Garbage and Food:
A Telling of Salvaged Waste
Anissa Gastelum
Fall 2014
Abstract
Is dumpster-diving a form of radical reaction against social relations of race and class in
an environment of structural violence in the food system of the United States? Dumpster-diving
is often tagged with the ethic of freeganism. Freeganism is an ideology of anti-consumerism that
seeks to boycott the capitalist system of food economics (as well as other economies, but the
focus of this project will be centered on the food politics). Dumpster-diving is the act of
rummaging through ‘waste’ in order to salvage food that has been deemed by another as
‘garbage’. It is about the semantic/literal recycling of thrown out food. This freegan movement is
often associated with large, urban communities. One aspect of this project that I will focus on are
the social relations and compositions of freegan dumpster-diving as it is relevant to race, class,
and gender. This will allow for an investigation of any inequalities present among divers and
other participants. Following this, I will break down the ideologies present within the
communities and probe through the diver ideology as it is concerned with structural violence
from societal institutions which connects its [