| dc.description.abstract | This dissertation explores oral histories with dumpster divers of varying food security levels. The project draws from 15 oral history interviews selected from an 18-interview collection conducted between Spring 2008 and Summer 2010. Interviewees self-identified as divers; varied in economic, gender, sexual, and ethnic identity; and ranged in age from 18-64 years. To supplement this modest number of interviews, I also conducted 52 surveys in Summer 2010. I interview divers as theorists in their own right, and engage the specific ways in which the divers identify and construct their food choice actions in terms of individual food security and broader ecological implications of trash both as a food source and as an international residue of production, trade, consumption, and waste policy. This research raises inquiries into the gender, racial, and class dynamics of food policy, informal food economies, common pool resource usage, and embodied histories of public health and sanitation. Topically, the chapters build from Chapter 1: "Dumpstering the American Way of Life"--a theoretical analysis of the space of the dumpster and its social and legally stigmatized margins framed within questions of ideal citizenship and consumption. Chapter 2: "Situating Food in the Dumpster" explores the possibilities of (re)imagining the dumpster-as-food-source within contexts of food in/security. Chapter 3: "On Twinkies, Chickpeas, and the `Real' Food Paradigm" is an examination of the contemporary re-visitation and application of modernist food discourses as a means of constructing alternative food paradigms in the present. I trace a particularly gendered modernist history through to contemporary food movement literature constructing `good' food and `real' food including works by chef-activists and scholars such as Alice Waters, Michael Pollan, Carlo Petrini, Jamie Oliver, and Marion Nestle. Chapter 4: "Tackling Informality: The Dumpster as Public Health Threat" engages turn-of-the-century food specific public health measures in relation to a `politics of clean' as it applies to the dumpster and extends to mechanisms of State control over other exemplary informal street food economies. By overlapping the oral narratives with research about food and waste policies, practices, and literature, I build an overall hypothesis. I begin by arguing that the interviews show there are broad spectrums of divers and diving narratives. Each chapter discusses varying diver experiences in relation to intertwined food, trash, and health related policies and paradigms in an attempt to thicken understandings of the dumpster and garbage as transnational material residue, as food source, and as a form of commons space. | |
