Upcoming Satya Interview: Uncut Version Part 1 (long!)
1. What is Freeganism?
Freeganism is a living strategy to reclaim control of our lives from an economic system that turns us into wage slaves and makes us complicit in exploitation of the earth and human and nonhuman animals.
Under capitalism, the prime motivator for businesses selling goods, services, ideas and spaces is not to serve consumer needs, provide for their workers, or improve the overall state of the world, but to generate profits for their investors and owners. To do this producers seek to keep production costs low, attach a substantial profit margin on the sale price of an item, and dominate markets by making product more attractive to customers than the products of competitors.
A model that reduces everything to assets and expenses, that seeks to continually widen the margin between production cost and sale price will inevitably place concerns for the environment, for the impacts of doing business on the environment, on public health, on culture, on quality of life for workers, on animals, on indigenous people, on anything other than the bottom line as secondary. Thus, labor interests are considered only when labor organizing threatens profitability. Ecological concerns are considered only when consumer boycotts threaten to damage a corporation's image, reduce investor confidence, and decrease sales. Even products marketed as "green" or "vegan" operate on the same principle-- their "greenness" becomes a selling point to consumers, emphasizing a single attractive quality in the production of a product, (e.g. adherence to organic standards) while obscuring exploitative aspects of production that allow low-cost, high-volume production (e.g. labor exploitation, shooting and trapping of wildlife).
In a society where people are encouraged to be wasteful and to find satisfaction in purchasing of material commodities, freegans seek to prevent waste by reclaiming, recovering and repairing available resources to serve need rather than generate profit. Resisting an economic model that tells us that our interests are best served in ruthless competition with each other, freegans demonstrate that we can live better lives by building community, cooperating to serve our needs, conserving what we have, questioning the need to produce and acquire more, simplifying our lifestyles to minimize our impact on the planet and other living beings, and sharing our resources, labor, and skills voluntarily with each other.
In practice, some of the ways we do this include:
* Urban Foraging - recovering wasted food, books, clothing, office supplies and other items from the refuse of retail stores frequently discarded in brand new condition, finding useable furniture and appliances on curbsides, discovering computers in industrial sized office building dumpsters, and more. Freegans recover goods not for profit, but to serve their own immediate needs and to share freely with others.
* Free Sharing - Sharing the wealth instead of adding to the waste. On email lists like Freecycle, websites like the free section of Craigslist, at day-long fairs like the "Really, Really Free Market” and "Freemeet," and in permanently established "Free Stores," people donate items they don't want and others find things they can use-- all free of charge. 3
* Repair Workshops - Repair bikes and mend clothes and hold workshops to teach others to do the same. Fixed-up items can be found on the street or simply collecting dust in the back corner of a closet.
* Wild Foraging - Identifying collecting and using wild-growing plant foods and medicinals, everywhere from the deep woods to a city park. In a society where we've been taught to think food comes out of a box, wild foraging reconnects us with the realization that our food comes from the Earth. (Brill)
* Squatting - Finding abandoned, decrepit buildings and restoring them info homes and community centers for low-income families without benefit of a property deed. Squatting challenges the values of an economic system where homeless people freeze to death on the streets while landlords and municipal governments sit on boarded up buildings.
* Guerilla Gardening - Converting garbage-strewn abandoned lots into beautiful garden plots amidst the asphalt and concrete of urban neighborhoods. The gardens are refuges for urban wildlife and allow communities to grow their own food in neighborhoods where supermarkets under stock healthy fruits and vegetables.
* Eco-friendly Transportation - Freegans see automobiles and the petroleum economy as a social and ecological disaster and promote more sustainable methods of travel. Bicycling is healthy, nonpolluting, and requires no fuel cost, so volunteer groups called “bike collectives” teach people to repair abandoned and broken bikes. Hitchhikers and freight train hoppers continue a time-honored vagabond tradition of traveling with minimal means in a car-obsessed nation with inadequate and prohibitively expensive passenger rail lines. Driving cars and running trains with extra space is an inefficient use of energy resources. By filling these vehicles with extra bodies, hitchers and hoppers increase their environmental efficiency, instead of putting another petroleum burning engine on the road. Freegans who find cars unavoidable avoid petroleum dependence by converting their diesel engines to run on used grease from restaurant flyers, turning a waste product into an ecologically friendly fuel. For traveling short distances, freegans are happy to simply walk.
*Avoiding Disposables- Freegans believe that the goods we used to should be designed to last and preserved for longevity. Freegans use rags over paper towels, handkerchiefs over paper tissues, and carry mugs rather than use disposable cups. In the process we save money and conserve natural resources.
*Avoiding Overconsumption and Working Less- Freegans resist manipulative advertisements that tell us we can find happiness and self-worth on retail store shelves. By buying less "stuff" and taking care of vital needs without paying money, freegans are able to work less or not at all. This is motivated not by "laziness", but by a desire to devote their time to community service, activism, caring for family, appreciating nature, and enjoying life.
*Entertainment and Education- Freegans attend and share information about free events-- parties, educational forums, free schools, nature hikes, walking tours, workshops that teach practical skills, concerts, discussion group and other activities where people can learn and have a great time without spending a dime. Freegans can find events and activities on email lists, free calendars, and websites like http://www.freeevents.org/ .
* Food Not Bombs- Food Not Bombs groups in over 200 cities recover food that would otherwise go to waste and use it to prepare warm meals on the street to promote and ethic of sharing and feed hungry people, challenging a society that can always pay for war, but never seems able to ensure that all are fed.
2. Is there a freegan community in NYC?
There are many freegan communities in New York City-- some which embrace this term, and other that practice the same lifestyles and share many of the same perspectives, but don't use the term. Squatters and groups like that repair bikes and people who grow gardens in abandoned lots and people who forage for discarded goods and groups like Recycle This! that run centers to leave and collect goods that would otherwise go to waste. Our group, Freegan.info is an organization that seeks to build community and educate people about freegan practices and ideas. We hold 3-6 "trash tours" every month. These are urban foraging expeditions where we take groups to see firsthand and harvest the remarkable quantities of useable waste generated by retail shops. 1-2 times a month we hold "freegan feasts," dinner parties where people come together to prepare and eat foods recovered during our trash tours. Once a month we hold "Urban Foraging 101" discussion groups to introduce curious, new people to freegan ideas and practices and take them out on a trash tour afterwards. At least once a month we go "Trash Trailblazing", foraging expeditions into areas we haven't yet visited on our tours, and as we discover wasteful businesses that discard lots of useable goods, we note them to add to our online "Dumpster Directory" (http://freegan.info/?page=LocalDirectories), so that others can recover resources at these locations in the future. People can find our about our events at http://freegan.info/?page=Events or can send a blank email to freegannyc-events@lists.riseup.net to be added to our email list for events announcements.
3. Roughly, how many freegans do you think
4.
5. What inspired you to take on this lifestyle?
Animal rights psychologist Ken Shapiro once described animal rights activists as "caring sleuths", people who keep their eyes open to injustices around them that others might not notice, and this is a pretty good description of me. As I became more aware of the ways that my consumer choices were impacting others, I progressively make changes in my lifestyle, first by going vegetarian, then by going vegan, then by eating only organic foods.
Yet as I got more interested in organic growing methods, I became increasingly aware that "organic" does NOT mean "animal friendly." Organic farmers will shoot, trap, and poison mammals, birds, insects, and other animals as readily as non-organic farmers--they simply won't do it with petroleum-based pesticides. And of course, many organic farmers subsidize animal agriculture by using manure to fertilize their crops. Even agriculture practices not intended to harm animals cause massive numbers of deaths--machine threshers chop animals to bits, animals on land or in dens are crushed under agricultural machinery, small animals are shredded as soil is tilled--one study suggests that pasture raised beef production (cattle who eat grass rather than livestock feed) may actually cause LESS animal deaths than growing crops!
