A Mass Conspiracy to Feed People

A Mass Conspiracy to Feed People
Author: David Boarder Giles
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 206
Release: 2021-07-21
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1478021713

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.

"A Mass Conspiracy to Feed People"

Author: David Henry Galen Boarder Giles
Publisher:
Total Pages: 254
Release: 2013
Genre: Globalization
ISBN:

This is an ethnography of waste, cities, and social movements. Primarily one social movement in particular, Food Not Bombs, which recovers and freely redistributes wasted food in the public spaces of hundreds of cities, in dozens of countries, on every continent except Antarctica. In the process, chapters contest highly polarised geographies of hunger, homelessness, and public space in these places. This dissertation explores three aspects of Food Not Bombs' context and cultural logic: (1) the ways in which waste is made and moved about in cities; (2) the ways in which those cities are becoming global in the process of waste-making (and vice versa); and (3) the ways in which this globalised waste-making cultivates globalised forms of social organisation and political resistance. This research has consisted of extensive participant-observation within Food Not Bombs chapters and some of the larger political and cultural communities in which they are embedded--Dumpster-divers, squatters, homeless advocates, punks, anarchists, and so on--in Seattle, New York City, San Francisco, Boston, Melbourne, Australia, and several other cities. It describes the link between urban globalisation and the proliferation of Food Not Bombs chapters, many of which have been located in "global" cities whose post-industrial economies are intimately entangled in global circuits of elite business investment, high-end consumption, and tourism. Each of these cities generates a wealth of world-class waste: food wasted in the interests of commodity aesthetics, buildings left empty for the sake of property speculation and gentrification, and so on. This waste, and the disparities and deprivations that correspond to it (hunger, homelessness, etcetera), are the material and political preconditions of Food Not Bombs' work. Broadly speaking, then, this dissertation describes a sort of abject symbiosis between the development of such globalised cities and the politically resistant work of Food Not Bombs.

Introducing Human Geographies

Introducing Human Geographies
Author: Kelly Dombroski
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 1081
Release: 2024-07-09
Genre: Science
ISBN: 0429556373

Introducing Human Geographies is a ‘travel guide’ into the academic subject of human geography and the things that it studies. The coverage of the new edition has been thoroughly refreshed to reflect and engage with the contemporary nature and direction of human geography. This updated and much extended fourth edition includes a diverse range of authors and topics from across the globe, with a completely revised set of contributions reflecting contemporary concerns in human geography. Presented in four parts with a streamlined structure, it includes over 70 contributions written by expert international researchers addressing the central ideas through which human geographers understand and shape their subject. It maps out the big, foundational ideas that have shaped the discipline past and present; explores key research themes being pursued in human geography’s various sub-disciplines; and identifies emerging collaborations between human geography and other disciplines in the areas of technology, justice and environment. This comprehensive, stimulating and cutting-edge introduction to the field is richly illustrated throughout with full colour figures, maps and photos. The book is designed especially for students new to university degree courses in human geography across the world, and is an essential reference for undergraduate students on courses related to society, place, culture and space.

Truffles and Trash

Truffles and Trash
Author: Kelly Alexander
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Total Pages: 160
Release: 2024-10-29
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1469678608

On a fragile planet with spreading food insecurity, food waste is a political and ethical problem. Examining the collaborative, sometimes scrappy institutional and community efforts to recuperate and redistribute food waste in Brussels, Belgium, Kelly Alexander reveals it is also an opportunity for new forms of sociality. Her study plays out across a diverse set of locations—including a food bank with ties to the EU, a social restaurant serving low-cost meals made from supermarket surplus by an emergent immigrant labor force, and a social inclusion program in an urban market with a "zero food waste" pop-up cafe. Alexander argues that these efforts, in concert with innovative policy, effectively recirculate wasted food to new publics and produce what she terms a "spectrum of edibility." According to Alexander, these models face challenges—including reproducing the very power dynamics across race, class, and citizenship status they seek to circumvent. They also mirror the challenges of the everyday operations of the European social welfare state, which is increasingly reliant on NGOs to meet provisioning promises. Yet she finds that they also move the needle forward to reduce food waste across one city, providing an example for major urban centers around the world.

Culinary Man and the Kitchen Brigade

Culinary Man and the Kitchen Brigade
Author: Jordan Fallon
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 233
Release: 2024-09-23
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1040134653

Culinary Man and the Kitchen Brigade offers an exploration of the field of normative subjectivity circulated within western fine dining traditions, presenting a theoretical analysis of the governing relationship between the chef, who embodies the Culinary Man, and the fine dining brigade. The book offers a unique treatment of western haute cuisine’s interlocking regime of labor and aesthetics and theorizes the underexplored kitchen brigade as a model of disciplinary formation. It deploys a heterogeneous set of disciplinary discourses and practices which have the effect of consolidating monopolies on epistemic authority and governance. Each position within the brigade’s hierarchy is subject to distinct, though related, disciplinary practices. Thus, chapters identify the specific practices pertinent to each brigade subject, while also illuminating how they fit together as a coherent hegemonic project. The application of Wynterian and Foucauldian insight to the fine dining brigade offers a political theory of culinary work which departs from other food studies texts. Notably, this work offers an in-depth treatment of the brigade’s colonial dimensions which resonate with emerging critiques, scholarly and general, of the race and gender politics of restaurant labor. The concluding chapters seek to identify where extant modes of resistance or alternative forms of culinary organization may hold the potential to move beyond the hegemonic overrepresentation of Culinary Man. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars from across the social sciences and humanities interested in critical food studies, political and cultural theory, and popular culinary culture.

