Conclusion: Don Quixote Scavenges for Food

Abstract

On 24 September 2012, The New York Times published a report entitled ‘Spain Recoils as Its Hungry Forage Trash Bins for a Next Meal’. The piece was accompanied by a front-page picture of a man, incidentally in a Barça T-shirt, searching a dumpster. ‘So pervasive is the problem of scavenging that one Spanish city has resorted to installing locks on supermarket trash bins as a public health precaution,’ reported Suzanne Daily.² The article painted a grim, although accurate, picture of Spain, a country with a 25 per cent unemployment rate, 22 per cent house-holds living in poverty and over a million hungry people forced to use soup kitchens and forage the day’s refuse for food. The New York Times linked Spain’s dire straits to the austerity measures imposed to meet budget targets that had resulted in ‘cutting jobs, salaries, pensions and benefits, even as the economy continues to shrink’. Making life much harder for those on the edge, the central government had raised value-added tax by three percentage points, while the regional governments were ‘chipping away at a range of previously free services, including school lunches for low-income families’.³ The timing of the publication was also telling, as on the same day that Suzanne Daily’s report came out, King Juan Carlos I paid a visit to the New York Times headquarters. Somewhat ironically, the goal of the royal visit was to promote the Spain Brand (Marca España) and to explain to American journalists the real situation in the Iberian country.

‘The Spain Brand is the father of a family scavenging in dustbins’

(Riot Propaganda)¹