David Boarder Giles: A mass conspiracy to feed each other (ep333)
How do we make sense of the contradiction of having both excess food and food insecurity at the same time? How do counterculture movements like Food Not Bombs prefigure the alternative worlds that are possible?
In this episode, we welcome David Boarder Giles, Ph.D., an anthropologist of food, waste, cities, and social movements who teaches at Deakin University in Melbourne. He focuses on the relationships between economy, identity, and affect or feeling, and his writing is largely organized around three intersecting topics: the role of abject economies in global cities, globalized efforts at municipal governance, and emergent networks and counterpublics cultivated within those abject economies. For him, these are the topics that are the most interesting and the most pressing.
David is the author of A Mass Conspiracy to Feed People: Food Not Bombs and the World-Class Waste of Global Cities.
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“Even the most conservative economist will tell you that capitalism requires structural unemployment to keep inflation down. The economy is based on some people not having work, which means that we have a class system built into capitalism: we need some people to be a little bit hungry, a little bit desperate for work, in order to keep the whole economy ticking.”
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Transcript:
Note: *Our episodes are minimally edited. Please view them as open invitations to dive deeper into each resource and topic explored. This transcript has been edited for clarity.
David Giles: I've always been the sort of person who is interested in the margins and the things that other people have avoided.
I live in Australia now, but I lived in the United States for a long time. As an undergraduate, I just found myself as one of the people who couldn't walk past someone who was homeless asking for money. Over the years, I had different approaches to that. I came to the conclusion that I will just give people money because they probably need it. And whatever they do with it, they probably still need it more than me.
It's those sorts of moments that I think brought me to anthropology — always feeling like an odd duck myself. As an Australian kid living in the United States for a long time, feeling like I've been away from one country for too long to call it home, but not feeling like I was at home in the country, I was in that third space experience. All of those things, I think, bring a lot of people to anthropology.
Anthropology is the science of understanding people in the broadest way possible, which means you look in the margins, in the places where people don't fit. And you don't take anything for granted about your own culture.
I got interested in anthropology for many of the same reasons I got interested in homelessness and dumpster diving. I have been interested in what gets thrown away and why and who gets thrown away or discarded or abandoned. At some point, I realized how much food was thrown away living in the United States, just watching how the people around me ate.
I remember, and this was always insufferable to my friends, but I was in my late teens and early twenties. I'd go out to restaurants, and I just wouldn't order anything. And they’d say, “Are you alright?” And I’d say, “Yeah, I’m just not hungry.” Inevitably, someone would end up with half a meal, and they wouldn't take it home. They would just be ready to throw it away. At the last minute, I’d say, “I’ll take it. I'll grab a box,” which my friends thought was insufferable.
It was just the juxtaposition of so much need against so much waste, the poverty, and inequality in the United States. In my late teens and early twenties I thought, how could you not see this? How could you not find something troubling about this?
I stopped doing that at restaurants because, honestly, it just rubbed my friends the wrong way, even though they were going to throw it away. So I got interested in other kinds of waste recovery.
Probably the most formative experience actually was working at a thrift store before graduate school. I worked in the back for a long time. You take boxes and boxes of people's donations. You have to comb through it and decide what you could sell. Most of it you couldn't sell. So a lot of it got recycled or thrown away. People don't know this. They bring a lot mountain of old coffee cups to the thrift store. We call them op-shops in Australia. They’d bring a mountain of old coffee cups, and most of them would have a stain here and there. And they think, “These will be good. I bet you you can find a good home for these. I've loved them.” I'm sure they did love them, but we couldn't resell them.
In many ways, people use thrift stores as just a way to throw things away without the guilt of putting them in the landfill. All of that made me interested in these big cultural questions.
Why do we throw these things away? Specifically, what drives us to constantly consume and to create this constant throughput through our households? What does that have to do with how we value things and people?
That's why I got into dumpster diving. I got into dumpster diving and anthropology at roughly the same time. So it just made sense to write my doctoral thesis about it.
Kamea Chayne: We have explored the subject of food excess through different lenses on the show before, though I'm no longer sure that the word "excess" properly captures the full picture of what's really going on. Because when we have excess at the same time that many are facing a shortage, then something else is going on and is manufacturing these crises.
