dishes, silverware, and food scraps. my role as a performer muddied and became more cumbersome, but it also created a shift in energy. a small group of peiople started watching, observing how i would handle the logistics of the situation. there was a subtle transformation from a simple transaction—me collecting leftovers—to an exchange of sorts: i received the scraps, but in return, i also handled their plates, their silverware, their mess. the reciprocity was quiet but profound. i was not merely a collector; i had become part of a larger cycle, one in which giving and receiving were intertwined in ways that were hard to untangle.

one of the most curious aspects of the performance was the way people interpreted its purpose. many seemed to see it as a commentary on personal consumption—on individual waste. but that was never my intention. the piece was always meant to address institutional consumption—the systems that perpetuate waste on a much larger scale. this was not about blaming individuals; it was about questioning the structures that make food waste a given, a near-inevitable byproduct of modern life. it reminded me of the pbs documentary “plastic wars,” where the focus is often on individual action, when the real issue lies in the larger, invisible systems of production and disposal. as i continued to handle the food waste, i couldn’t help but feel a sense of complicity. by touching the dirty plates and accepting the leftovers, i too was participating in the very system i was critiquing. the act of getting my hands dirty was no longer just a symbolic gesture; it became an embodiment of the very problem at hand. i was both the critic and the participant, the observer and the enabler. in some strange way, i was complicit, too.

what i hadn’t expected was how the piece would make me feel so deeply enmeshed in the systems i was trying to critique. waste, i realized, is not an isolated act—it’s part of a larger, cyclical process. the piece turned into a meditation on this very entanglement, on how personal actions are inseparable from the broader structures in which they are embedded. the performance wasn’t just an exploration of food waste; it was a question, a provocation: how do we untangle ourselves from systems that shape our every action, while still acknowledging that we are part of them?in the end, the work wasn’t about pointing fingers or offering solutions—it was about asking questions, about creating a space where the invisible became visible, and where the messy, uncomfortable reality of waste could be examined without easy answers. what i discovered, more than anything, is that waste is not just an individual issue. it’s a systemic one. the more i engaged with it, the more i saw how we are all implicated in ways we often fail to acknowledge. by the end of the piece, i wasn’t just observing waste—i was becoming part of it, turning the act of collecting into a kind of reflection on how deeply intertwined we all are in the systems that shape our lives.