Freegans: Diving into the Wealth of Food Waste in America
Alex V. Barnard
Abstract
This book explores how 40% of America’s food supply is thrown out—uneaten—through the lens of one group of activists, “freegans,” in New York City dedicated to recovering, redistributing, and reusing this wasted wealth. Through the eyes of freegans, we see the hidden underbelly of our food system, the limits of “ethical consumption,” and the disturbingly central place of waste in contemporary capitalism. This book is the only full-length treatment of freeganism, a movement that has inspired hundreds of reports in dozens of countries in the last decade. Although other scholars have analyzed foo ... More
This book explores how 40% of America’s food supply is thrown out—uneaten—through the lens of one group of activists, “freegans,” in New York City dedicated to recovering, redistributing, and reusing this wasted wealth. Through the eyes of freegans, we see the hidden underbelly of our food system, the limits of “ethical consumption,” and the disturbingly central place of waste in contemporary capitalism. This book is the only full-length treatment of freeganism, a movement that has inspired hundreds of reports in dozens of countries in the last decade. Although other scholars have analyzed food waste, this is the first to do so through the eyes of anti-food waste activists themselves, which presents a uniquely critical perspective into the underlying logic behind it. Finally, it is the first book to use waste to highlight the limits of ethical consumerism—like buying organic, fair-trade, or vegan—by showing that markets do not seamlessly translate preferences expressed at the cash register into changes in production.
Keywords:
freeganism,
dumpster-diving,
waste,
capitalism,
anarchism,
social movements,
ethical consumption,
food,
prefiguration
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2016 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780816698110 |
| Published to Minnesota Scholarship Online: January 2017 |
DOI:10.5749/minnesota/9780816698110.001.0001 |
