The Limits of Think.Eat.Save

There has been an extraordinary amount of media attention and policy action around food waste lately.  Major environmental groups like NRDC and totally not-at-all environmental groups like the Institution for Mechanical Engineering have released reports documenting how 30-50% of food is wasted in the US and abroad.  While reports from non-profits on some issue or another are nothing to get excited about, governments ranging from the City of Austin to the EU have introduced initiatives to curb food waste.  Most recently, the UN brought us “Think.Eat.Save.”

After years of listening freegans calling out from the wilderness of late-night dumpster dives, it’s great to hear that this is an issue that is getting some attention.  Industrial food production places huge strains on the environment, and wasted food means that much of that strain is wholly unnecessary.  To offer one of a barrage of possible statistics: 25% of freshwater and 4% of the oil used in the US goes to produce food that doesn’t actually get eaten.

As I see it, the only problem with preventing food waste is that it’s bad for the economy.

I’d love to have this picked apart, but it seems straightforward.  When Monsanto sells seeds to a farmer for a crop that will never be harvested, they make money.  So, too, does the farmer who sells produce that a processing plant will reject because it doesn’t meet their (absurd) aesthetic standards.  And it’s good news for the distributor when retailers are forced to buy in bulk – despite an inability to sell the entire product – to get lower prices.  Those grocery stores’ balance sheets, too, look better when they sell food in packages so large that no one could eat it all (cilantro, anyone?).  The consumer pays for all this waste in the end through higher prices—purchasing the commodities they use as well as the commodities destroyed along the way.

The U.S. agricultural system produces upwards of 3,700 calories per person, per day.  Our efforts to achieve Type-3 diabetes notwithstanding (cf. Steven Colbert), we aren’t going to eat all those calories.  There isn’t a lot to do with that excess.  You could dump it on developing countries (bad), or you could turn it into bio-fuels (also bad).  Barring that, it will go to waste—somewhere—irrespective of individual good intentions.  And all that production, the money that changed hands, the goods that got sold and then got discarded—they will count in GDP figures all the same.  “The economy”, that abstract idol to which we sacrifice much-needed social programs, the well-being of workers, and the future habitability of our planet, likes waste.

Yes, there are some individual strategies we can take to reduce food waste, and they may make the economy more efficient and more sustainable.  The campaigns against food waste are, in my eyes, positive – and unequivocally so.  But if we really care about food waste, we need to start to talk about reducing production.  And when you propose reducing the size of a sector worth $1.8 trillion and employing 1/6^th of the US population, you’re starting to question  the imperative of unlimited growth and expansion, and asserting that there is perhaps something more important than “the economy”.  Once you’re there, you’re taking—as one of my favorite friends from freegan.info put it—“a long, hard look at capitalism” itself.

Maybe the UN secretly wants us to have that conversation.  I hope so.

Still Eating Quinoa

I’ve been meaning to return to blogging for a while—in fact, since I made it a New Year’s Resolution and, immediately thereafter, abandoned it as quickly as a new exercise regime.

Leave it to a not-at-all veiled attack on veganism to bring me back.  Periodically, friends forward me links obliquely encouraging me to reconsider my veganism.  First, it was the idiotic vegan parents who deprived their kid of breast-milk (“You wouldn’t make your kids be vegan…would you?”).  Then it was soy plantations causing deforestation in the Amazon.  Now it’s Bolivians going hungry, supposedly, because demand for quinoa from Western vegans has made the grain prohibitively expensive for them.

Just so we’re clear: the quinoa article is a complete farce.  Vegans are less than one percent of the U.S. population, so it’s not clear why “vegans”, as opposed to “people who eat quinoa”, are singled out.  The article’s follow-up claim that vegans should also feel bad about eating soy – because it “drives environmental destruction” in the Amazon – is actually so off-base that The Guardian added a footnote pointing out that 97% of soy imports go to animal feed.  Presumably, some of that soy goes to feed the cows that the author smugly concludes we can eat with a clear conscience.

