The Anatomy of a Dumpster

Giles, David Boarder

doi:10.1215/01642472-2391351

Cited by 24 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 63 publications

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“…However, a public desire to reduce food waste, mediated through both governmental policy and everyday consumer practice, is much older if we consider food assistance programs that go at least as far back as the Great Depression. We argue, in fact, that it is critical not to isolate environmental targets associated with food waste from questions of poverty and racial inequality, when together they constitute broader “food systems” that include food assistance benefits (Kornbluh, 2015; Marres, 2012) as well as the “abject capital” of surplus food (Giles, 2014). If today there are fears of people wasting too much food, during the Depression the concerns were the economic effects of unstable prices for agricultural commodities.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Just Desserts: The Morality of Food Waste in America

Reno

Alexander

2023

Culture Agric Food & Envi

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Food, waste, and food waste are embroiled in a wide array of political and moral debates in the United States today. These debates are staged across a range of scales and sites-from individual decisions made in front of refrigerators and compost bins to public deliberations on the U.S. Senate and House floors. They often manifest as a moral panic inspiring a range of Americans at seemingly opposed ends of the political spectrum. This article contrasts three distinct sites where food waste is moralized, with the aim of deconstructing connections between discarded food and consumer ethics. In doing so, we argue that across the contemporary American social strata, food waste reduction efforts enfold taken-for-granted ideas of moral justice, or theodicy, that foreground individual responsibility and, as a result, obfuscate broader systemic issues of food inequality perpetuated by late stage capitalism.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Just Desserts: The Morality of Food Waste in America

Reno

Alexander

2023

Culture Agric Food & Envi

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“…The movie Fight Club picks up on the fact that value in the capitalist schema is based on strategic obsolescence, which encourages the manufacture of goods that will need to be replaced (Henderson 2011); a central ploy of Fight Club is the excess fat gleaned from the garbage at the liposuction clinic, which, in a home factory in a declining neighborhood, is turned into a soap to be flogged to fancy shops as a luxury good (Henderson 2011, p. 157). Freegans (Gross 2012), punks (Clark 2013), and dumpster divers (Giles 2014) also view garbage as a potential resource. Waste is the "thing" that Giles (2014) follows during his fieldwork dumpster diving in Seattle, particularly the "social afterlife of things," the banished things, the "uncommodity."…”

Section: Wastementioning

confidence: 99%

“…Freegans (Gross 2012), punks (Clark 2013), and dumpster divers (Giles 2014) also view garbage as a potential resource. Waste is the "thing" that Giles (2014) follows during his fieldwork dumpster diving in Seattle, particularly the "social afterlife of things," the banished things, the "uncommodity." Expiration dates of industrial foods reflect shipping/storage time rather than edibility; according to Giles and his divers, much edible waste is locked away in dumpsters out of sight, at the back of the store, a practice that keeps the prices up.…”

Section: Wastementioning

confidence: 99%

Consumerism

Meneley

2018

Annu. Rev. Anthropol.

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The article investigates how consumerism is perceived as an unremarkable part of quotidian existence, as a patriotic duty at various moments, as an indicator of social class, and as a means of semiotic self-fashioning. In consumerism, the tension between the sumptuary restraint on conspicuous consumption, which characterized the early Protestant ethic, and the dependence of capitalism itself on boundless commodity circulation, emerges again and again. I investigate how certain forms of consumerism, relating to excess and improper storage, are reclassified in medical terms. I also investigate modes of strategic consumerism, which try to bridge the gap between producer and consumer, and how certain forms of performative labor are themselves consumed. I close with a few reflections on sites for future study: shopping as a form of underrecognized labor, and an auto-ethnographic turn for academics, inspecting the reach of consumerism into academic practices and universities themselves.

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“…grapple with edible matter gone to waste (Eikenberry and Smith 2005;Heynen 2010;Giles 2014;Barnard 2016;Vaughn 2018); others calling for clarification as to the exact make up of this systematically produced waste (MacBride 2011; Liboiron 2013); and those describing the reduction of consumer food waste as equally vital to the future of global food security as increasing food production itself (Stuart 2009). Celebrity chefs like Dan Barber, David Chang, and Massimo Bottura repurposed food waste to great fanfare, protesting global food insecurity or embracing local microbes to ferment food scraps into deliciously novel condiments and sauces (e.g.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Guest editors’ introduction: on the creative destruction of food as science

Tracy

Vaughn²

2019

Food, Culture & Society

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This introduction and special issue takes as its inspiration Kyla Wazana Tompkins' 2012 articulation of Critical Eating Studies. We examine how value is produced through the circulation and transformation of the parts that constitute eating and edible bodies. Guided by the presumed dead, done, and discarded, we find material and structural meaning by focusing not on finished goods but on by-productsboth intended and unintended. The Edible Feminisms special issue foregrounds scientific methods through which neoliberal market relations write-off matter and bodies as wastes and metabolic discontents. We explore how devaluation, or systemic discard, is built into technical modes of capitalist value production and echoes in social structure and cultural forms. In asking: what does feminism have to do with edibility? with waste and metabolic science? we illustrate the stakes of how, why and who of devalued parts and bodies. In the eleven essays of this special issue, we examine how cultural logics of devaluation (classism, racism, sexism) are related to the technical practices of revaluation (e.g. quantitative reductionism, nutritionism). We attune our readers to the messy insides of things, to food science through the Marxian concept of creative destruction.What does edibility have to do with feminism? With waste, or with metabolic health?In the late 2010s, women around the world produce a significant portionsome speculate more than halfof the world's food. Yet, women (particularly women of color) also face sharp hunger trends and gender-based barriers to resources like the land, tools and financing necessary for production (FAO; Doss 2011; Braich 2018). The lack of precise statistics, and the barriers to data collection

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The Anatomy of a Dumpster

Cited by 24 publications

References 63 publications

Just Desserts: The Morality of Food Waste in America

Just Desserts: The Morality of Food Waste in America

Consumerism

Guest editors’ introduction: on the creative destruction of food as science

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