I came to realize that for an animal liberationist, an organic, vegan diet was a lot like buying meat at the supermarket -- being complicit in animal oppression, but letting someone else do the dirty work, so we don't have to think about it. I bought a few books about veganic gardening, a system that truly attempts animal-friendly agriculture, from the American Vegan Society, and briefly considered growing my own food, so that I could show a greater level of care for wildlife in every stage of the growing process than a commercial farmer would. Before I got started with this, however, I stumbled upon the enormous volume of waste generated daily by retailers, and realized that I could fully satisfy my need for food by consuming goods that would otherwise go to waste-- meaning that no my consumption would not require even the limited detrimental impact on wildlife and the environment that my small-scale farming would have had, and I could leave the land that I would have farmed to the wildlife.. Also, in the process, I would actually having a positive impact, by rescuing goods from the waste stream, rescuing goods from further contributing to the garbage crisis. On a day to day basis, that may not seem like a big deal, but over the course of years, by living this way, the amount of stuff I prevent from ever reaching a landfill is considerable. And I compound that impact when I encourage others to do the same
According to Mathis Wackernagel, Executive Director, Global Footprint Project, an organization that measures the ecological impact of our lifestyle choices "The food we eat shapes our [ecological] footprint the most. And while eating locally grown vegan food makes the smallest print among food-buyers, freegans even beat that."
6. What are some of your best finds?
7. Some of your worst?
From a freegan perspective, "best" and "worst" finds become inescapably mired in irony.
Yes, we can find all sorts of remarkable goods-- computers, stereos, clothing, televisions, enormous quantities of fresh food, furniture, books, magazines, newspapers, bicycles, appliances, office supplies, audio and video tapes and disks, etc.
But, really, the best possible find is nothing at all--finding that a store or other institution has not needlessly discarded useable goods.
While the experience of finding useable commodities can be fun, it's also sobering. Freegans are aware that in the United States, off-gassing from landfills is the second contributor to global warming. Freegans consider the relationship between garbage and environmental racism and classism, recognizing that while wealthy white communities are the most wasteful and overconsumptive, low income, predominantly black and brown communities are poised by incinerators that belch heavy metals and leachate-leaking landfills that contribute to asthma, leukemia, and other cancers.
It's also truly upsetting to thing of all of the suffering and ecological destruction that goes into producing consumer goods--and then to see them needlessly wasted. Personally, NOTHING upsets me more than seeing discarded meat. It infuriates me to think of the hellish, short lives these animals were forced to live-- only to end up in a landfill. As much as I oppose the murder of animals for food, this seems even MORE disrespectful to me-- to see that these animals have died for NOTHING. . Fish in particular are discarded in high volume, because the standard business model for many fish markets is to pick up hundreds of fish from the fish market at the beginning of the day, put them on ice, and dump every single on that doesn't sell by the end of the day. Meanwhile, one of the greatest ecological catastrophes is the depletion of ocean life by factory trawlers-- massive fishing ships that leave the oceans barren of life with nets that stretch for miles. We are leaving dead oceans and causing suffering and death to an incalculable number of individual animal lives so that markets can regularly overstock and discard the bodies of once- living beings.
Similarly, when I see massive quantities of fresh bananas or chocolate or beef, I think of the destruction of tropical rainforests for plantation and pastureland. And knowing that the entire industrial system that brings these tropical foods to our North American supermarkets is made possible by consumption of mass quantities of fossil fuels --powering the machinery used to clearcut the rainforests, petroleum-based pesticides sprayed on the crops, fuel for the vehicles that transport these products, of the coal-powered energy used in refrigeration, of the plastic packaging, etc-- I'm reminded of the devastation of Iraq in Bush's oil war; of the destruction of wildlife and ocean ecosystems from enormous oil spills; of rainforests poisoned by sloppy oil drilling extraction operations in countries like Ecuador by companies by Chevron-Texaco that have polluted groundwater left generations of indigenous children with birth defects and, left wildlife to horrific deaths trapped in oil pits; of the desperate fight the defend the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge from the ravenous greed of oil corporations and their complaint cronies in Congress; of the forced displacement of indigenous communities like the Dineh (Navajo) by companies like Peabody Coal and their stooges in the US government so the that Peabody can ravage sacred indigenous land to mine it for coal. Then there are the metals used in the chainsaws and bulldozers and trucks: aluminum harvested at great ecological cost from open-pit strip mines on former rainforests land, and steel mills that spew toxins into air and water.
Just about every consumer product we buy carries an ugly legacy of environmental damage, labor exploitation, and animal exploitation, and in a nation of massive waste-- where, for example, 40-50% of all food is needlessly discarded, a very high percentage of these destructive impacts are being generated not for the goods we use, but for the ones we DON'T use. The same study that documented that 40-50% of all food is wasted also found that we could cut the ecological impacts of food production by 25% if we eliminated this waste.
At the same time, it's hard not to look at this waste and think of all of the unmet need that it represents. Again, using the example of food, the USDA classifies 4.4 million people in the Unites States as hungry, while estimates place the annual global death toll from starvation and malnutrition-related illness at 45 million, with recent USDA figures estimating that 857 million people globally live under conditions of starvation. Considering that we in the US are wasting enough food annually to feed our entire populace, a country where most people eat far more than absolutely necessary, we could effectively end hunger-related death if the foods that we wasted in the United States were distributed appropriately.
Of course, this isn't a matter of getting food from the trash bins of stores and shipping it to Africa. Instead, it’s a matter of dismantling an economic model that ruthlessly exploits the third world to provide an overabundance of resources to the first world so that corporations can profit from selling commodities to affluent first world consumers. And of course, for these corporations, so long as they are making a profit and staying competitive, they care nothing of the enormous waste they are generating, despite the fact that many of the resources that they are robbing from the third world are vitally needed in their countries of origin.
Globally this problem is driven by neoliberal economic polices (more commonly known as "corporate globalization") imposed by the International Monetary Fund, a global financial that "aids" third world countries in paying their foreign debt by strong-arming them into imposing disastrous domestic policies. These policies have shifted third world agricultural economies away from a sustainable, self-reliant model of subsistence agriculture and local commerce to one where farmers work as wage slaves to global agribusiness concerns and are forced to grow cash crops for export to the first world.
According to Oxfam Canada, under IMF structural adjustment policies, "Land and agricultural subsidies [are] diverted away from small-scale farmers and offered to large-scale food producers and companies. Poor farmers, with little access to loans, land or technology, are unable to compete. Small-scale farmers, many of whom are women, are highly disadvantaged. People have little to no income to buy food, yet much of the food grown in the country ends up on tables somewhere overseas. For example, Brazil is the world’s fourth largest agricultural exporter, yet the number of food insecure people rose from 44 million to 46 million from 1999 to 2001 “.
This problem is exacerbated by "free trade" agreements like CAFTA and NAFTA, which eliminate agricultural import tariffs in third world nations, so that first world agribusiness, using pesticides, GMOs, and heavy machinery to produce in high volume at low cost, can flood third world markets with products priced dramatically below the product of small-scale local farmers, driving them out of business and forcing them to take jobs starvation wage jobs with corporate ag interests or move to urban areas to take similarly atrocious jobs in hellish sweatshops making goods for companies like Nike, Disney, Guess, and the Gap, who will sell them at premium prices so that their CEOs and celebrity endorsers can make hundreds of millions every year and the companies can reap billions in profit
We can resist this economic model on many fronts, and one of these is by taking business away from these companies by building communities that promote sustainable living strategies that don't provide profits to corporations. In the short term, this can mean using their own wastefulness against them by harvesting the goods they discard, and in the long term this means increasingly shifting towards a model where we provide for our needs through cooperative local efforts --fixing the goods we have, cooperative local gardening projects, wild foraging, etc. If we intend to liberate the third world from being the labor and resource pool that drives our first world excess, then we need to end our own dependence on the global economy. We also need to lobby, protest, educate, and take direct action (along the lines of groups like the Earth Liberation Front) in solidarity with people in the third world fighting to preserve traditional lifeways--like indigenous communities in countries like Ecuador, Nigeria, Nicaragua and Colombia resisting the destruction of their ancestral lands by logging and oil interests and mass movements of peasant farmers like the Zapatistas in Mexico who have fought economic policies that create poverty and cause cultural genocide.
