Description
Book SynopsisIn
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 mu
Trade Review“Chronicling the work of the urban justice organization Food Not Bombs, David Boarder Giles analyzes urgent and overlapping social, economic, and political concerns common in today's global cities. Giles engages with a range of scholarly disciplines and theoretical arguments eloquently and elegantly, while offering ethnographic details that are both vivid and convincing.” -- Robin Nagle, author of * Picking Up: On the Streets and Behind the Trucks with the Sanitation Workers of New York City *
“In
A Mass Conspiracy To Feed People, David Boarder Giles documents the rhizomatic magic by which the anarchist direct action group Food Not Bombs converts urban food waste into meals for the hungry and hope for a better world. Along the way he intertwines his own lived experience and a sophisticated critique of the contemporary capitalist city to create a beautiful book that is itself a recipe for a slow-simmering revolution.” -- Jeff Ferrell, author of * Drift: Illicit Mobility and Uncertain Knowledge *
“[A Mass Conspiracy to Feed People] is appropriate for upper division undergraduate and graduate classes on social movements. . . . It is a must read for social activists looking to address equity issues in a neo-liberal, capitalist world. Kudos to Giles for providing such an excellent blueprint for ways in which the detritus of capitalism can be used to address the ills of the system."
-- Michael L. Hirsch * International Social Science Review *
“Themes of abject waste, abject communities, and the subversive potential of counterpublics form the structure of [
A Mass Conspiracy to Feed People] and aptly carry the reader from the quotidian bin into new political possibilities.” -- Benjamin Wyatt * Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology *
"
A Mass Conspiracy is an academic book with the aesthetics of an anarchist zine, replete with side-bar soup recipes, reproductions of FNB flyers, and vivid photographs of discarded food and abandoned people. This, combined with Giles’ lively prose, helps the reader through a dense theoretical argument. It also brings us back to what really matters: who and what is being thrown out of the towering heights of global cities, and what insights and possibilities we can recover from the wreckage." -- Alex V. Barnard * Mobilization *
Table of ContentsPreface/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
