Recipes for Disaster: an anarchist cookbook

pended the pifiata, making it swing wildly?so that many kids of all sizes, and a few of their mothers, got to have a turn before it was finally smashed open and its booty spilled across the grass.

We waited an hour before putting up the next pifiata, then another hour again before deploying the last one, and each was greeted with the same response. All the fake dollar bills with radical messages on them inside the fat cat disappeared along with the candy, which was encouraging?and the atmosphere in the park was definitely transformed: imagine a mixed crowd of vagabond activists, college students, and parents of all races watching a powerful black mother aggressively swinging a baseball bat at a pig with a police hat on it as her children and about a hundred others scream "Hit it! Kill it! Get the pig!" in the middle of a placid, consumerist street fair. See Effigies (pg. 229) for more information about how to do this yourself

As for the table, we were amazed by how many people of widely varied walks of life were excited to see it, and more excited to learn everything on it was free. We'd brought hundreds of anarchist newspapers and magazines, pamphlets for student activists, bootlegged comic books with radical commentary added, seditious posters and stickers, and punk rock patches, and the table was totally bare by the end of the afternoon?and we had enough donations in the can to pay for our gas all the way up and back down the coast. A few nights later I set my hair on fire while trying to demonstrate the pinata program in my hometown, but that's another story.

Distribution, Tabling, and infoslnops 21S

Dumpster Diving

Kid in dumpster with mountain of food. Head of broccoli demands, "What are you doing in here?" Kid counters, "What are YOU doing in here?"

Burdens lift and scarcity is averted when the mountains of trash produced by this insane society become suppHes and sustenance. Everything that sucks about capitaUsm is inverted when the dumpster diver scores. Poverty becomes abundance. Loss becomes gain. Despair becomes hope.

"To a dumpster diver, every day is Christmas?except Christmas, which is boring because it's the same trash from the 24^^." -St. Nick

If you haven't heard it on the evening news, dumpsters aren't just for trash anymore. Why in the world would anyone throw a case of fresh strawberries in a dumpster? That's a great question, but we've no time for a nuanced discussion of how waste figures into capitalist collapse. There are more pressing matters at hand . . . like that case of berries, and the hundreds of other price-less treasures awaitmg rescue this very second in a dumpster near you! Soldier, this is an emergency! We're talking about how to get in there, get those berries, and get back out where you and your fruit belong.

Instructions

where The first step is to find out who in your town is wastefiil. That's the same question as "Who has a dumpster?" If you just want to explore the world of waste reclamation, get aimless: most any dumpster will do. But if you have specific needs, do what any savvy shopper does?look in the yellow pages! Chances are, if they sell it in front, they throw it away out back. So ... what do you need? There's bound to be a dumpster out there to serve you: food, bike equipment, construction materials, kitchenware, books, electronics, clothes, flowers, shoes, bread, bread, bread. There are even fancy nut dumpsters, and I'm here to tell you: yes, you can get sick of almonds.

Keep your eyes peeled for invisible dumpsters without walls or lids. Weeks after college gets out for the summer, those sad, rusting bicycles still locked up on campus are in such dumpsters, and you'd better grab your bolt cutters and cut them free before some maintenance worker transfers them to the big dumpster in the sky. You can also use scissor jacks or bottle jacks to break locks, and if you do so with the right confidence, everyone will think you're just reclaiming your own bicycle. By the same token, don't miss leftover materials at construction sites, or piles of perfectly good items set out on curbs throughout the suburbs.