Prologue. Any given Sunday in Seattle -- Introduction. Of waste, cities, and conspiracies -- The anatomy of a dumpster : abject capital and the looking glass of value -- Market-publics and scavenged counterpublics -- Place-making and waste-making in the global city -- Eating in public : shadow economies and forbidden gifts -- Recipe for a mass conspiracy -- Embodying otherwise : toward a new politics of surplus -- Encore. A new zeitgeist -- Conclusion. Open letters to lost homes (political implications).
Summary:
"A Mass Conspiracy to Feed People describes a global movement of anarchist food-sharing projects, Food Not Bombs, and some of the global cities whose distinctive patterns of waste, hunger, and displacement foster it. Drawing on over five years of fieldwork as a Food Not Bombs (FNB) volunteer in Seattle, David Boarder Giles focuses on the global movement of grassroots soup kitchens that recover wasted grocery surpluses and redistribute them in public spaces. The book's exploration begins in the city's dumpsters, in order to uncover the logic by which perfectly edible commodities are nonetheless abandoned and scarcity thereby manufactured; it next shifts to the city's streets, to describe the gleaming aesthetic and social order reproduced there-which excludes both detritus and abject bodies; and finally it traces the pathways of some of those surpluses into anticapitalist political movements and social spaces such as the FNB kitchen. In the process, it aims to describe the mutual entanglement of the global city and FNB, and more broadly, of global capitalism and anticapitalist resistance"-- Provided by publisher.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.