A Mass Conspiracy to Feed People

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In A Mass Conspiracy to Feed People, David Boarder Giles explores the ways in which capitalism simultaneously manufactures waste and scarcity. Illustrating how communities of marginalized people and discarded things gather and cultivate political possibilities, Giles documents the work of Food Not Bombs (FNB), a global movement of grassroots soup kitchens that recover wasted grocery surpluses and redistribute them to those in need. He explores FNB's urban contexts: the global cities in which late-capitalist economies and unsustainable consumption precipitate excess, inequality, food waste, and hunger. Beginning in urban dumpsters, Giles traces the logic by which perfectly edible commodities are nonetheless thrown out—an act that manufactures food scarcity—to the social order of “world-class” cities, the pathways of discarded food as it circulates through the FNB kitchen, and the anticapitalist political movements the kitchen represents. Describing the mutual entanglement of global capitalism and anticapitalist transgression, Giles captures those emergent forms of generosity, solidarity, and resistance that spring from the global city's marginalized residents. David Boarder Giles traces the work of Food Not Bombs—a global movement of grassroots soup kitchens that recover wasted grocery surpluses and redistribute them to those in need—to examine the relationship between waste and scarcity in global cities under late capitalism and the fight for food justice. David Boarder Giles is Lecturer in Anthropology in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at Deakin University. Preface/Acknowledgments  vii
Prologue: Any Given Sunday in Seattle  xi
Introduction: Of Waste, Cities, and Conspiracies  1
Part I. Abject Capital
Scene i: It's Thanksgiving in Seattle  27
1. The Anatomy of a Dumpster: Abject Capital and the Looking Glass of Value  31
Scene ii: Reckoning Value at the Market  55
2. Market-Publics and Scavenged Counterpublics  58
Part II: World-Class Cities, World-Class Waste
Scene iii: If You Build It, They Will Come  91
3. Place-making and Waste-making in the Global City  97
Scene iv: Like a Picnic, Only Bigger, and with Strangers  117
4. Eating in Public: Shadow Economies and Forbidden Gifts  123
Part III: Slow Insurrection
Scene v: "Rabble" on the Global Street  157
5. A Recipe for Mass Conspiracy  166
Scene vi: When I First Got to the Kitchen  198
6. Embodying Otherwise: Toward a New Politics of Surplus  202
Encore: A New Zeitgeist  233
Conclusion: Open Letters to Lost Homes (Political Implications)  235
Notes  255
Bibliography  271
Index  293

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