Freegan Easy
Posted on December 11, 2013 | posted by:All of this talk about inefficient systems and the waste created by them (most notably in the book Natural Capital : Creating the Next Industrial Revolution by Paul Hawken, Amory & L. Hunter Lovins) has got me thinking about Dumpster diving, urban foraging, and the incredibly diverse and high-quality food that is thrown away every day by people and businesses.
Many people have doubtless heard of Dumpster diving, a vividly named activity that involves investigating (mostly) businesses’ trash cans & reclaiming their edible contents. Not just reclaiming, but eating.
Eating out of the trash is something that many people have an aversion to, which would be totally understandable except for the fact that so much good food gets put into it. Food safety laws, business policies, confusion about expiration dates & a just-in-time supermarket stocking system all conspire to create huge amounts of perfectly edible waste that generally gets sent to the landfill (where it certainly does no one any good). So much, in fact, that there is a whole stratum of politically/ecologically minded people that literally survive on this ‘trash’.
These people are called freegans, a play on the term ‘vegan’. As vegans use products only NOT made by or of animals, so do freegans only use found products, or things that are termed ‘trash’ by conventional definitions.
Although vegans and freegans tend to share some important philosophical characteristics, freegans’ ethics are attuned to waste and commerce, and their lifestyle is attempt to opt out of the commercial economy. A freegan meal might consist of dumpstered fried chicken or fruit salad, day- (or week-) old bread, walnuts from a tree in the local park or vegetables donated from a farmstand.
Not only does freeganism apply to food—it also can apply to other basic needs, such as shelter (see: squats) and clothing (see: free stores).
Freegans live on the waste of others, sometimes proudly calling themselves “freeloaders”, but the intent of the philosophy and practice is to call attention to and to mitigate some of the waste produced by our inefficient commercial systems.
In the future world envisioned by freegans, freeganism would not exist, because the waste that makes the lifestyle possible would be eliminated. They ask us all to look at our own habits and preconceptions of usefulness, to reject disposability-as-feature and to re-examine what makes our treasure into our trash.
For more on the philosophy, and for how we can incorporate freegan practices into our lives (as New Yorkers and otherwise): check out freegan.info. Happy not-shopping!