So through your anthropological lens, how have you made sense of this contradiction of excess and insecurity for food—and the idea of the economic value that is assigned to food as commodities?
David Giles: It's taken a lot of thinking because you have to understand capitalism as a system. It's such a massive, complex behemoth. It just takes quite a long time to get your head around the global economy. I don't think I ever will. But I've taken a shot at it.
I spent a lot of time trying to understand the inner logics, the inner parts, and dependencies that make capitalism tick. Because on the surface, it does not make sense. If you just look at it from a naive set of assumptions about commerce, you buy things, you keep stock on your shelf, you want to sell as much of it as possible. It's only zooming out and looking at capitalism as a system, not in the way a lot of people think about it.
A lot of people have this sort of mythical assumption that capitalism is an efficient system for distributing resources, that it is a rational process. People talk about the rational market hypothesis. People talk about it as a rational process by which people get what they need, and prices are set appropriately and resources get distributed.
It turns out it's nothing of the sort. Among other things, capitalism is a system of class.
Capitalism is a system for valuing some things above others, and valuing some people above others, whether you're looking at wages, or at the price of goods… Inherently, it has to produce value at the same time as it produces waste, and it has to segregate those. So it has to manufacture scarcity in order to manufacture value.
You take an economics class, Economics 101, and the first thing they tell you most of the time is about scarcity. They tell you about the seesaw of supply and demand. The more constrained the supply, the greater the price.
So capitalism has to create scarcity. And it does it in all sorts of ways. But it enforces a class distinction. It's what they do on an airplane: how many business class seats are there, how many first-class seats are there. They've made a market by manufacturing a scarcity of those things, and they've made a class system at the same time because only a certain number of people can afford those things.
They do it with food, too. And we all participate in it. If you go to the shops, you pick up an avocado — I always think of an avocado because it's one of my favorite foods. You look for just the right one to go on with, and you're implicitly valuing all of those on a hierarchy on a scale from most preferable to the least preferable at a counter. So of course, you're consigning some of those avocados to the bin.
That happens on a mass scale—so much food gets thrown away that’s edible. And that’s not because there's anything dangerous about it, but just because it's been part of these value systems, these heuristics processes for valuing the thing, which might be a sell-by date. Most of us know that sell-by dates don't really mean that much; it's just a way to distinguish between what you can charge full price for and what you can’t—day-old bread versus fresh bread, the avocado without the spot versus the avocado with the spot.
In all of these ways, we're creating a value hierarchy so that some things can be sold at a premium, and others can get chucked. We do that with people, too. So that's the essence of class within capitalism.
Even the most conservative economist will tell you that capitalism requires structural unemployment to keep inflation down. The economy is based on some people not having work, which means that we have a class system built-in. We need some people to be a little bit hungry, a little bit desperate for work, in order to keep the whole economy ticking.
Kamea Chayne: It's interesting when you talked about Economics 101 classes. I took an introductory course myself, and the points that they're teaching have presumptions that underlie them that should be critiqued and questioned.
We often think of the economy as this dominant, large-scale system of value exchange, which globally is rooted in capitalism, but that's just one facet of the story and a limiting understanding of the diverse economies that are existing simultaneously. Part of your work has been to investigate the alternate economies of people living outside traditional social structures, including homeless populations.
Can you break this down for us? What even is an "economy", and how do we recognize its different forms—especially in more marginal and liminal spaces?
David Giles: By and large, we didn't talk about "the economy" until the 20th century. People talked about "economies.”
If you think about the word ‘economy’, it just refers to the management of things. It comes from the word Oikos, which is Greek for household. So the economy was originally the management of resources in a household. If you think of the economy in the way that we use it now, an economy is just any system for distributing wealth, resources, labor, and value. It's any system for valuing things and distributing them.
One of the things I've always loved about anthropology is that we look at all different kinds of economies. So many societies throughout history and still today have been based on a gift economy rather than a market economy.