This editorial wouldn’t even be worth talking about if it didn’t make a logical mistake that vegans, fair-trade enthusiasts, and farmers-market junkies do as well.  It’s the notion that our individual consumer choices actually cause and, in turn, can solve social problems.  The implicit narrative of the article—that I should feel bad for eating quinoa—assumes that there is some invisible hand that snatches the grain from someone else and gives it to me.

Take this to its logical conclusion, and apply it to a food that isn’t associated with a tiny, much-maligned dietary minority.  From 2005-2008, prices for wheat spiked 80%.  The absolute number of hungry people worldwide increased for the first time in decades.  So should we blame people who continued to eat bread during the crisis for the fact that others starved?  We could, but to do so would be naïve to the political and economic realities of our food system.  The food price spikes of 2008 happened because Goldman Sachs and other investment banks figured out they could make money by betting on grain futures, essentially cornering grain for which they had no real need.  Wheat prices went up in 2008 even though wheat farmers posted record harvests, making a mockery of your introduction to microeconomics textbook.

I’m not writing this as a defense of veganism.  If anything, the article reminds us that finding just commodities in an unjust system is impossible.  So long as 30-50% of food production winds up in the dumpster, you can be confident that your decision to abstain from quinoa / meat / gluten / whatever means that more of said commodity winds up in the trash – not that less is produced.  It’s also, then, a reminder that our “food politics” should involve more than just buying one thing over another.   In the meantime, berating for people for doing their best in a fucked-up situation simply offers comfort to those who would rather do nothing.

November 9th and the Changing Repertoires of Activism

The reports are just rolling in, and boy, has it been enlightening.  A few weeks ago, the University of California Police Department released a report determining that the real source of problems at Berkeley on November 9^th was that police weren’t allowed enough “force options”—particular, pepper spray. Shortly thereafter, a quasi-independent review board at Davis came to a somewhat divergent conclusion that, there, the use of pepper spray was “objectively unreasonable.”  And, after seven months of painstaking research, the Berkeley Police Review Board has closed the book on November 9^th by declaring that campus police “may” have violated campus norms and procedures.  One wonders: isn’t a “possible” violation of the rules usually the starting premise for an investigation, not its end point?

Of the lot, I think the Edley/Robinson report to the UC President comes closest to saying something interesting about November 9^th—which is ironic, because it was the only report which wasn’t tasked with investigating what happened on November 9^th.  One thing about the report stood out to me in particular.  Early on, the authors note:

Although we began this project by addressing “protest” activity generally, we soon realized that the central challenge before us related to civil disobedience… It is only when demonstrators engage in civil disobedience—the refusal to comply with laws or regulations as a form of protest or as a means of drawing attention to the demonstrators’ message—that more complicated and controversial issues arise (5)

I think the authors are on to something.  Policing “protest” at Berkeley isn’t complicated, because most of the 50-or-so registered “protests” at Berkeley are sanctioned, contained, and, ultimately, totally meaningless.  The issue, really, is about how to deal with certain kinds of protest tactics that deviate from this predictable norm.

In a sense, I’m grateful that the authors called what we were doing “civil disobedience.” After all, immediately after November 9^th, Chancellor Birgeneau sent out an e-mail claiming that we hay “betrayed” the legacy of the civil rights movement.  Now, by calling what we did “civil disobedience”, they are now implicitly connecting us to that tradition.  For me, at least, civil disobedience immediately conjures the image of black college students in the deep south, sitting patiently at a segregated lunch counter, bravely bearing police harassment and violence in order to dramatize injustice and spur legislators to action.  It’s an overly generous comparison, and while I’m not sure we’ve quite lived up to it, I’ll take it.

There’s only one problem: what we were doing on November 9^th wasn’t civil disobedience, it was direct action.  While for Occupy Wall Street activists and their ilk this is all fairly obvious, I think that the difference between “civil disobedience” and “direct action” is crucial for understanding what happened in November, and why things ended so badly.  And, because it relates to my current research interests, it seems like a good starting point for a brief excursus into the sociology of protest repertoires.

