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Abstract
Hunger and food insecurity persist in the United States despite charitable efforts to place food that is unnecessarily wasted in the hands of those in need. Food Not Bombs is a collective that attempts to address inequality through the non-violent direct action of recovering wasted food and openly providing that food as a right to all people. In the spring of 2008, I began recovering food for the Athens Food Not Bombs in order to analyze the differences and effectiveness of the collective in addressing issues of inequality. This was done through a spatial analysis of the collectives food gleaning network to find the impediments Food Not Bombs faces in that network and how the collective works to surpass those obstacles. Anarchist critique helps to analyze impediments of the food gleaning network while the concepts of prefigurative direct action and performativity show how Food Not Bombs can address these impediments.