Year-End Update: Revisiting Scenes and People From 1986 View Stories : Trashing Bev Hills

View has revisited some of the people and places it reported on in 1986 to update their stories. Among them:

--A shelter for the homeless that was itself homeless.

--An author who had new ideas about how to market and promote his book.

--The campaign to save Nancy Reagan’s 1981 inaugural gown, which is stretching under the weight of its bugle beads.

When last we looked in on Luanne Hudson in February, she was an assistant professor of anthropology at Occidental College and was teaching a course on Modern Material Culture. The students liked to call it garbology.

Having done rubbish reconnaissance in middle-class and poorer neighborhoods, they decided to examine discards in the town where it is said the firefighters hose down blazes with Perrier water--Beverly Hills.

After going a-trashing, the students and Hudson, who has a doctorate in anthropology, discovered not that the town’s garbage is gift-wrapped, but rather that there is an apparent focus on a healthy diet.

“We found that the residents threw away a lot of glass bottles which had contained good, high-quality juices,” Hudson said at the time. No Twinkies or candy wrappers in the garbage.

Since then she has returned to USC, where she formerly taught, and is a senior lecturer in anthropology, giving credit courses on her own and non-credit symposia in conjunction with another anthropologist, Suzanne Engler.

In something of a follow-up to her health findings in Beverly Hills, Hudson said she plans to study school garbage in 1987.

“I want to find if children of elementary school age are eating what we hope they are--or whether they are throwing away the nutritious cafeteria food and either substituting junk food or skipping meals altogether,” she said.

As with everyone else, you are what you throw away.