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Activists like to think of social movements as strategic actors, cleverly adapting innovating new tactics to achieve their goals.  In truth, though, activists tend to resort to the same narrow range of tactics—like marches, demonstrations, and petitions—over and over again, while ignoring a host of theoretically possible other ways to express dissent.  These “repertoires” of protest tend to vary coherently over time and between countries.  As the late sociologist Chuck Tilly demonstrated, prior to the 19^th century people “protested” by acting directly to address the problems they perceived.  If a group of people thought bread prices were too high, they would riot and seize the granary.  If they didn’t like a tax on tea, they’d throw the tea into the sea.  If you were pissed off at your feudal lord, you’d burn down his house.

In early 19^th century England, though, this changed.  Protesting moved from the realm of the material to the symbolic: instead of acting directly, people sought redress indirectly by making appeals to powerful external actors.  The rise of what Tilly calls our “modern repertoire” of contentious politics, then, is closely tied to the rise of democracy.  Although civil disobedience might seem to be much more radical than an orderly march, it still follows the same basic logic of other actions in that repertoire.  Even if CD by nature emerges from a frustration with the ineffectiveness of institutional political acts, like voting, it still requires a belief that the system as a whole basically works.  You don’t do CD unless you believe that elected representatives will eventually be responsive, if only you show—through breaking the law—that your particular cause is an important one.  The paradox of civil disobedience, then, is that it simultaneously reinforces the legitimacy of the political system even as it trespasses one part of it.  The black students carrying out sit-ins were violating one particular law, but in so doing they were validating “The Law” and the representative-democracy from which it flows as the appropriate way to address it.*

Since the 1960s, CD has become an increasingly routinized part of the protesting landscape.  In annual demonstrations against nuclear power plants, for example, demonstrators will often arrange with the police beforehand, making their own inevitable arrest an integral part of their message.  But this is only part of the story of how protest tactics have evolved in the last few decades.  Although “direct action” never really disappeared—strikes, for example, are in some respects direct actions—I believe (and, hopefully, will someday empirically document) there has been a major upsurge in this tactic.  The “direct” shutdown of the WTO meeting in Seattle, 1999, is a visible example, but projects like “guerilla gardens” started in abandoned lots or Food Not Bombs’ free meals from discarded food are also “direct actions.”  The demise of state-socialism has, I think, effected a change towards anarchist models of organizing that prioritize these kinds of tactics that attempt to immediately, and directly, change society.

This is a major shift.  As John Rawls suggests, CD only makes sense if you believe you live in a “nearly-just society”; DA, on the other hand, is a tool for those who believe that the whole system of representative democracy is broken and the best we can do is work around it at every turn.  And, of course, while the lines between CD and DA are always fuzzy, the two entail profoundly different ways of relating to the police.  As David Graeber notes:

Those carrying out a ‘civil disobedience may willingly surrender themselves to the police; even if they don’t…they act in the full expectation they will wind up in jail…Direct actionists, in contrast…are trying their best to get away with it (Direct Action: An Ethnography: 205).

In short, for the civilly-disobedient, the police are an integral part of the script of a protest; for the direct actionist, they are a hazard.

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A charitable reading of the Edley and Robinson report is that the authors are trying to return us to a previous model in which civil disobedience was, well, civil.  After all, within Occupy, it has often seemed like the tacit understanding between police and protesters engaged in CD—you let us break the law, and we’ll let you arrest us and face the consequences—had broken down.  After November 9^th, I found myself wondering why no officer ever bothered to ask me if I would submit to arrest peacefully.  In this respect, Edley/Robinson—with its call for mediation and dialogue—seems like a step in the right direction.

But would it have changed anything?  For better or for worse, on November 9^th, we wanted to “get away with it”—not make a statement through getting arrested.  We weren’t setting up an encampment because we wanted to dramatize the irrationality of the university’s rule against encampments.  Nor were our tents a publicity stunt to get legislators to wake up and pay attention to our concerns.  We were making a direct intervention into the operation of the university, attempting to create a real (not just symbolic) alternative to privatization and austerity.  Had the university attempted to mediate, we probably would have ignored them; had they asked us if we wanted to be arrested, we likely would have said “No.”

