David Boarder Giles traces the work of Food Not Bombs--a global movement of grassroots soup kitchens that recover wasted grocery surpluses and redistribute them to those in need--to examine the relationship between waste and scarcity in global cities under late capitalism and the fight for food justice.
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.
“"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."”
“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)David Boarder Giles is Lecturer in Anthropology in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at Deakin University.
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