As the industrial revolution drew families into cities and mass-production jobs, society’s relationship to stuff began to change, and modern notions of “waste” emerged. For example, in traditional farming communities, food scraps are fertilizer. But the nineteenth-century urban tenements into which rural families relocated provided little space or opportunity to “recycle” food. In the absence of waste collection, food scraps often literally went out of the window, into the streets. In 1842 the New York Daily News estimated that ten thousand pigs were roaming the streets of New York, consuming
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