A lot of occupiers like the way that DA “heightens the contradictions” within our system, forcing authorities into a binary choice between letting protesters do what the want—whether occupying a public space or starting a farm on nominally “private property”—or engaging in spectacularly stupid acts of repression.  The point, though, is that not everyone realizes this is happening.  People like Edley/Robinson continue to believe that they are dealing with a variant of classic civil disobedience, and so they’re confused as to why activists aren’t playing their part.   Sociologically, it’s a fascinating moment, in which there are not just divergent opinions about the issues we’re protesting about, but also different conceptions of what these protests actually are.  For protesters, though, it’s bad news, as the police and some elements of the administration seem to have picked up on the fact that the only way to stop direct action is to beat people into submission – which is why, for all it’s reasonableness, the Edley/Robinson report will be completely ignored.

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* Of course, this may reflect the fact that – were they to do anything more radical – the violence against them would be even more extreme.

Quick Hits on Berkeley Sit/Lie

On June 12th, Berkeley’s City Council will vote on a “sit-lie” ordinance intended to prevent un-housed, homeless, and otherwise indigent people from sitting on city sidewalks during the day.

This is a terrible idea. The ordinance would turn what is at worst a minor inconvenience for those of us with a low tolerance for disorder into a social problem that demands city resources. Apparently, a similar ordinance in San Francisco has led to the police repeatedly ticketing a tiny number of older homeless people over and over again. I didn’t come to Berkeley to study homeless and I don’t consider myself an expert on the issue. But, through my work with Food Not Bombs in People’s Park, I’ve learned a thing or two about Berkeley’s long history of conflict over public space and the various “publics” that use it. Being unable to attend the City Council Meeting tomorrow, I offer a few quick thoughts:

1) We will always have the homeless (if we choose to). One of the most important ideological tricks that the right has played on us—and the left increasingly accepted—is the notion that “we will always have the homeless”. It’s a clever way of reframing the debate that refocuses us away from addressing the root causes of homeless towards trying to figure out how to manage what is reframed as a set of inevitable nuisances. But this framing is belied by reality: as Teresa Gowan documents in her (much recommended) “Hoboes, Hustlers, and Backsliders”, homeless as a large scale social phenomenon virtually disappeared from the 1930s to the late ‘70s, only to expand rapidly in the Reagan years.

Unless you believe that, over a five year period of the early 1980s, Americans suddenly started using lots more drugs, had a lot more mental illness, and became much less willing to work, it’s difficult to explain the sudden explosion of homelessness in terms of individual factors. Instead, we should remember that we, as a society, chose to de-institutionalize the mentally ill, slash social programs, skimp on services for returning veterans and ignore the impacts of globalization on the working class—all contingent factors behind the inevitable rise of homelessness. The nuisances of homelessness are not something imposed on us from the outside, but something that we have systematically created for ourselves.

2) This should be obvious but… Very, very, very few people in Berkeley are homeless because the want to be or have chosen to engage in the behaviors—like panhandling—that come with it. I say this because Berkeley’s homeless include a particularly uncharismatic element: street kids who—I am often told—have “chosen” their situation out of a desire to travel, avoid work, or fight the man. Most people of the white-liberal persuasion are willing to give a pass to homeless Vietnam Vets (and maybe even older African-American vets) but cannot abide crust-punks flying signs that ask for money to buy weed.

I get it: many of Berkeley’s un-housed community do not fit our image of the deserving poor. But, having interacted with scores of homeless people in the course of my research, I have only met two who claim to be homeless by choice—and neither of them panhandle. There is very little romantic about life on the streets: accessing basic services for shelter or healthcare entails endless degradation, and, for many, the meal we serve as Food Not Bombs is the only food they’ll get in the day. Ultimately, of course, we should try to break down the grouping of the poor into “deserving” and “undeserving”, but in the meantime, we should remember that there are hidden histories of abuse, disempowerment, and marginalization that lead people to sit on sidewalks and ask for spare change.