8. What are the practical concerns about dumpster divingused needles, used condoms, rats, etc.?
People have fanciful imaginations about garbage but in reality what you'll find in the trash of a retail store is by and large the same items on sale on store shelves. That's not to say that everything a retailer discards is a useable commodity, but usually useable unsold products are bagged separately from other refuse. You might find one bag of nothing but bagels or fresh fruit, and separate bags containing fairly unremarkable and relatively inoffensive objects like empty bottles, coffee grounds, store circulars, etc. You can usually often guess what's in a bag before even opening it by simply looking at how it sits or by kicking it or patting it and many bags are clear, making it even easier. So you open the bags of usable stuff and ignore the others, or open them all, check what's inside and reclose it if contains nothing that you want.
Just about the most dangerous or unpleasant thing I've ever found in a bag is broken glass, but this is VERY rare and this sort of thing is almost always bagged separately from useable stuff. It’s a good idea to look in bags as you are reaching in them and to reach about gingerly. Flashlights are often unnecessary, but are sometimes helpful.
9. Have you ever about gotten sick from bad food?
People are often incredulous when I tell them that eating freegan food is perfectly safe to eat, so I’ll refer this one o the experts:
"I guess you could hurt yourself falling headfirst into an empty Dumpster. Strange as it sounds, most food that's thrown out by stores is still safe to eat if you clean it and cook it appropriately."
-Dr. Ruth Kava, American Council on Science and Health, asked if getting food from dumpsters is dangerous
(as quoted in the NY Daily News, 2/13/06)
"There's no reason to assume that simply because a store has discarded food that it is unsafe to eat. Many stores bag all discarded items and don't commingle food and nonfood items, so contamination from non-food sources may not be a concern. A bag filled with bread or fruit may be no more dangerous than the loaf of bread on our countertop or the fruit bowl at the center of our table. In cold temperatures, items bagged outside a store may be no worse off than those on its shelves. Meat, daily, fish, and eggs carry serious risks whether purchased in a store or recovered outside of it. These items require special care in all weather and should be properly handled and cooked thoroughly. In truth,
a vegan harvesting plant-based items that have been discarded by stores is probably safer than a shopper who buys animal products, though a freegan who harvests meat items in cold weather and handles and cooks them appropriately may be no worse off than a meat buyer."
-Dr. Michael Greger, nutrition lecturer, Cornell University, expert in food-borne illness (specializing in Mad Cow Disease), invited as expert witness in Oprah Winfrey vs. Texas Cattlemen lawsuit
(via correspondence, 8/17/04)
At the core of this question is an incorrect assumption-- that freegan food must be of inferior quality to store-purchased commodities, and therefore someone consuming them must be taking greater risks with their health. Within the context of our culture this assumption seems utterly commonsensical, and the suggestion that it is rooted in faulty assumptions sounds absurd.
In reality, we've been trained by the corporations who manipulate our desires, expectations, and perceptions from cradle to grave to believe that anything worth having must have a price tag attached to it. Programming us with this message ensures that the vast majority of our productive activity will be in service to generating income that we will then hand over to them in exchange for the trinkets and snake oil that they have assured us will provide health, happiness, self-esteem, security, and social acceptance. Thus, we find it inconceivable that anything worth having can be acquired without paying for it.
We assume that if stores are throwing food away, it must be of inferior quality to what they are selling, because if this were not the case, because the alternative challenges the core assumption around which we have structured our lives. If the same goods that we purchase can be acquired free of charge, then why are we wasting day after day in the endless drudgery of paid work? For that matter, if these goods are available in such abundance and treated as so utterly without value as to discard, why are we paying so much for them?
Rummaging through retail garbage and finding enormous quantities of high end items in essentially identical conditions to those carrying hefty price tags inside the store, one quickly realizes that we've been had. We’ve been led to believe that these premium price items are of some great value and great prizes to acquire to be worth of such high cost. We may even come to believe that these items are available in short supply and that the retailer selling them has gone to great expense to acquire them. Yet seeing them discarded as worthless, it becomes immediately apparent that retail pricing reflects not the actual acquisition or production cost of an item (retailers would be less quick to discard the $25 fruit platter if their per-unit expense was anything comparable), nor a reflection of its scarcity (how can these products be scarce if they are available in such enormous supply as to regularly discard massive quantities of them), or even a reflection of its actual value to the consumer (if intrinsic consumer value were the consideration, how could goods of equal value to those being sold be discarded as worthless?), but simply a calculated estimate of the greatest amount target market consumers can be bilked for without losing sales to competitor brands.
We are slaving away to make enough money to acquire products from corporations trying to ensure that they can get as much money out of us as we can possibly provide, while constantly being bombarded with advertising messages telling us our happiness and worth depends on acquiring even more stuff. Essentially, our entire working lives, the entire model that defines our consumption is based around a massive scam. We are running on a treadmill chasing a carrot suspended on wires just out of reach, but no matter how fast we run, no matter how hard we push ourselves, we never claim the prize. We live in a culture of enormous affluence, yet so many people with "good jobs" are drowning in debt-- credit cards, mortgage debt, student loans, and car loans. We pay enormously inflated prices on rent, while billionaire landlords sit on vacant properties, waiting for gentrification to turn straw into gold. And no matter what hurdle we clear, we find that on the other side are yet another come-on, yet another promise that we will achieve happiness when we work MORE, earn MORE, buy MORE, and spend MORE on higher-priced goods. Once we can feed our families, we need to start thinking about buying gourmet foods. Once we can clothe our families (and in many cases BEFORE), we need to strive for the ability to buy designer-label items. If we can afford to pay rent, we need to start thinking about a bigger apartment in a nicer neighborhood, or perhaps a condo or a house in the suburbs. Meanwhile, we are encouraged to buy disposable goods and to replace rather than repair.
According to financial analyst Susan C. Walker “There's an axiom known by every economist under the sun: because consumers make up two-thirds of the economy, they must keep spending to keep the economy healthy. It's easy to see that we've been acting on cue for the economy, to the point that we've kept spending well beyond our means.”
Along the way some of us go through midlife crises when we recognizes that we’ve wasted decades chasing that carrot, and we haven’t gotten any closer; we’re still just as hungry as when we were stuck on that treadmill as children and told to get the best grades in school so we could get in the best college, so we could get in the best grad school, so we could could get the best job so we could buy the best stuff, so that---what?
Our entire economic model is predicated on keeping us dissatisfied, always wanting more. Does the heroin addict ever decide she has had enough cocaine? Of course not. Over time, satisfaction can only be found in more frequent and larger hits, and the motivation becomes less about the satisfaction of using the drug and more about the fear of going through withdrawal, of not being able to satisfy the addiction.
William Burroughs recognized this when he commented, “The junk merchant does not sell his product to the consumer, he sells the consumer to the product. He does not improve and simplify his merchandise, he degrades and simplifies the client.”
We live in a society where we’re profoundly alienated from the people living around us, from the ecosystems we exist within (everyone knows how to buy oranges in New York in December, but how many people know how to find indigenous edible berries in July?), where every important decision that affects our lives, the lives of others, and the future of our world is made by corporations satisfying the mandate of an economic model that validates only one goal or by politicians who sold their souls to corporate interests by necessity in the process of being elected, a society where we feel so powerless that social engagement is viewed as trite and passé and naïve yet people fail to question corporate advertisements that tell us to “Think Different” by buying their junk,, where the conventional forms of protest have been rendered so ineffective that we treat the acquisition of crumbslike more cage space for factory farmed hensas great victories, where the symbols of resistanceraised fists, images of Gandhi and King, graffiti-- have been commodified by “agit-prop marketing”, where killer corporations treat social and ecological concerns as just another desire to manipulate by veiling themselves in earthtones and crunchy-granola brandnames and superficial talk of “green business practices” and “corporate social responsibility”, disguising the genocide and ecocide and exploitation they are truly responsible for and furthering people’s sense of alienation from the notion of a genuine and powerful and dangerous and truly liberating resistance to the point where shameless, conspicuous consumption and overt apathy are now colored with “irony” and a sense of defiance against “politically correct fascism.”
