The taste of waste: reclaiming and sharing rotten food among squatters in London

ABSTRACT

This paper analyzes consumption practices and dumpster diving among squatting communities in London. By rejecting the cultural environment which endorses rules of production and distribution of goods, squatters choose to consume food that has already been expelled by the mainstream economic system. Appealing to recent scholarship in this field, the way in which food is transformed and recategorized compels us to rethink Lévi-Strauss’s culinary triangle. Food items, once fallen into the category of rotten, acquire new values and even change their properties from the squatters’ perspective, redefining not only what is good to eat, but also what is considered ethical and acceptable. Drawing upon classical literature engaging with theories of value in anthropology, I will show how political tastes interact and sometimes contradict individual tastes and desires. Moreover, I will analyze how reclaimed food items are reinserted into an exchange network that reflects the political values and objectives of the social actors.

KEYWORDS:

• Squatting
• waste
• dumpster diving
• culinary triangle
• value
• gift

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Poet and activist in the London squatting scene at the time of my fieldwork (http://www.catbrogan.com/).

2. “Crews” are groups of activists who share similar political ideas and often have a particular project to be carried out in an occupied space.

3. The most intense section of fieldwork has been carried out between November 2012 and January 2013 as part of an MA dissertation research. It has been followed by other visits along a total of three years and it opened the way for years of ongoing reflection about waste. Before starting my fieldwork, I had been an occasional attendant of squat events for about a year. This article is not to be considered an exhaustive depiction of the squatting scene and its consumption strategies, but rather a reflection on the practices I could observe within that short period of close engagement with my interlocutors.

4. Occupy is an international protest movement formed in New York in October 2011, within the context of the Economic Crisis 2007–2008. It aims to fight social and economic inequalities and encourages an active involvement of the civic society in a new anti-hierarchical political structure. The predominant role of waste in this movement has been explored in detail by Liboiron (2012).

5. While I changed the names of my interlocutors, the names of the squats in this article have been chosen by carefully evaluating each case. My goal has been to protect people’s privacy but at the same time to allow interlocutors to recognize the places they had lived in.

6. These authors especially analyzed dumpster diving within the framework of the Food Not Bombs, a movement born in the 1990s in the radical scene with the aim of recovering wasted food and serving it publicly on the streets.

7. https://antipodeonline.org/2012/04/16/precarity-and-housing-politics-in-austerity-london-uk/.

8. Counterculture is defined as a social movement that develops within a dominant cultural system, but that clearly marks its opposition to it (Dowd and Dowd 2003, 23).

9. These three examples only represent some of the squatters’ interests in the wider network of crews. Other spaces I had contacts with are the London Queer Social Center, that aimed at providing support for homeless LGBTQI people, the 56a Infoshop, a community space, and two squatting communities in the areas of Oval and Camberwell.

10. These conflicts normally revolve around the general organization of the squats, the political project or strategy to be adopted.

11. The term “community” has been at the center of several debates in social sciences. As discussed by Walsh and High (1999, 259), communities are not only defined by sharing a particular space, but are themselves to be considered as a social process within an exchange network.

12. The use of the term “foragers” has been widely employed in anthropological and archeological literature referring mostly to hunter-gatherer groups (for a specific analysis see Ingold 2000, 27). Indeed, while urban foraging happens in a very different environment, the action of finding food in the urban landscape can be compared to its classical meaning for it requires a set of environmentally related skills.

13. As far as I could observe during my fieldwork, squatting communities are not organized in clear roles, so that there are no designated foragers. Instead, squatters often take turns so that everyone at some point will be responsible to provide food for the community.

14. The term free-shop is commonly used in the squat scenes of Anglophone countries, although it is unclear in which context the term originated.

15. Squatters are of a variety of nationalities, reflecting the cosmopolitan environment of London. Interviews were conducted in English, Italian and Spanish. For lack of space, those excerpts are here reported in their English translation.

16. As noted by Holtzman, Hughes and Van Meter (2007, 45) dumpster diving is inserted in that cluster of practices belonging to the DIY (Do It Yourself) culture, which tries to reclaim the human labor for the production of use-value instead of exchange value.

17. In London, charities and organizations like Food For All and Foodcycle engage in similar activities. Foodcycle, active from 2008 in London, opened a few restaurants in which one can taste a cheap menu of “saved” food.

18. See for example two artists who were actively performing in squats during my fieldwork: Crazy Divine (https://soundcloud.com/crazydivine) and Pete the Temp (http://www.petethetemp.co.uk/the-media-have-squatted-my-brain/).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Giovanna Capponi

Giovanna Capponi is a social anthropologist. She graduated from the University of Bologna and SOAS, and she obtained a PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of Roehampton. She is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Musée du quai Branly - Jacque Chirac. She is interested in ritual, waste, environmental anthropology and human-animal studies.