3) You can go elsewhere. They can’t. Thanks to my background, experiences, and identity as a white, heterosexual male, I am lucky enough to feel comfortable virtually anywhere in Berkeley, including in spaces occupied by homeless people. I acknowledge that others may not, and maybe for good reasons that, for aforementioned reasons, I can’t entirely understand. When I have raised the notions of “urban clearing” or “revitalization” with my classmates—expecting that they would be similarly horrified by the prospect—I’ve been surprised by the number of people who support them. They resent that places like Telegraph Avenue or People’s Park are, to them, uncomfortable and unsafe spaces.

And so I offer a somewhat insensitive retort: you can go elsewhere, they can’t. Homeless people don’t come to Berkeley to partake in some romantic sixties counterculture. They’re here because they won’t starve or freeze to death and the police are slightly less likely to harass them than in San Francisco. Berkeley is as close to a haven for the homeless as exists in our society. While that might create inconveniences for the rest of us, we should acknowledge that we can go be white privileged people and not get harassed by police or panhandlers pretty much anywhere.  I’m not suggesting that those in favor of Sit/Lie should move elsewhere—although I would note that there are an almost infinite number of neo-liberal, gentrified-as-shit law-and-order hellholes where you could go and not be regularly confronted with the after-effects of welfare-state retrenchment—but arguing that maybe you could just go to virtually any street in Berkeley other than Telegraph Avenue.

4) And jeez, we are Berkeley after all. I came to Berkeley expecting to find a progressive utopia. I’ve been sobered on this image by some vigorous baton thrusts and the realization that, like virtually everywhere, Berkeley is wracked by tensions between business and community, between tolerance and order, and between ideals and reality. But Berkeley is still special: a place that has in the past bucked and resisted national trends to criminalize homelessness, militarize the police, and run the poor and marginalized out of town. There are lots of places with Sit/Lie ordinances; there is only one Berkeley.

For interested, the Berkeley City Council can be reached at: lmaio@cityofberkeley.info, dmoore@cityofberkeley.info, kworthington@cityofberkeley.info, jarreguin@cityofberkeley.info, swengraf@cityofberkeley.info, gwozniak@cityofberkeley.info, lcapitelli@cityofberkeley.info, manderson@cityofberkeley.info. I’ve already received several personal replies, so if you are at all inspired, please contact them before tomorrow night. For those of you who tend to think no political action ever works and everything is 100% fucked, I would note that Berkeley activists have been successful in defeating similar ordinances in the past.

Reading Marx

Dick Walker talks like he knew Karl Marx personally.  “Man, Marx just couldn’t figure out what was going on with all this finance shit.  You can tell he just fucking hated it”, he tells us, as we are puzzling over our weekly assignment for his Das Kapital reading group.  He offers a bit of comfort for the confused: “Don’t worry, I had to read the whole thing through three or four times before I really understood it.”  Three or four times?  Marx’s magnum opus is painfully dense and, although it was only half finished, comes in at about 3,000 pages.  But there’s no doubt that Dick Walker has read it a bunch of times: his copy—an old edition, printed in the Soviet Union—is badly tattered, but contains years of annotations; a sign of a truly loved tome.

I started going to Dick Walker’s Capital Reading Group in the Geography Department this fall because, well, I was a grad student at Berkeley, and what could be more “Berkeley” than reading Marx?  The group was almost a caricature of itself.  We met in the Geography lounge, with a Brazilian Landless Movement flag and guitar with the words “This Machine Kills Fetishism” scrawled on it (get it?) hanging on the walls.  Others in the class seemed to hang on every one of Marx’s words, even when the arguments and evidence were obviously obsolete.  I remember one conversation with a classmate who seemed to suggest that the only reason we weren’t already living in a socialist utopia stemmed from our own inability to understand Marx’s brilliance.  The notion that Marx may have actually been wrong about some very important things—or that reading thousands of pages about capitalism wasn’t going to make capitalism disappear–had apparently not crossed our minds.

