A Mass Conspiracy To Feed People

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The Routledge Handbook of Urban Food Governance is the first collection to reflect on and compile the currently dispersed histories, concepts and practices involved in the increasingly popular field of urban food governance. Unpacking the power of urban food governance and its capacity to affect lives through the transformation of cities and the global food system, the Handbook is structured into five parts. The first part focuses on histories of urban food governance to trace the historical roots of current dynamics and provide an impetus for the critical lens on urban food governance threaded through the Handbook. The second part presents a broad overview of the different frames, theories and concepts that have informed urban food governance scholarship. Drawing on the previous parts, part three engages with the practice of urban food governance by analysing plans, policies and programmes implemented in different contexts. Part four presents current knowledge on how urban food governance involves different agencies that operate across scales and sectors. The final part asks key figures in this field what the future holds for urban food governance in the midst of pressing societal and environmental challenges. Containing chapters written by emerging and established scholars, as well as practitioners, the Handbook provides a state of the art, global and diverse examination of the role of cities in delivering sustainable and secure food outcomes, as well as providing refreshed theoretical and practical tools to understand and transform urban food governance to enact more sustainable and just futures. The Routledge Handbook of Urban Food Governance will be essential reading for students, scholars, practitioners and policymakers interested in food governance, urban studies, sustainable food and agriculture, and sustainable living more broadly.