If you participate in Christmas presents or if you do Halloween or any of these kinds of mass systems where you're obliged to give some things, and if you participate, you're also obliged to get some things, those are gift economies. Whole societies have been based on these kinds of bonds of reciprocity—unlike a market economy, which is also a system for distributing things but it's based on transactions. We buy and sell things. There are all sorts of economies, and they all have their own contradictions, their own internal foibles...
The idea that what we call "the economy" is the only economy is a myth. It's an ideology, really, that says the market is one internally consistent thing, that it's separate from the rest of society, and we are at its mercy—we need to constantly encourage it to grow.
All of these things that you hear on the nightly news and out of the mouths of politicians.
But really, we live in many, many different economies all at once. If you participate in Halloween, there's a small microcosm of a gift economy every October. And people probably haven't done that for the last couple of years.
Some economies are based on financial transactions. Some economies are based on bonds of reciprocity where you put some work in or you put some resources in and you get some out. Some of them are just based on generosity.
The economy of child-rearing, for example, is based on a lot of work that's not paid. It's not market-based in that way. No one really gets paid. Certainly, they don't get paid enough to have children. That's an economy of generosity.
There’s even this idea that maybe your kids will look after you when you get old. That's a kind of gift economy. But honestly, even if you worked and worked and worked and saved and saved, your retirement would be more assured than if you relied on your kids to do it for you. So it is not a profitable process. And yet everything about our society depends on people to continue to put work and life into making children.
That's a gift economy, or maybe it's even a economy of generosity, that a whole society depends on—that we can't see if we think that "the economy" is a single thing and it's all measured in dollars and cents.
Kamea Chayne: I'm coming to realize that I don't love the word 'free’ because people typically use that word to mean that it hasn't been assigned an economic value. But when people use the word free, it tends to undervalue the other forms of value that come from this gift that could enhance relationships that can't be reduced into a monetary value.
I'm not sure how deeply you've looked into this because it's going to be different in every city and country. But I'm curious to think about how certain laws have been set up to strengthen and protect the dominant economic system, which again, both manufacturers scarcity and excess, and how it might even render illegal, or suppress, or act as a barrier against these alternate economies that may be more efficient and that are trying to take hold and assert themselves.
David Giles: Absolutely. So the book that I've written, a large part of it is about those ways in which economies of generosity are undermined, one way or another. Again, think of Halloween. There are all sorts of ways in which people are afraid of sharing things with each other. So now, people are afraid of getting sued if they hand out the wrong Halloween candy. And so the law and the state intercedes to marginalize certain kinds of economies.
What I've written about is the way in which often it's illegal to share food in public spaces, which they do in a whole range of ways.
Sometimes it's just flat-out illegal, and you can get fined. In San Francisco, between 1988 and 1992, over a thousand people were arrested just for giving food out in public. That's mostly targeted at keeping people apart. Those laws and people don't come out and say this, but the real politic of it is that those laws are to keep homeless folks away from places where non-homeless folks might congregate. They stop homeless people from congregating in public spaces because cities get all sorts of complaints and it's bad for business, blah blah blah.
But the fact that they're targeted at these moments when people give food to each other tells us something about the way that capitalism relies on dissuading us from valuing things in this more generous, more humane way. These laws and policies are all over the country. Increasingly, they're all over the world.
And the other thing they do, aside from keeping people apart, is they keep resources from circulating in public, except through transactions.
I was involved in this group Food Not Bombs for six years in Seattle. And we would take food that would have been thrown away, cook it, and hand it out to people who would have gone hungry. Dead simple.
Periodically, the city would come in. The police would come and tell us we couldn't do it. We'd have periods of weeks or months where the police would just keep coming back and trying to kick us out of the park. And the police were just enforcing the law. And the law was that they don't allow the free circulation of this excess anywhere except church basements and other sorts of homeless shelters and indoor places.
This excess, and the economy of generosity that you can make with it, is, by law, constrained to these kinds of shadowy, marginal spaces: church basements, homeless shelters.
The only place where you can share outdoors was under the freeway outside the right free zone, which is a pretty stiff uphill walk from a number of the shelters and above all, where people couldn't see. So that's just one example when we think about all the ways in which we keep need and excess apart from each other.
In the United States, we throw away billions of pounds of unspoiled food every year and millions of households go hungry.