Meanwhile, outside the academia, real things were happening.  People were actually protesting capital and critiquing capitalism, and they didn’t need a reading group to figure out how to do it.  In September, there was an early protest held in San Francisco in solidarity with some naïve fools in New York who thought they were going to “Occupy Wall Street” (whatever that meant!).  A few of us sociologists decided we were going to ditch and go to it; some of the geographers we invited said they couldn’t because it overlapped with our reading group.  The moment evoked Marx’s own words: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world…the point is to change it.”  With a disdain for armchair radicalism of which I was confident Marx himself would approve, I quit going to class and started going to protests.

If my last post doesn’t give any indication, the last six months have been transformative, and the Alex of September feels very naïve by the standards of the Alex of April.  A short list of things about which I’ve drastically changed my views include “the police”, “academia”, “anarchism”, and, also, the “value” (so to speak) of reading Marx.  I’m not entirely sure why I went back to class this semester, but I did.  This time, I’ve joined my classmates in hanging on Marx’s words, trying to wrap my head around his elaborate system of circulating values and commodities.  I am no more convinced that knowing Marx is “useful” to me, either as an academic or an activist.  It’s the work itself—as a cultural and historical product—that draws me in, the very idea that someone could sit down and try to write a book with the absurd ambition of explaining the entire economic system in one go.  The fact that communism never “worked” doesn’t make Marx’s attempts to envision an alternative any less brave or elegant.

It suppose, then, it’s not just about the books, but Marx himself.  In sociology, we celebrate Marx as one of the earliest public sociologists, a man who worked outside the academy and was actively engaged in political projects.  But, in truth, Capital is the product of decades spent in quiet contemplation, pouring over ledgers and data in the British library.  There’s something in that which resonates with practically any social scientist: the tension between wanting to simply understand the way forces beyond our control shape the world, and the simultaneous desire to push those forces along.  As someone who spent the morning working on a theory paper in Berkeley and the afternoon protesting against capitalism in downtown Oakland, Marx’s dilemma resonates.

A recent hit-piece-cum-“report” on declining standards in the UC system by a right-wing think tank makes twenty-five separate references to “Marx” or “Marxism”.  Noting the “proliferation” of courses on Marx at UC Santa Cruz, they opine: “Adolescent Marxist nostalgia still evidently reigns on campus and impedes a return to reality”.  They’d be relieved to know that Professor Walker is retiring this year.  His replacement will likely be at the forefront of geography as a discipline, meaning that he or she will do fancy stuff with maps and quantitative data and not spend much time trying to figure out the true meaning of 150-year-old books.  For our part, none of us taking the class are likely to read Marx “three or four times”—the new logic of the university does not afford us time to do things that don’t look good on grant applications or spin into publications—and so its hard to see another reading group like this at Berkeley in the future.  It took me a while to come around, but I’ve realized that’s a sad thing.

The Long Haul

After a fall spent trying to make some social change, this spring I’ve withdrawn into my more comfortable habitus: reading about social change.  I’ve been particularly drawn to stories about the Civil Rights movement, perhaps because I’ve been desperate to remind myself that change does in fact happen every once in a while.

Most recently, I read Doug McAdam’s, Freedom Summer, which chronicles one of the most pivotal moments in the trajectory of 1960s activism.  Frustrated with their inability to draw significant attention from the white, Northern liberals they needed to pass Civil Rights legislation, the black activists of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee hatched a plan to bring hundreds of white students from elite universities to the deep south for voter registration.  Confronted with poverty and racism that white Northerners had previously ignored, the volunteers were profoundly radicalized. As McAdam charts, Freedom Summer volunteers went back to school in the fall and were pivotal in launching the movements that defined the New Left and the latter half of the 1960s.  Case in point: Berkeley legend Mario Savio, future spokesman of the Free Speech Movement, was a Freedom Summer volunteer.*

McAdam caught up with the activists twenty years later and found that, contrary to the popular narrative about ‘60s radicals, most Freedom Summer volunteers did not “sell out” or turn conservative.  Continuing political engagement, though, came at a price. When the ‘60s were over, the activists felt like they were coming down off of a years-long “freedom high”.  Even those who wanted to fully reintegrate into mainstream society struggled to maintain “regular” jobs or “normal” relationships.  There are some political experiences, it would seem, that you just can’t shake.

