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Talking Trash: Oral Histories of Food In/Security from the Margins of a Dumpster By: Rachel A

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Talking Trash: Oral Histories of Food In/Security from the Margins of a Dumpster By: Rachel A Talking Trash: Oral Histories of Food In/Security from the Margins of a Dumpster By: Rachel A. Vaughn Submitted to the graduate degree program in American Studies and the Graduate Faculty of the University of Kansas in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. ________________________________ Chairperson, Dr. Sherrie Tucker ________________________________ Dr Tanya Hart ________________________________ Dr. Sheyda Jahanbani ______________________________ Dr. Phaedra Pezzullo ________________________________ Dr. Ann Schofield Date Defended: Friday, December 2, 2011 The Dissertation Committee for Rachel A. Vaughn certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: Talking Trash: Oral Histories of Food In/Security from the Margins of a Dumpster ________________________________ Chairperson, Dr. Sherrie Tucker Date approved: December, 2, 2011 ii 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. iii Acknowledgements There are so many people, too numerous to mention in totality, that I need thank for guidance and support over the course of this project. I here mention just a few, and extend silent appreciation to so many more. I am especially grateful to my adviser and dissertation committee member mentors Dr. Sherrie Tucker--in whose 2008 American Studies Oral History Seminar this project was dreamed up in the first place--and Drs. Tanya Hart, Sheyda Jahanbani, and Phaedra Pezzullo, for years of advice, written commentary, and thoughtful feedback during exams and defenses. Thanks must also go to Dr. Ann Schofield for her thoughtful questions and comments during the final dissertation defense, and for her support and words of wisdom to a newbie in American Studies way back in 2007. You have all been incredible examples and mentors to me. Many, many thanks. I extend my gratitude to the University of Kansas Hall Center for the Humanities, and Office of Research and Graduate Studies for crucial research funding that helped me to complete this research, as well as to attend conferences of particular import in my fields of inquiry. I am also thankful for the wonderful opportunity to participate in the 2010-11 Hall Center Graduate Student Research Colloquium, generating an atmosphere of research support and inquiry invaluable to my research process. My sincere appreciation to the faculty and student editors at the University of Kansas American Studies Journal, who offered two years of professional training and steady work during my first years back in gradate school after a work hiatus. Thanks to Dr. Elizabeth Yeager who has been a friend, confidant, and utterly irreplaceable writing partner and comrade in dissertation-ness; not to mention exams, defenses, teaching, and other related dynamics of this life in the academy. How could I have finished this without your support and your friendship? Thank you to numerous friends including: Madden, who listened patiently and hardly batted an eyelid as I raved about garbage, food politics and global flows. Thanks to Bob, my first friend in Kansas, for thousands of cups of tea and coffee, bowls upon bowls of heartening noodles, and friendly banter about food and agriculture in the US. Thanks to Jelks for being such a wonderful friend with a true knack for critical inquiry, banter, wit, and loads of laughter especially throughout early coursework at KU. Thank you to Keith for being a persistent researcher in his own right, who never failed to email me thoughtful materials, ask insightful questions, and cheer me on to boot! Thanks to Jessi Mellowfields, for answering my telephone calls in the first pace, for listening to me, schooling me in the ways of small-scale agriculture, and generally keeping me on track to completion! To my parents and to my sister who have all encouraged, chided and cheered me on to be a writer from the time I was…well, for a long, long time. Your influence sits at the heart of this project. To Lentil, for getting into a car and driving hundreds of miles to a strange new land called Kansas; for listening, debating, outlining, printing, scanning, reassuring, re-confirming, and arguing with me all over again as I wrestled the fragments of thought and tidbits of information that collided to become this project. You are my truest friend, confidant, and so much more. iv Table of Contents Talking Trash: Oral Histories of Food In/Security from the Margins of a Dumpster Prologue………………………………………………………………………………….…….......1 Introductory Notes………………………….………………………………………….…...……...4 Chapter 1: Dumpstering the American Way of Life…………………………………...…..……...26 Chapter 2: Situating Food in the Dumpster………………………………………………...…….62 Chapter 3: On Twinkies, Chickpeas, and the ‘Real Food’ Paradigm………………………...…104 Chapter 4: Tackling Informality: Beyond the Dumpster as Public Health Threat…………...…140 Gesturing Toward Conclusion: Having Trash in Common…………………………………......169 Notes…………………………………………………………………………………………….174 Appendix 1…………...………………………………………………………………………….196 Appendix 2……………………………………………………………………………………....197 Extended Bibliography………………………………………………………………………….198 v Talking Trash: Oral Histories of Food In/Security from the Margins of a Dumpster I came back with, like, a backpack full of trash food and I put it on the table, and everyone was asleep and my dad heard me coming in and he was like, ‘oh, you went shopping?’ and I was like, ‘No this is all trash.’ …The next day they [asked], ‘What’s going on?’… I told them that this is all trash; I didn’t buy any of it. This is all stuff that’s been thrown out. I never buy food. And they were just kind of like, “Whoa, whoa, whoa.i Prologue My memories involving the dumpster are multiple, but the earliest are all enveloped in the protection of my family’s auction business. Those familiar with the inner workings of this kind of rural, Mid-western auction house know that there are multiple economies at work, inclusive of capital, trade, and gift. People purchase new and used things in the store during the week leading up to the sale, or during the auction, all of which the auctioneer sells on a commission basis. To supplement that income, goods are bought, found, made, or grown and re- sold again during a sale. My sister and I scrapped metal every week at the end of the auctions and stashed the money away for college, and whatever we didn’t recycle we shared with other local metal-scrappers who had access to junkyards further afield. Items that did not sell at an auction were given away, bartered for other goods or labor, or resold. Rummage sale scores were re-sold in our own individual lots, or traded for things we needed or wanted. And, the things that we found in a dumpster or beside someone’s trashcan were resold on Friday nights. Under the wing of the auction house, my scavenging habits were protected, admired, and encouraged. As a child scavenger, I was witty, resourceful, scrappy, and deemed a sure survivor. However, as an adult diver, my childhood experiences often chafe against the contemporary, taboo-laden encounters. Over the years, I have had to unravel and unlearn my childhood understanding of the dumpster as a protected and valued practical resource within new contexts of social ambiguity, criminality, and deviance. With every new story that I have heard from other divers, the more pronounced and apparent this dynamic has proven. 1 In May 2008 I was invited on a dumpstering expedition at KU in the midst of the mass migrational emptying of campus dorms and housing.
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