Same thing with squatting. There's a whole economy of squatting that wouldn't be possible if we weren't so attached to private property. Instead, the economy relies on private property. So you get millions of people, probably hundreds of millions of people across the United States go homeless in any given year. It's really hard to count them, but by some measures, it might be one out of every 100 Americans is homeless at some point in the year.
Kamea Chayne: What I've been thinking about is that we often get stuck in arguing over the how or the what, without realizing that many of us actually hold fundamentally different views of human nature that then guide our politics. And those views are at the heart of shaping and justifying different sorts of economic systems and social structures as well.
What are your thoughts on the underlying presumptions about humankind that undergirds our dominant market economy and how it must work? And how do some of these alternate economies that you spoke to push against those mainstream narratives of who we are as people, and therefore how we must organize ourselves, to most "efficiently" meet all of our different needs?
David Giles: So in teaching anthropology classes, one of the first things that come out of anyone's mouth is human nature—at some point within the first class or two. You realize how much of the world we feel like we need to explain by what we are taught, that we need to explain by making some fundamental assumptions about who we are as humans and what our capacities are. And those assumptions are always reductive.
The way our economy works is based on these assumptions that we are little widgets in an economist's model, that we're fundamentally self-interested beings who are weighing up our possibilities in this rational way in order to get the most goods.
So much of our politics also comes standard with a similar assumption that there's this idea that behind the thin veil of culture—it's the law of the jungle, really. Apocalypse fiction is all about reproducing this myth.
For example, the first two seasons of The Walking Dead, I thought, were a really interesting thought experiment. After that, it just turns into a grueling libertarian fantasy about the law of the jungle. Peel back this veneer of shopping malls and tax collectors and hospitals, and what will people do? Well, they'll turn brutal and they'll all have to compete for scarce resources. So it's the scarcity myth.
This scarcity myth suggests that fundamentally, we all are obliged to be self-interested, and that life is nasty, brutish, and short, without something to hold us all in fear of it. And of course, that's not a description of life in the actual wild. Life in the actual wild is much more complicated than that. And life in the actual wild is a mix of competition and cooperation.
What that myth really looks like is contemporary capitalism. That myth is a cartoonish, overblown description of what we do under these conditions of manufactured scarcity. And the scarcity myth is everywhere.
I think about the way the scarcity myth leads people to care about each other. There's this story that we tell the children that you need to find your one true love. And if you find your one true love, then you're incredibly lucky. And if they get away for whatever reason, then there won't be more love. This story does incredible damage to people. It makes people jealous. It makes people stay in relationships that they're not happy in. And it's all totally unnecessary. We could live in these kinds of economies of generosity.
There is a book called The Ethical Slut which talks about what it might be like to live in a non-monogamous society. Plenty of societies have been non-monogamous.
They say at the beginning of the book that love is a renewable resource—but we're told that it's scarce.
We're taught that you only have so much love and you mustn't share it too thinly. And if you do, you'll lose somehow. So this the scarcity myth drives so many things about our society and makes them look like a market. It makes them behave like a market in which people have to compete with each other.
This is all founded on that notion of human nature, which goes back to Thomas Hobbes, the old political philosopher who was famous for saying that life is nasty, brutish, and short in a state of nature where everyone is at war with everyone else… And that's why we need capitalism and this state to help us or to force us to be nice to each other. So I always tell my students, when they crop up with the term human nature. I encourage them to replace it with human potential because we don't just have one...
We have an infinite range of potentials biologically built into us: our possibilities are far greater than our "nasty, brutish" human nature.
Kamea Chayne: I love that reframing of looking to our human potential.
And you touched on this. But in the spirit of recognizing the diverse forms of economies that exist today, within and alongside the dominant fabricated system, which in my mind has been layered on top of reality in a superficial manner that separates economy from ecology, have you thought about this idea of an economic system that is self-organized and practiced by more than human communities? Is there even a concept of value and economy to recognize there, in an undefined and ever-evolving way that has been able to work itself out?
David Giles: I would like us to come up with more of an answer to that than we currently have. The anthropologist Anna Tsing talks about there being these latent commons lying around that are these multi-species relationships because obviously, we live in constant communion with the non-human world. And we've often been taught not to not to see that, but it doesn't mean we're not constantly relying on it.