We live in a society where were profoundly alienated from the people living around us, from the ecosystems we exist within (everyone knows how to buy oranges in New York in December, but how many people know how to find indigenous edible berries in July?), where every important decision that affects our lives, the lives of others, and the future of our world is made by corporations satisfying the mandate of an economic model that validates only one goal or by politicians who sold their souls to corporate interests by necessity in the process of being elected, a society where we feel so powerless that social engagement is viewed as trite and passé and naïve, yet people fail to question corporate advertisements that tell us to Think Different by buying their junk, where the symbols of resistanceraised fists, images of Gandhi and King, graffiti-- have been commodified by agit-prop marketing, where killer corporations treat social and ecological concerns as just another desire to manipulate by veiling themselves in earthtones and crunchy-granola brandnames and superficial talk of green business practices and corporate social responsibility, disguising the genocide and ecocide and exploitation they are truly responsible for and furthering peoples sense of alienation from the notion of a genuine and powerful and dangerous and truly liberating resistance to the point where shameless, conspicuous consumption and overt apathy are now colored with irony and a sense of defiance against politically correct fascism.
Reform efforts ask for too little and are too often coopted to the point where they glean nothing at all or treat the acquisition of crumbslike more cage space for factory farmed hensas great victories. Violence and other forms of militant resistance are too easily and too quickly crushed in a culture where the powerful have a near monopoly on force, a massive infrastructure for crushing dissent, and the masses are too convinced of their own powerlessness and too removed from the idea that they have a vital stake in rebellion to riseup. While there are since advocates of "green consumerism" and even some businesses with sincere motives, socially responsible business is at best a failed proposition in it's aspiration to commingle two diametrically opposed forces--amoral capitalism and an interest in ethical conduct-- and at worst an outright sham. Yes, some good can be achieved by every one of these strategies, and collectively, they are owed some due for things not being ever worse than they already are. But fundamentally, none of them pose a fundamental challenge to the status quo. They're like trying to clean up a massive oil spill -admirable, vitally important, yet hopeless in mitigating any significant measure of the damage being inflicted and utterly useless in addressing the root causes that created the disaster in the first place.
Freegans resist on what may be the only level that still has a capacity to matter within a system where our every genuine intention and desire is manipulated, corrupted, co-oped, blunted and obscured, where we wear cynicism as a suit of armor in a world where nothing seems genuine and trust feels dangerous, a system that strips us of hope, leaves us isolated, lonely, frightened, convinces us that mediocrity is "realistic" and imagination is "childish", where we believe dissatisfaction is the inevitable nature of the human condition, where alienation from our ecosystems, from each other, from our labor, and from our own fate is "normal," where self-interest is best served through competition, or, for that matter, where we accept the notion of self-interest as a discreet concept from collective community interest. Freegans challenge this system by giving ourselves the things we've been deprived of--joy and possibility, a sense of truly belonging rather than just fitting in, an unironic recognition of love as a vital component of functioning community and as as a transformative revolutionary force, the idea that we can create the lives we desire rather than just settling for what's "pragmatic" and "available," freegans dare to insist that WE DON'T NEED TO LIVE LIKE THIS! We CAN survive and thrive without destroying the planet and exploiting others. We CAN build communities where we trust the intentions of others and recognize that we can all live better when we cooperate to ensure that the needs and desires of all are met. We CAN be the masters of our own lives, finding meaning and beauty and adventure and purpose in every day, in every waking hour we spend on this earth, instead of accepting as a "fact of life" that we must complete endless joyless tasks that no higher purpose in the miserable daily chore of employment. . And that we CAN challenge this decaying global system that is ravaging our world in its the course of its own death throes by removing its two vital necessities --workers and consumers. And that we CAN believe ANOTHER WORLD IS POSSIBLE and we have the power to build it today, first within our own communities, and second, in conjunction with communities everywhere, throughout the world
10. Do you eat free meat or dairy and eggs?
I don't, but I have no ethical objection to those who choose to recover discarded animal products.. I think the meat and dairy industries are hideously evil, but our complicity with them is primarily at the cash register, not on the dinner table. In a capitalist economy, McDonalds' doesn’t care if we use their hamburgers for frisbees, so long as we BUY them.
According to Peter Singer, author of Animal Liberation, "The best argument against vegetarianism comes from dumpster divers. If you get your meat out of a supermarket dumpster, when it was going to be thrown out anyway, go ahead and eat it, you're not supporting the abuse of animals by paying for meat."
I’ve heard many vegans argue that consuming animals’ bodies is disrespectful, and I’m baffled by what measure of respect is afforded to animals by letting their discarded corpses end up in landfills and incinerators. Personally, when I die, I want my corpse dumped in the woods so that it can feed other animals Living beings have always consumed dead beings, keeping matter and energy a constant part of the life cycle. I find the ways that humans deal with our own bodiesembalming, incineration, burial in natural resource intensive boxesmorbid and ecologically irresponsible. We should stop projecting our bizarre concepts about immortal souls and resurrection onto our victims. It’s perfectly fine if we don’t want to consume animal productsthey’re terrible for our health after allbut instead of trying to force our naturally carnivorous cats to be vegan or buying canned decayed flesh from Purina for them, wouldn’t it be better to recover good quality flesh for them from a supermarket dumpster?
That said, most freegans recognize an important distinction between “free” and “recovered” good. Within the vegan community, there is a wildly inaccurate stereotype of freegans as being people who are otherwise vegan but will eat any nonvegan foods given to them by others. Freegans recognize that if someone buys a nonvegan food and offers it to another, the manufacturers are still turning a profit, and may encourage the purchaser to buy more, providing additional support for the exploitative practices we abhor. Also allowing purchasers of nonvegan goods reinforces the option that purchasing these goods is a morally acceptable option, which most freegans would dispute.
On the other hand, freegans recognize that ALL commodities produced under capitalism are produced using exploitative practices, not just the non-vegan ones, so freegans seek to avoid purchasing or encouraging others to purchase ANY goods. This is obviously difficult to live in absolute terms, so freeganism, lacks the “all or nothing” absolutism of veganism, focusing less on personal purity and far more on making alternatives widely available and practical, so that large numbers can practice ethical living strategies, not just a small number of lifestyle martyrs.
11. Is it true that freegans support the idea of working less?
In a society where we are told that employment is a necessity of survival, where bosses make all significant decisions in the workplace about a worker's labor and the practices of the corporation and even the bosses their actions are constrained by the demands of remaining competititve, work has become a form of slavery.
A very small number of us are able to work in accordance with our ethical principles and can also manage our work to fit our lives rather than managing our lives to fulfill our work, but only a very privileged few have these luxuries. And even in these cases, we are alienated from the positive impacts of our labors by the recognition that in being paid for our work we are serving an ulterior motive beyond the work itself and are ultimately taking something away from someone else/
For most of us, work occupies the realm of necessary evils. We know that the companies we work for don’t operate in accordance with our personal ethics and we often find our work unpleasant, boring, draining, stressful and unrewarding, but we were trained in school that letting others make decisions about how we use our time, that having to spend the bulk of our productive hours on tasks that fail to inspire us, that living in fear of disapproval by the authority figures that govern our work is what life is all about.
Freegans believe that by liberating ourselves from participation in the economy that requires us to possess capital, we can also liberate ourselves from the need to work to acquire capital. We can instead devote our time to the things that truly matter to us and that we truly enjoy-- spending time with our families and friends, working within community projects that fulfill our needs outside of capitalism (like developing community centers and free stores in squatted buildings and growing gardens in abandoned lots, activism against the exploitation of the earth and human and nonhuman animals, providing for our needs and the needs of our community by foraging for wasted goods and for wild-growing foods, spending time appreciating fauna and flora in urban parks (or, better yet, getting away from the city altogether), attending all manner of free concerts and lectures and parties listed in publications like the New York Free Events Calendar (http://freeevents.org), and remembering that we only have one chance to live every day of our lives and that we should make the very most out of the opportunity that
every day presents if we stop being obedient workers and let our imaginations run wild.
Freegans believe in prefigurature politics --the notion that our resistance to the status quo takes the form of realizing NOW the kind of world we wish to live in. We don't see liberating the days of our lives simply as a temporary act of resistance or a "freeloader" strategy on the margins of society, but rather as a model of how EVERYONE can live. We are creating a society where we collaborate voluntarily to serve the needs of our community, where we refuse to compartmentalize labor to serve our material needs from our ethical principles, and our need for adventure and enjoyment, where we recognize that our material needs are limited, but our needs for love, joy, community, and a sense of connection to all life are great, where we recognize that collectively we can locally provide for everything we want and need without endless hours of joyless toil.
