The Politics of Clean: Representing Food Salvage and Dumpster Diners

Ryan Owens, ABC News: What do you say to people who say, "There you are on the street digging through trash, this is gross, this is disgusting?"

Madeleine: Well, I'd say what's gross and disgusting is the fact that this food is being thrown out in the first place.¹

To have privacy is to exist in the eyes of the state, and this is the starting point for making claims for basic public services. The capacity to make a public self, to manage one's waste in a way that produces subjectivity rather than shame … is a fundamental process of distinction that anyone living with a bathroom takes as given. It inaugurates a public personhood.²

Gay Hawkins

Trash is incredibly powerful stuff. It is the material resonance of transnational dialectics of food, labor, and resources—a resonance of who's producing and who's consuming. Trash, scrap, and the waste sector represent a steadily booming billion-dollar global industry. Although the annual generation of garbage in the United States is staggering at 388 billion tons produced, 64.1% of which is landfilled, this article is focused on food salvage, food excess, and food waste in the United States—estimated by University of Arizona anthropologist Timothy Jones at somewhere between 40% and 50% of "overall food system" loss.³ Jones's study shows that "an average American family of four throws out $600 worth of good food every year, and that 14% of that is food that hasn't expired or even been packaged."⁴

In sharp juxtaposition to the waste levels noted in these findings, U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) statistics suggest that in 2014–15, 14% of U.S. households, or more than "48 million people, including over 15 million children," were food insecure, which means that individuals of a household experience "limited or uncertain availability of nutritionally adequate and safe foods or limited or uncertain ability to acquire acceptable foods in socially acceptable ways."⁵ The USDA's definition of food security excludes "resorting to emergency food supplies, scavenging, stealing, or other coping strategies"; this is because the human right to food access in a dignified means is central to the USDA's definition.⁶ In the pages that follow, I center my attention on these actions. Dumpster stories from varied socioeconomic perspectives, from the material edges and legal confines, are placed comparatively in dialogue with popular representations of divers and scavengers to draw out a breadth of multivocality, ingenuity, and complexity concerning the use of the dumpster as a food resource. Through the use of primary oral histories, critical reflection of 52 surveys conducted in 2010, and popular representations of food waste reuse and salvage, this article situates cultural tensions that surface surrounding reuse by underscoring what scholar Gay Hawkins calls "our most quotidian relations with waste," or how we grapple with the waste that we all make in our day-today lives.⁷

More specifically, drawing upon interviews with self-identifying dumpster divers from a modest 18-interviewee collection conducted Spring 2008–Summer 2010, this article critically examines the space of the dumpster and the act of diving in relation to how interviewees explain their actions. Use of the interviews permits stronger understanding of how diving fits lived experiences of waste, paying particular attention to food recovery. As the two opening quotes contend, waste may be used as a means of constructing subjectivity when it has been erased, denied or overlooked. This article juxtaposes interviewee testimonies with popular media representations of dumpster dining and reuse from comedy skits, late-night shows, music and television series to underscore common cultural anxieties from comedy skits, late-night shows, music, and television series to underscore common anxieties specifically about food recovery, thereby revealing what I refer to as the normative "politics of clean," or popularly constructed idealization of cleanliness. I am interested in how such popularly reflected anxieties may work on interviewees in different ways.⁸ The oral history interviews provide insight into diver sociopolitical positionalities. They also expose the ways in which their material deviance—removing or...