This spring, I think many activists could relate: I, for one, am suffering an “occupy hangover”.  Not that my experiences could possibly come close to those of the Freedom Summer volunteers.  I can’t even entirely relate to those who, this past fall, quit their jobs to move to encampments or who spent hundreds of hours in General Assemblies. Nonetheless, as a wise comrade recently posted on facebook, I miss knowing that the encampments were there, that there were thousands of people out there who shared my concern for the state of the world and my desire to do something about it.  Not that there aren’t still protests and demonstrations: I’m excited for May Day and inspired by the creativity and boldness of yesterday’s Occupy the Farm action.  It’s just that, no matter how many people come out for them, the sense of infinite possibility, of existing in a moment of real historical import, has disappeared, crushed by police batons, dishonest media coverage, and the realization that too many people still don’t give a damn.  Looking back at blog posts from the fall, I’m almost embarrassed at the optimism, the naivety: it’s part of why it’s been so difficult to write (the schoolwork doesn’t help either).

My search for a meaningful, post-occupation place to put my energy brought me to where it almost always does: feeding people.  In February, I started volunteering with East Bay Food Not Bombs, which serves over a thousand meals a week, almost entirely from food that would otherwise go to waste. My previous image of Food Not Bombs was one of self-involved hipsters; in East Bay, though, FNB is a fabulous amalgam of squatters from Oakland, remnants of Berkeley’s various communist parties, self-described homeless-activists, and some elderly women who, despite visually fitting the church-ladies-in-soup-kitchens stereotype, have repeatedly assured me that that they are anarchists.  There are limits to the political change that can be accomplished with free food, of course, but in an age where even the most meagre of public benefits are becoming a “privilege”, serving a no-questions-asked vegetarian meal feels radical enough for me.

It helps that, with Food Not Bombs, I’ve been plugged into a community of activists which existed long before Occupy and, I imagine, will persist long past it. Five days a week, we serve in People’s Park, only three blocks away from campus but a no-go zone for most students, who are wary of its residents.  A few weeks ago, I was invited to a “People’s Park Oral History Night” at a local infoshop.  There, a long-haired man in his 70s shared how he and other students seized the park from the university in 1969, declaring it a “liberated” space that would serve as a haven for the dispossessed and a launch-pad for organizing against “The War”.**  “In the 1960s, there were thousands of us”, another old activist said.  “In the ‘90s”—when the university tried to retake the park and activists fended them off in five days of rioting—“there were hundreds.”  Now, he admitted, “There are only a few dozen of us greybeards left.”

And yet, somehow, these activists have stayed committed.  They survived Reagan when, as Governor of California, he declared martial law in downtown Berkeley, and they survived Reagan when, as President, he dismembered the welfare programs they fought for in the 1960s.  They were pissed off when Bush went to war brazenly and openly, and they’re pissed off that Obama is doing it covertly.  The costs of their dedication are obvious: most everyone I talked to has led a difficult life, one in which they traded in financial stability and social acceptance for “the cause”.  And, in the end, they have few tangible victories—other than a couple-acre park that most everyone in Berkeley seems to hate—to show for it.

Hearing their stories made me feel guilty to have taken a pause to focus on my studies after only a few months of activity.  But when I told this to the other activists that night, they all said I have nothing to be ashamed of.  People cover for one another; when one person steps back to take care of him or herself, there’s another at a point where he or she can step forward.  The community is always active, even if we, as activists, have to focus on ourselves once in a while.  I was reminded of how lucky I am to be in a place like Berkeley, where there are older activists to show me that this isn’t just a passing phase, even if there are a few days, months, or even years where I’m behind a desk and not out on the streets.

As if to drive the point home, the next day I learned that one of the Food Not Bombs volunteers was part of Freedom Summer back in ’64.  Who knows what he did in the intervening forty-seven years; but now, he comes down to People’s Park almost every day, wearing a Rage Against the Machine t-shirt, and serves food with a bunch of anarchists.

It seems more than a coincidence that infoshop where the event was held is called the Long Haul.