Researching Poverty and Austerity

Researching Poverty and Austerity
Author: Caroline Moraes
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 187
Release: 2023-11-30
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1003803946

Poverty is a complex global challenge rooted in intertwined social, economic and political factors, which excludes people from participating fully in normalised social and market-based activities. The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated poverty-related issues such as food insecurity, and growing numbers of people are having to rely on welfare assistance. This pandemic, coupled with austerity measures implemented across many European countries over the past years, has impacted negatively on towns, cities, regions and countries, leaving places and communities depleted. This edited volume curates a collection of relevant research addressing the challenges of poverty and the political-economic measures that perpetuate it. It adopts a cross-disciplinary approach to covering relevant theories, methodologies and policy-oriented research, highlighting the interlinkages between poverty and austerity that have resulted since the 2008 financial crisis. In particular, the book focuses on food insecurity as one of the most extreme manifestations of poverty but also addresses interconnected issues such as unemployment, homelessness and poor health. The contributors primarily utilise diverse qualitative methods that give voice to lived experiences of poverty while also considering quantitative approaches that are essential for measuring food insecurity and modelling the impacts of austerity. The book will be of significant interest to anyone researching poverty and austerity with an interest in social policy, human and cultural geography, marketing and consumer culture, economic policy, public health and sustainability.

Routledge Handbook of Food Waste

Routledge Handbook of Food Waste
Author: Christian Reynolds
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 557
Release: 2020-01-13
Genre: Technology & Engineering
ISBN: 0429870701

This comprehensive handbook represents a definitive state of the current art and science of food waste from multiple perspectives. The issue of food waste has emerged in recent years as a major global problem. Recent research has enabled greater understanding and measurement of loss and waste throughout food supply chains, shedding light on contributing factors and practical solutions. This book includes perspectives and disciplines ranging from agriculture, food science, industrial ecology, history, economics, consumer behaviour, geography, theology, planning, sociology, and environmental policy among others. The Routledge Handbook of Food Waste addresses new and ongoing debates around systemic causes and solutions, including behaviour change, social innovation, new technologies, spirituality, redistribution, animal feed, and activism. The chapters describe and evaluate country case studies, waste management, treatment, prevention, and reduction approaches, and compares research methodologies for better understanding food wastage. This book is essential reading for the growing number of food waste scholars, practitioners, and policy makers interested in researching, theorising, debating, and solving the multifaceted phenomenon of food waste.

Circular Ecologies

Circular Ecologies
Author: Amy Zhang
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Total Pages: 265
Release: 2024-07-09
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1503639304

After four decades of reform and development, China is confronting a domestic waste crisis. As the world's largest waste-generating nation, the World Economic Forum projects that by 2030, the volume of household waste in China will be double that of the United States. Starting in the early 2000s, Chinese policymakers came to see waste management as an object of environmental governance central to the creation of "modern" cities, and experimented with the circular economy, in which technology and policy could convert all forms of waste back into resources. Based on long-term research in Guangzhou, Circular Ecologies critically analyzes the implementation of technologies and infrastructures to modernize a mega-city's waste management system, and the grassroots ecological politics that emerged in response. In Guangzhou, waste's transformation revealed uncomfortable truths about China's environmental governance: a preference for technology over labor, the aestheticization of order, and the expropriation of value in service of an ecological vision. Amy Zhang argues that in post-reform China, waste—the material vestige of decades of growth and increasing consumption—is a systemic irritant that troubles China's technocratic governance. Waste provoked an unlikely coalition of urban communities, from the middle class to precarious migrant workers, that came to constitute a nascent, bottom-up environmental politics, and offers a model for conceptualizing ecological action under authoritarian conditions.

Beyond Global Food Supply Chains

Beyond Global Food Supply Chains
Author: Victoria Stead
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 180
Release: 2022-07-20
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9811931550

This open access book takes the upheaval of the global COVID-19 pandemic as a springboard from which to interrogate a larger set of structural, environmental and political fault lines running through the global food system. In a context in which disruptions to the production, distribution, and consumption of food are figured as exceptions to the smooth, just-in-time efficiencies of global supply chains, these essays reveal the global food system as one that is inherently disruptive of human lives and flourishing, and of relationships between people, places, and environments. The pandemic thus represents a particular, acute moment of disruption, offering a lens on a deeper, longer set of systemic processes, and shining new light on transformational possibilities.