The anthropologist Anna Tsing writes about mushroom foraging as a small, more than human gift economy, right? And she talks about foraging in general as a gift economy between the human and the non-human. If you forage for mushrooms or blackberries, it relies on these non-human species to gift themselves to you—mushrooms are a great example in Anna Tsing's book—but they rely on humans to gift them a landscape in which they can grow. And mushrooms are great at growing and in all kinds of damaged landscapes. They're one of the species that recover the landscape. So she talks about this latent commons where we don't necessarily recognize it, but there are resources there and they circulate and they keep us all alive.
I think about the dumpsters as also a latent commons. There are lots of people out there dumpster diving who don't necessarily think about themselves as part of an economy, but they subsist. And then there are groups like Food Not Bombs that recover food that would have been wasted, whether by dumpster or by donation, they hand it out to people who would have gone hungry.
All of that together acts as a commons, and we don't necessarily see it as such, because we have the goggles of the market on.
So what we can see is waste. We don't see what afterlives that waste might go onto to create, and we don't see how those afterlives might weave together into some mutually supportive system.
Kamea Chayne: I think what this invites me to consider is that when we take on a more holistic view of an economy, what we understand to be value becomes more relational and relative because everybody's needs are different, and so things are going to be of different value to different people based on their needs. And it requires us to take on a more holistic understanding of value and resources and the economy to be able to recognize this less definable form of value, if that makes sense.
David Giles: Yeah, that makes such good sense. I mean, it requires us to think about...
What would "value" be if it wasn't about supply and demand? What would "value" be if it didn't depend on dollars and cents?
The phrase that I haven't used yet today which I think is crucial to use is mutual aid. So many societies would not be able to function if people weren't looking after each other. Even capitalist societies wouldn't be able to function if the people who don't win under capitalism weren’t being looked after somehow. We'd have bodies piling up in the street. I mean, we do have bodies piling up in the street to some extent, but it would be worse if there weren't those systems for people to look after each other.
So mutual aid is a way of valuing things and people differently, valuing things and people according to need in a humane way. The Food Not Bombs group that I was involved in for six years in Seattle is a mutual aid project, and people put the work in not because it's going to profit them, but they put the work in because somebody else needs the food and then later on that somebody else might put the work in and pay it forward. It's a whole minor economy of mutual aid where value is about human need and human well-being rather than gross domestic product.
Kamea Chayne: Yeah, I'm always keen on finding the common threads between issues that are typically looked at separately to try to find patterns and how they might even share their roots.
I know you've explored the idea of land excess alongside food excess, which may surprise people because land feels like it's so much more valuable that it may be shocking to think of land as being discarded in a similar way that food has been. Can you help us understand the similarities here and what they might tell us about, again, the idea of exchange value versus other forms of value?
David Giles: I think about food and housing insecurity as fairly parallel situations. Here in Melbourne, across Greater Melbourne, there are anywhere from 60 to 80,000 vacant properties in a given year, and there are anywhere from 20 to 30,000 people homeless across the whole state. You've got more vacant structures than we have people who need shelter. And this, I think, is true in the U.S. Again, the numbers are really hard to measure, but by a conservative estimate in the U.S., there might be five or six empty homes for every person who is homeless.
It's our commitment to private property and to the dollars and cents value of a commodity that keeps it out of the hands of people who need it.
And that works a little bit differently for land than it does for food because you can't throw land away, but there are parallels. With the manufactured scarcity in food systems created by throwing a lot of food away, you're constraining supply, which keeps the price up, so you're adding value to the things left on the shelf by throwing things away.
That's partly what happens when you warehouse an old property, when you kick things off the market. So gentrifiers and developers do this in a way when they look at a neighborhood as up and coming, and so they'll keep properties off the market in anticipation of higher value later. It might be a poor working-class neighborhood in the process of gentrifying, so someone might just evict their tenants and try and rezone it so that they can charge more for it. Or maybe they just won't rent it out for a few years because they know that in a few years, they can double it up and they can rent it out or sell the building. I mean, there's something fundamentally similar there, about keeping things off the market in order to add value.