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* Fun fact: the interview report for Mario Savio’s application to be a Freedom Summer volunteer describes him as “not very creative” and “one of those average people”.

** There is only one war in Berkeley: Vietnam.

Elephant Graveyard

The day after New Years, I took a trip down memory lane to engage in what was one of my favorite activities during my undergraduate days at Princeton: digging through trash on the streets of New York with the members of freegan.info.*  My ostensible reason for going was that I’ve been playing with the idea of revisiting some of my research on freeganism for publication; in truth, though, I wanted to remind myself, personally, why I find freeganism not just a relevant topic of study but a captivating mode of political praxis.

I’ve always insisted that you can’t really understand dumpster diving without having actually done it.  I could, of course, cite statistics about how half of America’s food production is wasted, but—in a mental environment saturated with graphs and pie charts and poll numbers—the magnitude of the waste is impossible to understand until you’ve seen it.  As we approached our first stop of the night, one freegan remarked, “Oh my god, this is going to be outrageous”, and it was.  The sidewalk was an utter mess: some divers had clearly gotten there before us.  But there were still hundreds of pounds of food: boxes and boxes of unexpired vegan burgers, mounds of fresh strawberries and asparagus, and trays of muffins and cookies covered in plastic wrap.

New York has no shortage of activist groups espousing similar values of radical ecology and anti-capitalism as freegan.info, so it is—in a sense—puzzling that night after night, their events continue to draw a diverse range of people and reporters from around the world.  It wasn’t until this trip back, though, that I started to realize why freeganism is not just sociologically interesting, but also deeply resonant.  In part, my new insights are thanks to Occupy Wall Street, and the realization that the latter movement has been able to do something that has rarely been done publically in the last twenty years: challenge the morality of capitalism.

And why is it that we have spent so little time in recent decades debating whether the world’s dominant economic system is just?  The answer is simple: because anytime you raise such questions, the response will be “You may be right, but socialism just didn’t work.”  Of course, many people do believe that capitalism is a morally just system, but since the fall of the Soviet Union, they haven’t had to offer much explanation for their position.  There is no need to discuss the morality of capitalism, because there is no alternative: without the magic of free markets and the invisible hand, we are told, any economic system will collapse under the weight of its own inefficiency, incompetence, and yes, wastefulness.

But as we see on the streets of New York, night after night, this technical, a-political justification for capitalism rests on a monumental lie—on locked dumpsters hidden in back alleys and on trash bags quickly whisked away to distant landfills.  On a freegan trash tour, neo-classical economics falls apart before your very eyes: supply doesn’t equal demand.  The much-vaunted efficient allocation of resources that the market is supposed to provide simply doesn’t hold water in a society that throws away 96 billion pounds of food a year.  Freeganism may not offer a clear alternative, but it does reveal the inner workings of the present system in a tangible way.  “Why don’t the stores donate the food to the hungry?”, new freegans always ask.  The answer is simple: donations don’t contribute to the one thing capitalism is exceptionally good at creating—profit.

Ramblings about the logic and justification of capitalism are, of course, very abstract ideas.  But the garbage we encounter is undeniably real, and—even after well over one-hundred trash tours with the group—seeing it is an emotional experience.  There’s an element of freeganism that is about confronting capitalism; but there’s another side to it: an attempt to dignify that to which our society attaches no value.  Everything we consume represents a fragment of someone’s life: the embodiment of someone’s labor that went into producing it.  When we throw things in the trash without using them, we are not just wasting natural resources, then, but also lives.  And as the thirty-or-so packages of hamburgers we found at our first stop testified, it’s not just human lives that are being squandered.

On that night’s dive, we quickly realized there was far more food than the trash tour attendees could possibly take home.  In the end, we just piled up the food we found.  I asked one of my friends why we were even bothering to take stock of what was there, when we would have to put it back in the trash anyway, and she responded “It’s like an elephant graveyard.  Right now, we’re just here mourning the food.”  Eventually, though, we had to move on.  We were hoping to hit up five more grocery stores, and we knew there would be plenty to mourn there too.