This semester, I took a class called “Cities and Food” as part of my Nutrition minor. An anthropological class at heart, one of our readings was about Food Not Bombs (FNB), an organization that shares free vegan meals as a protest to war and poverty. For this assignment, we were tasked to focus on one aspect of David Giles’ work.
Fueled by his ethnographic observations in the Food Not Bombs (FNB) organization, in A Mass Conspiracy to Feed People (2021), David Giles’ framework targets ideas of abject capital, strategies of municipal governance, and emergent forms of resistance in an urban context. In the introduction, Giles shares how global cities, which are aspirationally global and performative by nature, are transformed by a spatial division of labor, further fueling precarious relationships between the haves and the have nots – the very people FNB is trying to feed. His work’s pathos speaks to the buoyancy and solidarity of such agents of change. Giles frames the “ingredients” of the FNB community as forces of representing and publicly mobilizing insurgent citizenship, in an attempt to ultimately heal the collective relationship between city governments and their communities of need.
What are the ingredients for such change and why are they opposed by public officials? FNB is a collection of both human and culinary ingredients that would, in posh terms, not be considered the cover models of a “global city”. Instead, as Giles explains, many FNB collaborators are affected by drift and displacement, including migrant service workers, formerly homeless people, young students, and more (16). Therefore, part of the threat of FNB’s collaborators is that they are unconventional in their humanity; at the end of the day, they represent everyday people, who cook healthy vegetarian food for the homeless, in shared, public spaces. For cities that seek fashionable hegemony and sleek landscapes, these globalized urban ideals are challenged by people who acknowledge, give, and need help, as signs of powerlessness are to be sequestered out of sight; efforts to help people in need highlight an inequity and therefore exposes a weakness of the global city complex, ultimately compounding existing tensions between local governments and the homeless. FNB’s perhaps “undesirable” ingredients contribute to what Giles calls “antifragility”: “They grow larger and more robust under pressure, even as specific individuals and instantiations are neutralized” (176). Interestingly, FNB’s “antifragility” which is strengthened by a web of diverse, enthusiastic, and compassionate people, fundamentally contrasts the otherwise fragile capitalist structure of current global cities that struggles to otherwise feed its people, even during non-crisis times.
In the larger scope of mending intra-city relationships, the ingredients behind FNB contribute to mobilizing forms of “insurgent citizenship” by demonstrating the resilient capacity to upset patterns of capitalist, politico-spatial complacency and reproduction. In Melbourne, FNB volunteers assembled in front of the Lord Mayor’s house to protest the proposal to fine unhoused people for sleeping rough and leaving belongings unattended in the business district. The FNB volunteers (aka ingredients) were described as a “rabble” in the newspaper to connote an uncivil political action and to invalidate their message (161). Moved to action by the state’s provocation, and perhaps because of FNB members’ “powerlessness” in comparison to public officials, FNB encapsulates a defiant logic that is necessary to shape the course of capitalism. As Saskia Sassen (2012) writes, “People becoming present and, crucially, becoming visible to one another can alter the character of their powerlessness” (159). This can even be extended to the food they serve; the quality food shared with the poor, who otherwise are seen as undeserving, is a form of empowerment for the marginalized communities, who global cities exclusively use for labor purposes. Furthermore, one should note the significance of their counter-public locations of protest; firstly, public places (i.e. homeless’ “home”), and secondly, the mayor’s home, which reciprocates the breach proposed by the Lord Mayor.
Overall, the “ingredients” of the FNB community are a vehicle for representing and publicly mobilizing insurgent citizenship in order to fill the gaps between capitalist-driven city ideals and all residents.