Kamea Chayne: It's that relationship again between scarcity and value.
And I know that land can't be salvaged and given away for free in the same way that discarded food can. But in terms of addressing food insecurity, is it a good thing that supermarkets are throwing away imperfect produce and soon to expire perishables so that there is an excess to reach alternative economies currently reliant on that surplus right now, rather than, say, putting a discounted price on it, which may still make it out of reach for people who can't even afford the discounted rates?
So ideally, we can create the conditions to not even allow anyone to fall through the cracks. But given our current situation, do we need that surplus food with its exchange value removed so that it can reach people who've been outcasted or have chosen to divest from the dominant system through salvaging the excess?
David Giles: Hmm. That's a good question and a tricky one. And I don't think I can give you a yes or no on which is better. I generally sketch out what the implications are, and you're absolutely right at the moment that food that's becoming obsolete at the supermarket, it's often going on to live an afterlife, if it's going to go on to live in an afterlife and if people are going to have to rely on waste in order to eat, then it's nice if people can access it directly themselves.
One thing that has been happening increasingly in the last 10 or 15 years since the global financial crisis is that there's been a real push to recover as much of that food as possible through food charities. In the United States, there’s Northwest Harvest, in France, there's a law that forces supermarkets to donate their excess rather than bin it, that sort of thing. On the one hand, it means that that food is going to get eaten, which means that food is available. On the other hand, it means that it goes through these kinds of formal organizations that segregate it like I was saying earlier, and it ends up in church basements and soup kitchens.
While I have a lot of respect for the people who do that charity work, it serves the function of segregating people. You can imagine a world in which that food was just available for people to pick through, and maybe they would have more agency and be able to have more direct control over their diets. So there's something at stake in how we distribute the waste. Now, a lot of it still goes to the landfill, and I think the more of it gets eaten, the better compared to just sending it to the landfill.
I would like to think we can imagine a society where people don't have to rely on excesses and cast-offs to eat, a world in which people have an income, and can afford to get their food, or people can grow and produce their own food, without relying on charity.
So there's no easy answer to that. It just requires us to be thinking in whole systems and when we're thinking in terms of whole systems.
For now, if there are strategies for keeping more food on the market at more affordable prices, that's one useful strategy. The ugly produce delivery system in California—you can order a box of ugly produce and it's a bit cheaper and then you get it delivered to your door. More power to them.
I've heard them criticized because they're basically stealing food from the emergency food sector, and I don't know about that. I'd have to look at the numbers, but there's a lot of food that gets wasted, and I feel like the emergency food sector is actually quite well stocked. It's not that there's not enough food to go into the emergency food sector. It might be other reasons, it might be funding or the government grants, it might be the supply chain.
I think at the moment, it makes sense to cultivate as many alternatives as possible. In the long run, if we're going to rely on the market to give people food, I think we need to cultivate a society where people can afford to eat. Food stamps are one of the few remaining parts of the safety net that haven't been totally decimated. And of course, there's an effort to wind that back, and there are all sorts of increasing constraints on how people can access food stamps because, under the conservative ideology, people should either pull themselves up by their bootstraps or die. So if people had access to adequate food stamps, then they could just buy the things that they need.
Imagine if we had a universal basic income, people could buy the things they need. And so they would have a right to survival rather than relying on charity to dole it out voluntarily. In the long run, that's something I think that's an ideal that we should keep our eyes on, rather than worrying about where capitalism's castoffs go.
Kamea Chayne: So maybe in the immediate term, it's important to pursue all methods that we can of ensuring that people can meet their basic needs of survival. But in the long term, we have to get to the heart of why these issues even have been created, to begin with, so we can render those problems obsolete.
Food Not Bombs, which you've been involved with, is premised on this question: “When a billion people go hungry each day, how can we spend another dollar on war?”
What has stood out to me is that Food Not Bombs doesn't operate like a traditional organization, and it even says that it is not a charity. It reminds me of my recent conversation with Tyson Yunkaporta, who I think is a colleague of yours at Deakin University. I really appreciated my conversation with him. He shared his views on the success of the Occupy Movement in how it was decentralized. It also reminds me of my conversation with Karen Washington, who talked about how food aid doesn't address the source of the problem and might even perpetuate the same power dynamics.