Freeganism is a living strategy to reclaim control of our lives from an economic system that turns us into wage slaves and makes us complicit in exploitation of the earth and human and nonhuman animals.
Under capitalism, the prime motivator for businesses selling goods, services, ideas and spaces is not to serve consumer needs, provide for their workers, or improve the overall state of the world, but to generate profits for their investors and owners. To do this producers seek to keep production costs low, attach a substantial profit margin on the sale price of an item, and dominate markets by making product more attractive to customers than the products of competitors.
A model that reduces everything to assets and expenses, that seeks to continually widen the margin between production cost and sale price will inevitably place concerns for the environment, for the impacts of doing business on the environment, on public health, on culture, on quality of life for workers, on animals, on indigenous people, on anything other than the bottom line as secondary. Thus, labor interests are considered only when labor organizing threatens profitability. Ecological concerns are considered only when consumer boycotts threaten to damage a corporation's image, reduce investor confidence, and decrease sales. Even products marketed as "green" or "vegan" operate on the same principle-- their "greenness" becomes a selling point to consumers, emphasizing a single attractive quality in the production of a product, (e.g. adherence to organic standards) while obscuring exploitative aspects of production that allow low-cost, high-volume production (e.g. labor exploitation, shooting and trapping of wildlife).
In a society where people are encouraged to be wasteful and to find satisfaction in purchasing of material commodities, freegans seek to prevent waste by reclaiming, recovering and repairing available resources to serve need rather than generate profit. Resisting an economic model that tells us that our interests are best served in ruthless competition with each other, freegans demonstrate that we can live better lives by building community, cooperating to serve our needs, conserving what we have, questioning the need to produce and acquire more, simplifying our lifestyles to minimize our impact on the planet and other living beings, and sharing our resources, labor, and skills voluntarily with each other.
In practice, some of the ways we do this include:
* Urban Foraging - recovering wasted food, books, clothing, office supplies and other items from the refuse of retail stores frequently discarded in brand new condition, finding useable furniture and appliances on curbsides, discovering computers in industrial sized office building dumpsters, and more. Freegans recover goods not for profit, but to serve their own immediate needs and to share freely with others.
* Free Sharing - Sharing the wealth instead of adding to the waste. On email lists like Freecycle, websites like the free section of Craigslist, at day-long fairs like the "Really, Really Free Market” and "Freemeet," and in permanently established "Free Stores," people donate items they don't want and others find things they can use-- all free of charge. 3
* Repair Workshops - Repair bikes and mend clothes and hold workshops to teach others to do the same. Fixed-up items can be found on the street or simply collecting dust in the back corner of a closet.
* Wild Foraging - Identifying collecting and using wild-growing plant foods and medicinals, everywhere from the deep woods to a city park. In a society where we've been taught to think food comes out of a box, wild foraging reconnects us with the realization that our food comes from the Earth. (Brill)
* Squatting - Finding abandoned, decrepit buildings and restoring them info homes and community centers for low-income families without benefit of a property deed. Squatting challenges the values of an economic system where homeless people freeze to death on the streets while landlords and municipal governments sit on boarded up buildings.
* Guerilla Gardening - Converting garbage-strewn abandoned lots into beautiful garden plots amidst the asphalt and concrete of urban neighborhoods. The gardens are refuges for urban wildlife and allow communities to grow their own food in neighborhoods where supermarkets under stock healthy fruits and vegetables.
* Eco-friendly Transportation - Freegans see automobiles and the petroleum economy as a social and ecological disaster and promote more sustainable methods of travel. Bicycling is healthy, nonpolluting, and requires no fuel cost, so volunteer groups called “bike collectives” teach people to repair abandoned and broken bikes. Hitchhikers and freight train hoppers continue a time-honored vagabond tradition of traveling with minimal means in a car-obsessed nation with inadequate and prohibitively expensive passenger rail lines. Driving cars and running trains with extra space is an inefficient use of energy resources. By filling these vehicles with extra bodies, hitchers and hoppers increase their environmental efficiency, instead of putting another petroleum burning engine on the road. Freegans who find cars unavoidable avoid petroleum dependence by converting their diesel engines to run on used grease from restaurant flyers, turning a waste product into an ecologically friendly fuel. For traveling short distances, freegans are happy to simply walk.
*Avoiding Disposables- Freegans believe that the goods we used to should be designed to last and preserved for longevity. Freegans use rags over paper towels, handkerchiefs over paper tissues, and carry mugs rather than use disposable cups. In the process we save money and conserve natural resources.
*Avoiding Overconsumption and Working Less- Freegans resist manipulative advertisements that tell us we can find happiness and self-worth on retail store shelves. By buying less "stuff" and taking care of vital needs without paying money, freegans are able to work less or not at all. This is motivated not by "laziness", but by a desire to devote their time to community service, activism, caring for family, appreciating nature, and enjoying life.
*Entertainment and Education- Freegans attend and share information about free events-- parties, educational forums, free schools, nature hikes, walking tours, workshops that teach practical skills, concerts, discussion group and other activities where people can learn and have a great time without spending a dime. Freegans can find events and activities on email lists, free calendars, and websites like http://www.freeevents.org/ .
* Food Not Bombs- Food Not Bombs groups in over 200 cities recover food that would otherwise go to waste and use it to prepare warm meals on the street to promote and ethic of sharing and feed hungry people, challenging a society that can always pay for war, but never seems able to ensure that all are fed.
2. Is there a freegan community in NYC?
There are many freegan communities in New York City-- some which embrace this term, and other that practice the same lifestyles and share many of the same perspectives, but don't use the term. Squatters and groups like that repair bikes and people who grow gardens in abandoned lots and people who forage for discarded goods and groups like Recycle This! that run centers to leave and collect goods that would otherwise go to waste. Our group, Freegan.info is an organization that seeks to build community and educate people about freegan practices and ideas. We hold 3-6 "trash tours" every month. These are urban foraging expeditions where we take groups to see firsthand and harvest the remarkable quantities of useable waste generated by retail shops. 1-2 times a month we hold "freegan feasts," dinner parties where people come together to prepare and eat foods recovered during our trash tours. Once a month we hold "Urban Foraging 101" discussion groups to introduce curious, new people to freegan ideas and practices and take them out on a trash tour afterwards. At least once a month we go "Trash Trailblazing", foraging expeditions into areas we haven't yet visited on our tours, and as we discover wasteful businesses that discard lots of useable goods, we note them to add to our online "Dumpster Directory" (http://freegan.info/?page=LocalDirectories), so that others can recover resources at these locations in the future. People can find our about our events at http://freegan.info/?page=Events or can send a blank email to freegannyc-events@lists.riseup.net to be added to our email list for events announcements.
3. Roughly, how many freegans do you think
4.
5. What inspired you to take on this lifestyle?
Animal rights psychologist Ken Shapiro once described animal rights activists as "caring sleuths", people who keep their eyes open to injustices around them that others might not notice, and this is a pretty good description of me. As I became more aware of the ways that my consumer choices were impacting others, I progressively make changes in my lifestyle, first by going vegetarian, then by going vegan, then by eating only organic foods.
Yet as I got more interested in organic growing methods, I became increasingly aware that "organic" does NOT mean "animal friendly." Organic farmers will shoot, trap, and poison mammals, birds, insects, and other animals as readily as non-organic farmers--they simply won't do it with petroleum-based pesticides. And of course, many organic farmers subsidize animal agriculture by using manure to fertilize their crops. Even agriculture practices not intended to harm animals cause massive numbers of deaths--machine threshers chop animals to bits, animals on land or in dens are crushed under agricultural machinery, small animals are shredded as soil is tilled--one study suggests that pasture raised beef production (cattle who eat grass rather than livestock feed) may actually cause LESS animal deaths than growing crops!
