Beyond Desperation: Motivations for Dumpster™ Diving for Food in Vancouver

Abstract

In the global food system, food is considered a disposable commodity and waste is produced at extraordinarily high levels. In a number of affluent nations, including Canada, "dumpster diving" for food has emerged as an approach to food provisioning. This article is based on a research project conducted for an honors thesis that examines dumpster diving for food in Vancouver, British Columbia. While an earlier report (Miewald 2009) identified dumpster diving in Vancouver as a survival strategy for people living in poverty who experience food insecurity, research for this article reveals that motivations also extend beyond economic desperation. The data contest some common assumptions and provide explanations of people's motivations and their means of "dumpstering" in the Vancouver locale. As such, the article reveals divers' broader political, social, and economic motivations in a specific locale, enabling an exploration of some systemic contradictions of food production, distribution, provisioning, and consumption.This article explains Dumpster TM1 diving for food in Vancouver, British Columbia, and why people do it. Diving has emerged as a food provisioning practice occurring in affluent urban centers, including Canada. 2 People who provision food from dumpsters-dumpster "divers"-have transformed their own behaviors-their foodways-to take advantage of an opportunity that our global food system creates: massive levels of food waste, some of which ends up in waste receptacles referred to in North America as dumpsters.We wish to thank the dumpster divers and everyone else who shared their views, experiences, stories, and food with us.

Domestic Residential Garden Food Production in Melbourne, Australia: a fine-grained analysis and pilot study

“…These emerging initiatives are now attracting the attention of researchers. These include such features as farmers' markets, community gardens (Beilin & Hunter 2011) and local food swaps, which tend to be informal and often held at public spaces like a reserve, school yard or neighbourhood house, as well as the more radical actions such as gleaning and 'urban foraging' (Carolsfeld & Erikson 2013;Edwards & Mercer 2013).…”

Natural Resource Access Rights and Wrongs: Nontimber Forest Products Gathering in Urban Environments

“…At the other end of the spectrum are grassroots approaches in which city residents self-organize to create individual or collective gardens by investing labor in vacant public or private spaces over which access rights are nebulous and without legal authority (Carpenter 2009;Adams, Hardman, and Larkham 2015). Related literature identifies social negotiations (with restaurant owners and diners, begging) (Downey 2016), and scavenging in dumpsters for food considered "waste" (Carolsfeld and Erikson 2013) as additional mechanisms of resource access in cities.…”

Living on the margins: dumpster diving for food as a critical practice

“…Research on the topic has proliferated since Ferrell's book. For example, studies have shown that voluntary dumpster divers are mostly middle class and well educated (Carolsfeld and Erikson 2013;Edwards and Mercer 2007;Vinegar, Parker, and McCourt 2016) and that they are not simply outside consumer society but play with notions of value at its margins (Brosius, Fernandez, and Cherrier 2012;Clark 2004;Fernandez, Brittain, and Bennett 2011;Giles 2014;Gross 2009; Guillard and Roux 2014; Lehtonen and Pyyhtinen 2020).…”