Could you speak more about how Food Not Bombs is operating in a way that is deeply counterculture and is part of, as you say, a global plot to give things away—a conspiracy of abundance?
David Giles:
While I have an enormous amount of respect for the work and the effort that people put in in some of these formal food charities, they have to play according to the rules of capitalism.
They have to play according to the rules of the local power structure. They have to discipline the people that they serve. They're part of the process of keeping capitalism's castoffs out of you. There's a group in Seattle which I have enormous respect for called Operation Sack Lunch. They historically have run the outdoor meal program. They get donations. They get the support of the city.
They had this one place where they were allowed to share food before the pandemic. They've had to go indoors since. But they had this one place where they were allowed to share food, and because of that, they can serve millions of meals in a year. They can reach more people than Food Not Bombs can reach, and the compromise that they have to make in order to do that is they have to follow the rules. They can only serve under the freeway outside the right free zone, away from the shelters, where no one can see them.
That's just one example of all of the ways in which the nonprofit-industrial complex has to act like an extension of the capitalist economy and has to act like an extension of the state and do what they’re told. I respect the people who think that that's a necessary compromise, but it's this disciplining force on the people that they're serving. In all sorts of ways, shelters are obliged to make people go through this whole routine that makes them feel like prisoners. There are all sorts of ways in which charity and these forms of aid don't necessarily always help.
Then you take something like Food Not Bombs, which is a messier, slightly more chaotic, voluntary association of people who are all doing mutual aid. They're looking out for themselves, they're looking out for other people, and they don't follow any of those rules. Most obviously, Food Not Bombs shares food in places where they are technically not supposed to: public parks, sidewalks, places that theoretically should belong to the public, but which is tightly controlled. And Food Not Bombs doesn't have to be disciplined in the way that these other charities have to be disciplined.
They don't have to answer to anyone's bottom line, and they don't have to present themselves to potential donors and philanthropies. They don't have to make their case to the Gates Foundation, so they don't have to adjust their worldview and adjust their commitments in order to get money from the Gates Foundation or whoever it might be. So there's a profound difference between that project and the thing that's called charity.
Kamea Chayne: So basically, because it isn't formalized or centralized, it's able to operate in this way at the fringes without following the rules.
David Giles: And where does change come from? The fringes.
I often think about the diggers. The diggers were this group in the 1600s in England who were just a ragtag bunch of people who saw that common land was being fenced off. At the very beginnings of capitalism, they saw that common land was being fenced off and taken away from the people. They occupied it. It was one of the very first sorts of occupy movements. And no one took them seriously at the time. They got on this land, they sang some songs, they had a protest, they got kicked off, the end, everybody thought.
But The Diggers were where the idea for universal suffrage came from. No one necessarily took them seriously, but they envisioned a profoundly different society, and some of their ideas came to pass. A few hundred years later, men with property got the right to vote. Some generations after that, white women got the right to vote and on and on.
Change comes from the margins. And these ragtag, slightly chaotic spaces along the side of capitalism incubate new ideas, and they incubate change.
Food Not Bombs is only possible because there's food getting thrown away. On the one hand, it's only necessary because there are people going hungry. On the other hand, in the places where people cook, we rarely ever had a stable, formal kitchen space. We certainly could never afford to pay rent for one. And so you ended up relying on squats and low-rent collective houses in overlooked parts of the city. And the people you get involved in cooking for Food Not Bombs is a really beautiful, chaotic mix of people who are all alienated from the market and alienated from the dominant society's norms one way or another.
So it all comes together because in some way, they've all been excluded. I’d include myself in with that, from what I was saying, I've always identified more with the people who are a little bit on the outs with society. All of those things come together because they've been excluded, and it's possible to bring them together in a new way because they've been excluded. The instant Food Not Bombs has to start asking for grant money, it would have a whole effect on the way people do things.
Kamea Chayne: With all of this in mind, knowing the power of building a decentralized and self-organized movement that isn't prescriptive nor top-down, how do you think the broader social and climate justice movements can learn from Food Not Bombs? Because I think we have a tendency to want to turn to some powerful voice or centralized and established organization to tell us what to do—because there's maybe a comfort in that.