I came to realize that for an animal liberationist, an organic, vegan diet was a lot like buying meat at the supermarket -- being complicit in animal oppression, but letting someone else do the dirty work, so we don't have to think about it. I bought a few books about veganic gardening, a system that truly attempts animal-friendly agriculture, from the American Vegan Society, and briefly considered growing my own food, so that I could show a greater level of care for wildlife in every stage of the growing process than a commercial farmer would. Before I got started with this, however, I stumbled upon the enormous volume of waste generated daily by retailers, and realized that I could fully satisfy my need for food by consuming goods that would otherwise go to waste-- meaning that no my consumption would not require even the limited detrimental impact on wildlife and the environment that my small-scale farming would have had, and I could leave the land that I would have farmed to the wildlife.. Also, in the process, I would actually having a positive impact, by rescuing goods from the waste stream, rescuing goods from further contributing to the garbage crisis. On a day to day basis, that may not seem like a big deal, but over the course of years, by living this way, the amount of stuff I prevent from ever reaching a landfill is considerable. And I compound that impact when I encourage others to do the same
According to Mathis Wackernagel, Executive Director, Global Footprint Project, an organization that measures the ecological impact of our lifestyle choices "The food we eat shapes our [ecological] footprint the most. And while eating locally grown vegan food makes the smallest print among food-buyers, freegans even beat that."
6. What are some of your best finds?
7. Some of your worst?
From a freegan perspective, "best" and "worst" finds become inescapably mired in irony.
Yes, we can find all sorts of remarkable goods-- computers, stereos, clothing, televisions, enormous quantities of fresh food, furniture, books, magazines, newspapers, bicycles, appliances, office supplies, audio and video tapes and disks, etc.
But, really, the best possible find is nothing at all--finding that a store or other institution has not needlessly discarded useable goods.
While the experience of finding useable commodities can be fun, it's also sobering. Freegans are aware that in the United States, off-gassing from landfills is the second contributor to global warming. Freegans consider the relationship between garbage and environmental racism and classism, recognizing that while wealthy white communities are the most wasteful and overconsumptive, low income, predominantly black and brown communities are poised by incinerators that belch heavy metals and leachate-leaking landfills that contribute to asthma, leukemia, and other cancers.
It's also truly upsetting to thing of all of the suffering and ecological destruction that goes into producing consumer goods--and then to see them needlessly wasted. Personally, NOTHING upsets me more than seeing discarded meat. It infuriates me to think of the hellish, short lives these animals were forced to live-- only to end up in a landfill. As much as I oppose the murder of animals for food, this seems even MORE disrespectful to me-- to see that these animals have died for NOTHING. . Fish in particular are discarded in high volume, because the standard business model for many fish markets is to pick up hundreds of fish from the fish market at the beginning of the day, put them on ice, and dump every single on that doesn't sell by the end of the day. Meanwhile, one of the greatest ecological catastrophes is the depletion of ocean life by factory trawlers-- massive fishing ships that leave the oceans barren of life with nets that stretch for miles. We are leaving dead oceans and causing suffering and death to an incalculable number of individual animal lives so that markets can regularly overstock and discard the bodies of once- living beings.
Similarly, when I see massive quantities of fresh bananas or chocolate or beef, I think of the destruction of tropical rainforests for plantation and pastureland. And knowing that the entire industrial system that brings these tropical foods to our North American supermarkets is made possible by consumption of mass quantities of fossil fuels --powering the machinery used to clearcut the rainforests, petroleum-based pesticides sprayed on the crops, fuel for the vehicles that transport these products, of the coal-powered energy used in refrigeration, of the plastic packaging, etc-- I'm reminded of the devastation of Iraq in Bush's oil war; of the destruction of wildlife and ocean ecosystems from enormous oil spills; of rainforests poisoned by sloppy oil drilling extraction operations in countries like Ecuador by companies by Chevron-Texaco that have polluted groundwater left generations of indigenous children with birth defects and, left wildlife to horrific deaths trapped in oil pits; of the desperate fight the defend the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge from the ravenous greed of oil corporations and their complaint cronies in Congress; of the forced displacement of indigenous communities like the Dineh (Navajo) by companies like Peabody Coal and their stooges in the US government so the that Peabody can ravage sacred indigenous land to mine it for coal. Then there are the metals used in the chainsaws and bulldozers and trucks: aluminum harvested at great ecological cost from open-pit strip mines on former rainforests land, and steel mills that spew toxins into air and water.
Just about every consumer product we buy carries an ugly legacy of environmental damage, labor exploitation, and animal exploitation, and in a nation of massive waste-- where, for example, 40-50% of all food is needlessly discarded, a very high percentage of these destructive impacts are being generated not for the goods we use, but for the ones we DON'T use. The same study that documented that 40-50% of all food is wasted also found that we could cut the ecological impacts of food production by 25% if we eliminated this waste.
At the same time, it's hard not to look at this waste and think of all of the unmet need that it represents. Again, using the example of food, the USDA classifies 4.4 million people in the Unites States as hungry, while estimates place the annual global death toll from starvation and malnutrition-related illness at 45 million, with recent USDA figures estimating that 857 million people globally live under conditions of starvation. Considering that we in the US are wasting enough food annually to feed our entire populace, a country where most people eat far more than absolutely necessary, we could effectively end hunger-related death if the foods that we wasted in the United States were distributed appropriately.
Of course, this isn't a matter of getting food from the trash bins of stores and shipping it to Africa. Instead, it’s a matter of dismantling an economic model that ruthlessly exploits the third world to provide an overabundance of resources to the first world so that corporations can profit from selling commodities to affluent first world consumers. And of course, for these corporations, so long as they are making a profit and staying competitive, they care nothing of the enormous waste they are generating, despite the fact that many of the resources that they are robbing from the third world are vitally needed in their countries of origin.
Globally this problem is driven by neoliberal economic polices (more commonly known as "corporate globalization") imposed by the International Monetary Fund, a global financial that "aids" third world countries in paying their foreign debt by strong-arming them into imposing disastrous domestic policies. These policies have shifted third world agricultural economies away from a sustainable, self-reliant model of subsistence agriculture and local commerce to one where farmers work as wage slaves to global agribusiness concerns and are forced to grow cash crops for export to the first world.
According to Oxfam Canada, under IMF structural adjustment policies, "Land and agricultural subsidies [are] diverted away from small-scale farmers and offered to large-scale food producers and companies. Poor farmers, with little access to loans, land or technology, are unable to compete. Small-scale farmers, many of whom are women, are highly disadvantaged. People have little to no income to buy food, yet much of the food grown in the country ends up on tables somewhere overseas. For example, Brazil is the world’s fourth largest agricultural exporter, yet the number of food insecure people rose from 44 million to 46 million from 1999 to 2001 “.
This problem is exacerbated by "free trade" agreements like CAFTA and NAFTA, which eliminate agricultural import tariffs in third world nations, so that first world agribusiness, using pesticides, GMOs, and heavy machinery to produce in high volume at low cost, can flood third world markets with products priced dramatically below the product of small-scale local farmers, driving them out of business and forcing them to take jobs starvation wage jobs with corporate ag interests or move to urban areas to take similarly atrocious jobs in hellish sweatshops making goods for companies like Nike, Disney, Guess, and the Gap, who will sell them at premium prices so that their CEOs and celebrity endorsers can make hundreds of millions every year and the companies can reap billions in profit
We can resist this economic model on many fronts, and one of these is by taking business away from these companies by building communities that promote sustainable living strategies that don't provide profits to corporations. In the short term, this can mean using their own wastefulness against them by harvesting the goods they discard, and in the long term this means increasingly shifting towards a model where we provide for our needs through cooperative local efforts --fixing the goods we have, cooperative local gardening projects, wild foraging, etc. If we intend to liberate the third world from being the labor and resource pool that drives our first world excess, then we need to end our own dependence on the global economy. We also need to lobby, protest, educate, and take direct action (along the lines of groups like the Earth Liberation Front) in solidarity with people in the third world fighting to preserve traditional lifeways--like indigenous communities in countries like Ecuador, Nigeria, Nicaragua and Colombia resisting the destruction of their ancestral lands by logging and oil interests and mass movements of peasant farmers like the Zapatistas in Mexico who have fought economic policies that create poverty and cause cultural genocide.
