Although I haven’t quite crested the New York Times bestseller’s list, I’ve been quite pleased to have been contacted by a few outlets to talk about my new book:

• What’s in the Dumpster (Tiny Spark)
• How to Fix All That Food Waste (Good Magazine)
• Freeganism: Food Waste’s First Wave (The New Food Economy)
• Freegans and What Is Waste (Wisconsin Public Radio)
• Whole Foods is Embracing the Freegan Ethic (Timeline)

I’ve also written some small things, including some outtakes from the detonated “theory chapter” and on the contemporary relevance of freeganism:

• On freegans, pre-peeled oranges, and ethical consumer ‘Whack-A-Mole’ (University of Minnesota Press Blog)
• A brief history of anti-capitalism, pulled from a dumpster (Discard Studies Blog)

A combination of feeling completely incapable of following through on effective self-promotion while being hopelessly narcissistic means that I’m closely following just about every word written about the book while doing little to shape how it is portrayed. So far I’ve discovered that:

• It is much more interesting that I am a “food justice activist” (according to the publisher) than that I am a “graduate student”, even though the latter clearly played a more important role in the fact that my experiences with freegans are published in a book overladen with footnotes.
• Despite my best efforts, the conflation of “freeganism” with “dumpster diving” is extremely strong, and it’s almost impossible to get people to talk about capitalism or even its central effects (the overproduction of food) in discussions of food waste that are ultimately going to center on the fact THAT THERE IS PERFECTLY GOOD FOOD TO EAT IN THE GARBAGE.
• The eight years which the book took from first tentative trip into New York City to published final product – which is not a particularly long time in academia (the length of a PhD project, or the probation period for tenure) – is an extremely long time for anyone else, and as a result, the book has been received almost as a history of the crazy uncle of the food waste movement rather than as a commentary on the movement’s contemporary state.

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