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.
- Cover
- Contents
- preface / acknowledgments
- prologue : any given sunday in seattle
- introduction : of waste, cities, and conspiracies
- Part I : Abject Capital
- scene i : it’s thanksgiving in seattle
- 1 / The Anatomy of a Dumpster : Abject Capital and the Looking Glass of Value
- scene ii : reckoning value at the market
- 2 / Market-Publics and Scavenged Counterpublics
- Part II : World-Class Cities, World-Class Waste
- scene iii : if you build it, they will come
- 3 / Place-making and Waste-making in the Global City
- scene iv : like a picnic, only bigger, and with strangers
- 4 / Eating in Public : Shadow Economies and Forbidden Gifts
- Part III : Slow Insurrection
- scene v : “rabble” on the global street
- 5 / A Recipe for Mass Conspiracy
- scene vi : when i first got to the kitchen
- 6 / Embodying Otherwise : Toward a New Politics of Surplus
- encore : a new zeitgeist
- conclusion : an open letter to lost homes (political implications)
- notes
- bibliography
- index
Text
Audio
Adobe DRM
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