8. What are the practical concerns about dumpster divingused needles, used condoms, rats, etc.?
People have fanciful imaginations about garbage but in reality what you'll find in the trash of a retail store is by and large the same items on sale on store shelves. That's not to say that everything a retailer discards is a useable commodity, but usually useable unsold products are bagged separately from other refuse. You might find one bag of nothing but bagels or fresh fruit, and separate bags containing fairly unremarkable and relatively inoffensive objects like empty bottles, coffee grounds, store circulars, etc. You can usually often guess what's in a bag before even opening it by simply looking at how it sits or by kicking it or patting it and many bags are clear, making it even easier. So you open the bags of usable stuff and ignore the others, or open them all, check what's inside and reclose it if contains nothing that you want.
Just about the most dangerous or unpleasant thing I've ever found in a bag is broken glass, but this is VERY rare and this sort of thing is almost always bagged separately from useable stuff. It’s a good idea to look in bags as you are reaching in them and to reach about gingerly. Flashlights are often unnecessary, but are sometimes helpful.
9. Have you ever about gotten sick from bad food?
People are often incredulous when I tell them that eating freegan food is perfectly safe to eat, so I’ll refer this one o the experts:
"I guess you could hurt yourself falling headfirst into an empty Dumpster. Strange as it sounds, most food that's thrown out by stores is still safe to eat if you clean it and cook it appropriately."
-Dr. Ruth Kava, American Council on Science and Health, asked if getting food from dumpsters is dangerous
(as quoted in the NY Daily News, 2/13/06)
"There's no reason to assume that simply because a store has discarded food that it is unsafe to eat. Many stores bag all discarded items and don't commingle food and nonfood items, so contamination from non-food sources may not be a concern. A bag filled with bread or fruit may be no more dangerous than the loaf of bread on our countertop or the fruit bowl at the center of our table. In cold temperatures, items bagged outside a store may be no worse off than those on its shelves. Meat, daily, fish, and eggs carry serious risks whether purchased in a store or recovered outside of it. These items require special care in all weather and should be properly handled and cooked thoroughly. In truth,
a vegan harvesting plant-based items that have been discarded by stores is probably safer than a shopper who buys animal products, though a freegan who harvests meat items in cold weather and handles and cooks them appropriately may be no worse off than a meat buyer."
-Dr. Michael Greger, nutrition lecturer, Cornell University, expert in food-borne illness (specializing in Mad Cow Disease), invited as expert witness in Oprah Winfrey vs. Texas Cattlemen lawsuit
(via correspondence, 8/17/04)
At the core of this question is an incorrect assumption-- that freegan food must be of inferior quality to store-purchased commodities, and therefore someone consuming them must be taking greater risks with their health. Within the context of our culture this assumption seems utterly commonsensical, and the suggestion that it is rooted in faulty assumptions sounds absurd.
In reality, we've been trained by the corporations who manipulate our desires, expectations, and perceptions from cradle to grave to believe that anything worth having must have a price tag attached to it. Programming us with this message ensures that the vast majority of our productive activity will be in service to generating income that we will then hand over to them in exchange for the trinkets and snake oil that they have assured us will provide health, happiness, self-esteem, security, and social acceptance. Thus, we find it inconceivable that anything worth having can be acquired without paying for it.
We assume that if stores are throwing food away, it must be of inferior quality to what they are selling, because if this were not the case, because the alternative challenges the core assumption around which we have structured our lives. If the same goods that we purchase can be acquired free of charge, then why are we wasting day after day in the endless drudgery of paid work? For that matter, if these goods are available in such abundance and treated as so utterly without value as to discard, why are we paying so much for them?
Rummaging through retail garbage and finding enormous quantities of high end items in essentially identical conditions to those carrying hefty price tags inside the store, one quickly realizes that we've been had. We’ve been led to believe that these premium price items are of some great value and great prizes to acquire to be worth of such high cost. We may even come to believe that these items are available in short supply and that the retailer selling them has gone to great expense to acquire them. Yet seeing them discarded as worthless, it becomes immediately apparent that retail pricing reflects not the actual acquisition or production cost of an item (retailers would be less quick to discard the $25 fruit platter if their per-unit expense was anything comparable), nor a reflection of its scarcity (how can these products be scarce if they are available in such enormous supply as to regularly discard massive quantities of them), or even a reflection of its actual value to the consumer (if intrinsic consumer value were the consideration, how could goods of equal value to those being sold be discarded as worthless?), but simply a calculated estimate of the greatest amount target market consumers can be bilked for without losing sales to competitor brands.
We are slaving away to make enough money to acquire products from corporations trying to ensure that they can get as much money out of us as we can possibly provide, while constantly being bombarded with advertising messages telling us our happiness and worth depends on acquiring even more stuff. Essentially, our entire working lives, the entire model that defines our consumption is based around a massive scam. We are running on a treadmill chasing a carrot suspended on wires just out of reach, but no matter how fast we run, no matter how hard we push ourselves, we never claim the prize. We live in a culture of enormous affluence, yet so many people with "good jobs" are drowning in debt-- credit cards, mortgage debt, student loans, and car loans. We pay enormously inflated prices on rent, while billionaire landlords sit on vacant properties, waiting for gentrification to turn straw into gold. And no matter what hurdle we clear, we find that on the other side are yet another come-on, yet another promise that we will achieve happiness when we work MORE, earn MORE, buy MORE, and spend MORE on higher-priced goods. Once we can feed our families, we need to start thinking about buying gourmet foods. Once we can clothe our families (and in many cases BEFORE), we need to strive for the ability to buy designer-label items. If we can afford to pay rent, we need to start thinking about a bigger apartment in a nicer neighborhood, or perhaps a condo or a house in the suburbs. Meanwhile, we are encouraged to buy disposable goods and to replace rather than repair.
According to financial analyst Susan C. Walker “There's an axiom known by every economist under the sun: because consumers make up two-thirds of the economy, they must keep spending to keep the economy healthy. It's easy to see that we've been acting on cue for the economy, to the point that we've kept spending well beyond our means.”
Along the way some of us go through midlife crises when we recognizes that we’ve wasted decades chasing that carrot, and we haven’t gotten any closer; we’re still just as hungry as when we were stuck on that treadmill as children and told to get the best grades in school so we could get in the best college, so we could get in the best grad school, so we could could get the best job so we could buy the best stuff, so that---what?
Our entire economic model is predicated on keeping us dissatisfied, always wanting more. Does the heroin addict ever decide she has had enough cocaine? Of course not. Over time, satisfaction can only be found in more frequent and larger hits, and the motivation becomes less about the satisfaction of using the drug and more about the fear of going through withdrawal, of not being able to satisfy the addiction.
William Burroughs recognized this when he commented, “The junk merchant does not sell his product to the consumer, he sells the consumer to the product. He does not improve and simplify his merchandise, he degrades and simplifies the client.”
We live in a society where we’re profoundly alienated from the people living around us, from the ecosystems we exist within (everyone knows how to buy oranges in New York in December, but how many people know how to find indigenous edible berries in July?), where every important decision that affects our lives, the lives of others, and the future of our world is made by corporations satisfying the mandate of an economic model that validates only one goal or by politicians who sold their souls to corporate interests by necessity in the process of being elected, a society where we feel so powerless that social engagement is viewed as trite and passé and naïve yet people fail to question corporate advertisements that tell us to “Think Different” by buying their junk,, where the conventional forms of protest have been rendered so ineffective that we treat the acquisition of crumbslike more cage space for factory farmed hensas great victories, where the symbols of resistanceraised fists, images of Gandhi and King, graffiti-- have been commodified by “agit-prop marketing”, where killer corporations treat social and ecological concerns as just another desire to manipulate by veiling themselves in earthtones and crunchy-granola brandnames and superficial talk of “green business practices” and “corporate social responsibility”, disguising the genocide and ecocide and exploitation they are truly responsible for and furthering people’s sense of alienation from the notion of a genuine and powerful and dangerous and truly liberating resistance to the point where shameless, conspicuous consumption and overt apathy are now colored with “irony” and a sense of defiance against “politically correct fascism.”
