Waste and Want

Years ago, I was a janitor. When I would take a shower, it was like I could never get the stench off my body. I like Susan Strasser’s book because it reminds me of the waste I use to clean up daily. She examines the most unprecedented commonplace act of throwing things out and how it has transformed American society.

Her classic book about trash world culture is fascinating to me because, in the last hundred years, the way of life has been replaced by mass consumption, disposable goods, and waste on an unimaginable scale. Her book could easily be… show more.

How many times have you tossed something in the trash without thinking about it? That throwaway mentality would be unrecognizable to earlier generations of Americans, who reused and repurposed and made do, because they had to. As I went through the process of emptying out my mother’s overstuffed house, I wondered when our things had gotten the better of us. Susan Strasser, a historian who’s also written about housework and consumerism, explains how and why Americans’ attitudes toward trash have shifted so radically since the country’s early days.

So much can be said about a society based on how it defines and handles its trash. Where the line is between trash and treasure can vary, even within a community, based on a person’s need and creativity. Susan Strasser’s beautifully written history of garbage shows how our relationships with both consumption and waste have changed over time. Especially as we reconsider our current wastefulness, it is eye-opening to learn about how folks handled garbage at other points in history.