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.