Learning to Share

While most literature on dumpster divers has come from settler-colonial states, their activism against the colonial dimension to capitalism remains a missing kōrero. In this article, I gather five conversations with settler Pākehā dumpster divers in Ōtepoti. Their experiences expose the excessive food waste of the supermarket system as a structural violence of capitalism, a critique that aligns with dumpster divers globally. However, capitalism cannot be separated from the ongoing settler-colonial dispossession and degradation of Indigenous land. In this article, I follow Moana Jackson’s kōrero that decolonisation can be an ‘ethic of restoration’, an ethic that requires the telling of alternative stories to colonising doctrines, in part, to restore society’s relationship with Papatūā nuku. As a direct action against food waste, dumpster diving is an intervention against the landfills and hunger produced by capitalism. No longer constrained by money, participants found they enjoyed sharing their finds generously and freely, feeding a network of friends, community and strangers. Through the reappropriation of waste into the material bindings of social networks, dumpster divers turn commodities into a conceptualisation that complements Indigenous kai – food to feed relationships. Through sharing, I argue, dumpster diving can be one material, albeit small, way for settler activists to practice commensal feeding and not private consumption. This is a relationship to food that offers one alternative food future for te ao Pākehā, one which complements te ao Māori

Action (physics) · Capitalism · Colonialism · Food systems · Hegemony · Indigenous · Intervention (counseling) · Agriculture, Land Use, Rural Development · Food Waste Reduction and Sustainability · Organic Food and Agriculture