We live in a society where were profoundly alienated from the people living around us, from the ecosystems we exist within (everyone knows how to buy oranges in New York in December, but how many people know how to find indigenous edible berries in July?), where every important decision that affects our lives, the lives of others, and the future of our world is made by corporations satisfying the mandate of an economic model that validates only one goal or by politicians who sold their souls to corporate interests by necessity in the process of being elected, a society where we feel so powerless that social engagement is viewed as trite and passé and naïve, yet people fail to question corporate advertisements that tell us to Think Different by buying their junk, where the symbols of resistanceraised fists, images of Gandhi and King, graffiti-- have been commodified by agit-prop marketing, where killer corporations treat social and ecological concerns as just another desire to manipulate by veiling themselves in earthtones and crunchy-granola brandnames and superficial talk of green business practices and corporate social responsibility, disguising the genocide and ecocide and exploitation they are truly responsible for and furthering peoples sense of alienation from the notion of a genuine and powerful and dangerous and truly liberating resistance to the point where shameless, conspicuous consumption and overt apathy are now colored with irony and a sense of defiance against politically correct fascism.
Reform efforts ask for too little and are too often coopted to the point where they glean nothing at all or treat the acquisition of crumbslike more cage space for factory farmed hensas great victories. Violence and other forms of militant resistance are too easily and too quickly crushed in a culture where the powerful have a near monopoly on force, a massive infrastructure for crushing dissent, and the masses are too convinced of their own powerlessness and too removed from the idea that they have a vital stake in rebellion to riseup. While there are since advocates of "green consumerism" and even some businesses with sincere motives, socially responsible business is at best a failed proposition in it's aspiration to commingle two diametrically opposed forces--amoral capitalism and an interest in ethical conduct-- and at worst an outright sham. Yes, some good can be achieved by every one of these strategies, and collectively, they are owed some due for things not being ever worse than they already are. But fundamentally, none of them pose a fundamental challenge to the status quo. They're like trying to clean up a massive oil spill -admirable, vitally important, yet hopeless in mitigating any significant measure of the damage being inflicted and utterly useless in addressing the root causes that created the disaster in the first place.
Freegans resist on what may be the only level that still has a capacity to matter within a system where our every genuine intention and desire is manipulated, corrupted, co-oped, blunted and obscured, where we wear cynicism as a suit of armor in a world where nothing seems genuine and trust feels dangerous, a system that strips us of hope, leaves us isolated, lonely, frightened, convinces us that mediocrity is "realistic" and imagination is "childish", where we believe dissatisfaction is the inevitable nature of the human condition, where alienation from our ecosystems, from each other, from our labor, and from our own fate is "normal," where self-interest is best served through competition, or, for that matter, where we accept the notion of self-interest as a discreet concept from collective community interest. Freegans challenge this system by giving ourselves the things we've been deprived of--joy and possibility, a sense of truly belonging rather than just fitting in, an unironic recognition of love as a vital component of functioning community and as as a transformative revolutionary force, the idea that we can create the lives we desire rather than just settling for what's "pragmatic" and "available," freegans dare to insist that WE DON'T NEED TO LIVE LIKE THIS! We CAN survive and thrive without destroying the planet and exploiting others. We CAN build communities where we trust the intentions of others and recognize that we can all live better when we cooperate to ensure that the needs and desires of all are met. We CAN be the masters of our own lives, finding meaning and beauty and adventure and purpose in every day, in every waking hour we spend on this earth, instead of accepting as a "fact of life" that we must complete endless joyless tasks that no higher purpose in the miserable daily chore of employment. . And that we CAN challenge this decaying global system that is ravaging our world in its the course of its own death throes by removing its two vital necessities --workers and consumers. And that we CAN believe ANOTHER WORLD IS POSSIBLE and we have the power to build it today, first within our own communities, and second, in conjunction with communities everywhere, throughout the world
10. Do you eat free meat or dairy and eggs?
I don't, but I have no ethical objection to those who choose to recover discarded animal products.. I think the meat and dairy industries are hideously evil, but our complicity with them is primarily at the cash register, not on the dinner table. In a capitalist economy, McDonalds' doesn’t care if we use their hamburgers for frisbees, so long as we BUY them.
According to Peter Singer, author of Animal Liberation, "The best argument against vegetarianism comes from dumpster divers. If you get your meat out of a supermarket dumpster, when it was going to be thrown out anyway, go ahead and eat it, you're not supporting the abuse of animals by paying for meat."
I’ve heard many vegans argue that consuming animals’ bodies is disrespectful, and I’m baffled by what measure of respect is afforded to animals by letting their discarded corpses end up in landfills and incinerators. Personally, when I die, I want my corpse dumped in the woods so that it can feed other animals Living beings have always consumed dead beings, keeping matter and energy a constant part of the life cycle. I find the ways that humans deal with our own bodiesembalming, incineration, burial in natural resource intensive boxesmorbid and ecologically irresponsible. We should stop projecting our bizarre concepts about immortal souls and resurrection onto our victims. It’s perfectly fine if we don’t want to consume animal productsthey’re terrible for our health after allbut instead of trying to force our naturally carnivorous cats to be vegan or buying canned decayed flesh from Purina for them, wouldn’t it be better to recover good quality flesh for them from a supermarket dumpster?
That said, most freegans recognize an important distinction between “free” and “recovered” good. Within the vegan community, there is a wildly inaccurate stereotype of freegans as being people who are otherwise vegan but will eat any nonvegan foods given to them by others. Freegans recognize that if someone buys a nonvegan food and offers it to another, the manufacturers are still turning a profit, and may encourage the purchaser to buy more, providing additional support for the exploitative practices we abhor. Also allowing purchasers of nonvegan goods reinforces the option that purchasing these goods is a morally acceptable option, which most freegans would dispute.
On the other hand, freegans recognize that ALL commodities produced under capitalism are produced using exploitative practices, not just the non-vegan ones, so freegans seek to avoid purchasing or encouraging others to purchase ANY goods. This is obviously difficult to live in absolute terms, so freeganism, lacks the “all or nothing” absolutism of veganism, focusing less on personal purity and far more on making alternatives widely available and practical, so that large numbers can practice ethical living strategies, not just a small number of lifestyle martyrs.
11. Is it true that freegans support the idea of working less?
In a society where we are told that employment is a necessity of survival, where bosses make all significant decisions in the workplace about a worker's labor and the practices of the corporation and even the bosses their actions are constrained by the demands of remaining competititve, work has become a form of slavery.
A very small number of us are able to work in accordance with our ethical principles and can also manage our work to fit our lives rather than managing our lives to fulfill our work, but only a very privileged few have these luxuries. And even in these cases, we are alienated from the positive impacts of our labors by the recognition that in being paid for our work we are serving an ulterior motive beyond the work itself and are ultimately taking something away from someone else/
For most of us, work occupies the realm of necessary evils. We know that the companies we work for don’t operate in accordance with our personal ethics and we often find our work unpleasant, boring, draining, stressful and unrewarding, but we were trained in school that letting others make decisions about how we use our time, that having to spend the bulk of our productive hours on tasks that fail to inspire us, that living in fear of disapproval by the authority figures that govern our work is what life is all about.
Freegans believe that by liberating ourselves from participation in the economy that requires us to possess capital, we can also liberate ourselves from the need to work to acquire capital. We can instead devote our time to the things that truly matter to us and that we truly enjoy-- spending time with our families and friends, working within community projects that fulfill our needs outside of capitalism (like developing community centers and free stores in squatted buildings and growing gardens in abandoned lots, activism against the exploitation of the earth and human and nonhuman animals, providing for our needs and the needs of our community by foraging for wasted goods and for wild-growing foods, spending time appreciating fauna and flora in urban parks (or, better yet, getting away from the city altogether), attending all manner of free concerts and lectures and parties listed in publications like the New York Free Events Calendar (http://freeevents.org), and remembering that we only have one chance to live every day of our lives and that we should make the very most out of the opportunity that
every day presents if we stop being obedient workers and let our imaginations run wild.
Freegans believe in prefigurature politics --the notion that our resistance to the status quo takes the form of realizing NOW the kind of world we wish to live in. We don't see liberating the days of our lives simply as a temporary act of resistance or a "freeloader" strategy on the margins of society, but rather as a model of how EVERYONE can live. We are creating a society where we collaborate voluntarily to serve the needs of our community, where we refuse to compartmentalize labor to serve our material needs from our ethical principles, and our need for adventure and enjoyment, where we recognize that our material needs are limited, but our needs for love, joy, community, and a sense of connection to all life are great, where we recognize that collectively we can locally provide for everything we want and need without endless hours of joyless toil.