But as history shows, these centralized organizations more often than not become either co-opted or end up capitulating to existing establishments and therefore upholding the status quo. So what do you think our listeners can take away from understanding the success of this movement of Food Not Bombs?
David Giles:
Food Not Bombs has really helped me to have a bit more trust and faith in change over the long haul.
When I was twenty-six and first getting involved in Food Not Bombs, after the first year I was really disillusioned. I felt like we were going out just scrambling to get enough people and food together to go out and do a meal. And every week I thought that maybe it wasn't going to happen because it takes a lot of work to get the food together. You're not sure what you're going to get every week. You're not sure who's going to show up every week. Yeah, I remember being really disillusioned. Meanwhile, capitalism kept on, and I just couldn't imagine how this chaotic, almost desperate weekly struggle can stack up in the face of capitalism. It felt very much like a David and Goliath experience.
And then after six years, lo and behold, it kept on every week and people came and went and the resources were different every week. We missed a few weeks that in six years. I think just in the six years that I did it, we missed maybe three or four kitchens. It really helped me believe in long-term sustainability. Sustainability is the wrong word, perhaps, it’s one of those words that's been co-opted, but the long-term temerity of a scrappy bunch of people over time.
This is one of the things I'm most grateful for about having written the book because the book allowed me to talk to people and interview people from all across Europe, across generations.
Food Not Bombs has that temerity across time and space. Since the 80s, the movement has only grown, and it's still around. It's no less desperate and scrappy and uncertain from week to week. And yet in the long haul, from month to month and year to year, it's absolutely reliable.
It's not necessarily visible in the way that something like Occupy Wall Street was visible. But there would have been no Occupy Wall Street without smaller, scrappier, less visible threads like Food Not Bombs that carried on over time in the less visible moments. And so when something like Occupy Wall Street happens, all of these threads are woven together very quickly because there are people who know how to run a field kitchen. There are people who've been doing books to prisoners for years, and they can put the book tent together overnight. There are Quakers and anarchists who've been practicing consensus in their house meetings or whatever for years, and they can get together and run a large, consensus-based meeting.
So all of these little scrappy threads like Food Not Bombs—I have learned to trust in their temerity and their longevity. When a larger movement comes along like the climate movement, they can learn some of those lessons about how to do things by consensus, about how to trust in the diversity of tactics and the diversity of the groups coming together.
There are these moments like the alternative globalization movement from the late 90s and early 2000s or Occupy Wall Street, that with these kinds of chaotic, but really effective concentrations of lots of diverse people with diverse interests, those kinds of prove that such a thing is possible and impactful. But they do that in this concentrated way at key moments and then they come apart. Food Not Bombs teaches us that people can carry that on in less visible ways over time in their own communities. And I think that matters.
*** CLOSING ***
Kamea Chayne: What's an uplifting social media account or publication you follow or a book that's been really profound for you?
David Giles: Anna Tsing's The Mushroom at the End of the World is my favorite recent anthropology book. It's the kind of thing that anthropologists and non-anthropologists alike can read and enjoy, and it's just about the way different parts of the economy, different people, and different species can all come together in unexpected ways to change the future.
Kamea Chayne: What are some of your personal mottos, mantras, or practices that keep you grounded?
David Giles: I don't necessarily believe in progress, but I believe in change. And not only do I believe in change, I think change is the only constant. So while I'm never sure what the future holds, I know that it will be otherwise.
Kamea Chayne: And what are some of your biggest sources of inspiration at the moment?
David Giles: There's an author whose work I like, Quinn Norton, who says that we're taught to think that in the middle of the apocalypse, people will eat each other, but in fact, they feed each other. Over the last eighteen months, as the pandemic has pushed on, we've seen the full spectrum of human possibility. And one of the things we've seen is the growth of these mutual aid movements—people just buckling down and helping each other.
Kamea Chayne: David, thank you so much for joining me on the show today. I really appreciated this conversation. What final words of wisdom do you have for us as green dreamers?
David Giles: I'm not sure that I have any words of wisdom. I know what I needed to hear when I was twenty-six, was just, "Keep it up. It matters.”
