Paper short abstract:

Grassroots soup kitchens and food forests redistribute wasted surpluses, making thinkable new ways of sharing the city. Through a comparison of the prohibitions they provoke, this paper explores urban apparatuses of biopolitical governance and non-market forms of economy against which they militate.

Paper long abstract:

In 1980, the first chapter of Food Not Bombs—a decentralised movement of grassroots, antiwar soup kitchens—began sharing free meals in Cambridge, Massachusetts, protesting militarism, poverty, and homelessness. Since then, hundreds of autonomous chapters have formed across the globe—earning the group a place on the FBI's terrorist watch list, and over one thousand arrests for violating municipal food sharing prohibitions that have proliferated during the same timeframe in the name of public health and public safety.

Three decades later, urban permaculture movements have successfully lobbied to establish free, self-renewing, edible landscapes—"food forests"—on disused public lands in several major cities, including Seattle and Christchurch. Almost immediately, these projects have elicited suspicion from neighbours and public officials alike towards the beneficiaries of such ecological commons. What sort of people would they attract, they wondered? Who would come to "steal" this free food?

Why should simply sharing food mobilise such prohibition and distrust? Through a comparative analysis of Food Not Bombs, food forest collectives, and the responses they provoke, this paper develops a composite genealogy of urban apparatuses of biopolitical governance that underwrite market exchange, and the non-market forms of economy against which they militate. Both movements redistribute wasted surpluses (donated food and derelict land) and, I argue, articulate prefigurative forms of economic value and illiberal agency—remaking the affective and institutional landscape of urban food systems, and making thinkable new ways of sharing the city in the twenty-first century.