The Glories of Quasi-Capitalist Modernity, Dumpster Diving Division
Brian Doherty | September 12, 2007, 1:58pm
It allows people to live simply, while others simply throw stuff away. The LA Times profiles the "freegan" movement of mostly middle-class, or formerly so, white progressive types who choose to eat largely from the dumpsters of D'Agostino's, Trader Joe's, and Whole Foods. Some excerpts:
[Madeline] Nelson, 51, once earned a six-figure income as director of communications at Barnes and Noble. Tired of representing a multimillion dollar company, she quit in 2005 and became a "freegan" -- the word combining "vegan" and "free" -- a growing subculture of people who have reduced their spending habits and live off consumer waste. Though many of its pioneers are vegans, people who neither eat nor use any animal-based products, the concept has caught on with Nelson and other meat-eaters who do not want to depend on businesses that they believe waste resources, harm the environment or allow unfair labor practices.
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She garnishes her salad with tangy weeds picked from neighbors' yards. She freezes bagels and soup from the trash to make them last longer. She sold her co-op and bought a one-bedroom apartment in Flatbush, Brooklyn, about an hour from Manhattan by bike. Her annual expenditures now total about $25,000.
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Freeganism was born out of environmental justice and anti-globalization movements dating to the 1980s. The concept was inspired in part by groups like "Food Not Bombs," an international organization that feeds the homeless with surplus food that's often donated by businesses.
Freegans are often college-educated people from middle-class families.
Adam Weissman, whose New York group Freegan.info has been around for about four years, lives with his father, a pediatrician, and mother, a teacher. The 29-year-old is unemployed by choice, taking care of his elderly grandparents daily and working odd jobs when he needs to. The rest of his time is spent furthering the freegan cause, he said, which is "about opting out of capitalism in any way that we can."
It's nice of capitalism to provide such an overflowing cornucopia that the Weissmans of the world can opt out. Wouldn't it be gracious of them to show some love to the system that manages to keep them alive and thriving without even trying?
Kevin Roderick at LA Observed notes the LAT was about three months behind the New York Times on using the same character to tell the same story.
Bonus: Here is a brilliant freegan parody from a '90s humor zine Nothing Doing by Gregg Turkington and Brendan Kearney, in which they describe breathlessly all the ways one could thrive FOR FREE!!! via various time-consuming machinations that would eat up 12 hours or more a day (including doing the rounds of every vending machine within miles looking for dropped nickles, and learning all your pals daily peregrinations so you could dragoon them into delivering your packages and parcels for you, when convenient). My favorite line: " **If you mow a lawn for the crazy old lady down the street, or get a paper route, you’ll receive money for your services…FREE!"
South Park episode 901 | September 12, 2007, 11:47pm | #
So now not only do I have to run the raccoons and neighborhood dogs out of my trash, I have to run the hippies out to? WTF is the world coming to?
Cartman: Hello, ma'am. I'm working to clean up the neighborhood from parasites. Do you mind if I take a quick look around your house? I'm afraid you may have hippies.
Elderly Woman: Hippies?
Cartman: Yeah, they've been poppin' up all over the neighborhood lately. Ms. Nelson next door had seven hippies in her basement; they usually live in colonies. Could I take a look in your attic? . . . Oh yeah, boy. Take a look at this, ma'am.
Elderly Woman: Oh my.
Cartman: These are what we call the uh giggling stoners. Pretty common form of hippie, usually found in the attics. Problem is, if you see one hippie, there's probably a whole lot more you're not seein'. Uh, whe-where's the backyard.
Cartman: Yep, that's what I thought. See that? You've got a drum circle in your backyard.
Elderly Woman: Oh, well they showed up a few days ago, but I didn't think they were hurting anything.
Cartman: Yeah. You know, I had a guy in Jackson county. He had a little drum circle in his backyard. It turned into a drum circle four miles in diameter. You get a few hippies playing drums and next thing you know, you got yourself a colony.
Elderly Woman: Oh dear. Oh, well, so, so what do I do?
Cartman: Ma'am, I need to clear out your giggling stoners and your drum-cricle hippies RIGHT NOW, or soon they're gonna attract something much worse!
Elderly Woman: Ooooo.what's that?
Cartman: The college know-it-all hippies [and the freegans]!
Eric the .5b | September 13, 2007, 1:13pm | #
no but seriously there's some actual good being done here in the form of wasting just a wee bit less, even if the people involved come across like jerkoffs.
Thriftiness is wise and virtuous and all that, but what good are they doing?
From an environmental standpoint, they're far too few to have reduced consumer demand enough to actually reduce use of resources one iota. In fact, if there were enough freegans to be more than an occasional fluff story, businesses would either find ways to make them pay or else produce less and thus provide less waste. Either way, some freegans would have to get jobs, and consumption would bounce back upward.
From an economic standpoint, they're just freeloading off of the work of everyone who actually produced the food and other items they scavenge. Their central goal amounts to to actively avoid engaging in exchanges that could benefit other people. There's nothing
wrong with that, but it isn't "good" for anyone but the freegans.
The reaction against wasted food that gets the freegans some vague sympathy is the same sort of thing as the reaction against self-righteous freeloaders. Nobody's being hurt in either case (
nobody's starving because grocery stores have to throw away perfectly edible food - in fact, that
feeds homeless people); it's just values people have. If you've moved out from your parents' place and work for a living, you're going to tend to take umbrage at someone who scrounges through garbage and tries to claim moral superiority to you because he doesn't have a job.
The funny thing is, if these people were unpretentious about it and said "I just don't want to work a job, I just want to scrounge for things I need, and I like living this way," I'd be perfectly cool with that. I'd be just a bit wary if one offered me dinner, but hey. Of course, the key thing there is that
this wouldn't even be a story if that were the case. Without the ideological posturing, what would there be to write about for the reporter or to link to here?
