[SusDet Announce] Freegans! Re: from New York Times

[Jacob Stevens Corvidae]

I loved this article.  And since I used to identify as freegan myself 
(though no one had heard of the term), let me offer my intro to it:

Specifically, I first heard the term applied to vegans who would eat 
non-vegan food if it was otherwise going to be thrown out. Most often, 
this was dumpster-dived food, like canned soups or things like that. 
It's not like people were eating almost rotten meat or anything. (though 
I have a friend who still chides me for my iron stomache and having an 
attitude about left-overs that she summarizes as "ooh, this is almost 
bad, better eat it quick".)

Anyway, I personally used the term freegan to fit my own brand of 
veganism, which was that I would rather eat dairy or meat if it were to 
be thrown out -- but also that I wouldn't refuse food that was offered 
to me. I felt the cultural exchange of hospitality was really important 
and so if someone served food to me, I would eat it. And so for me, 
freegan fit as a description for this too.

My diet is not at the top of my activism lists these days, and so while 
I mostly eat vegetarian and most of that is vegan, I hold no claim to 
any such labels as an identity. Still, I hold a fondness for the term 
'freegan' -- not because I think it's such an important identity for 
people to adapt, but because I enjoy new words (neologisms) that define 
new emerging cultural complexities that otherwise disappear in our 
language.

Jacob

Ursa Minor wrote:

>Not Buying It
>
>By STEVEN KURUTZ
>Published: June 21, 2007
>
>ON a Friday evening last month, the day after New York University’s 
>class of 2007 graduated, about 15 men and women assembled in front of 
>Third Avenue North, an N.Y.U. dormitory on Third Avenue and 12th Street. 
>They had come to take advantage of the university’s end-of-the-year 
>move-out, when students’ discarded items are loaded into big green trash 
>bins by the curb.
>
>New York has several colleges and universities, of course, but according 
>to Janet Kalish, a Queens resident who was there that night, N.Y.U.’s 
>affluent student body makes for unusually profitable Dumpster diving. So 
>perhaps it wasn’t surprising that the gathering at the Third Avenue 
>North trash bin quickly took on a giddy shopping-spree air, as members 
>of the group came up with one first-class find after another.
>
>Ben Ibershoff, a dapper man in his 20s wearing two bowler hats, dug deep 
>and unearthed a Sharp television. Autumn Brewster, 29, found a painting 
>of a Mediterranean harbor, which she studied and handed down to another 
>member of the crowd.
>
>Darcie Elia, a 17-year-old high school student with a half-shaved head, 
>was clearly pleased with a modest haul of what she called “random 
>housing stuff” — a desk lamp, a dish rack, Swiffer dusters — which she 
>spread on the sidewalk, drawing quizzical stares from passers-by.
>
>Ms. Elia was not alone in appreciating the little things. “The small 
>thrills are when you see the contents of someone’s desk and find a book 
>of stamps,” said Ms. Kalish, 44, as she stood knee deep in the trash bin 
>examining a plastic toiletries holder.
>
>A few of those present had stumbled onto the scene by chance (including 
>a janitor from a nearby homeless center, who made off with a working 
>iPod and a tube of body cream), but most were there by design, in 
>response to a posting on the Web site freegan.info.
>
>The site, which provides information and listings for the small but 
>growing subculture of anticonsumerists who call themselves freegans — 
>the term derives from vegans, the vegetarians who forsake all animal 
>products, as many freegans also do — is the closest thing their movement 
>has to an official voice. And for those like Ms. Elia and Ms. Kalish, it 
>serves as a guide to negotiating life, and making a home, in a world 
>they see as hostile to their values.
>
>Freegans are scavengers of the developed world, living off consumer 
>waste in an effort to minimize their support of corporations and their 
>impact on the planet, and to distance themselves from what they see as 
>out-of-control consumerism. They forage through supermarket trash and 
>eat the slightly bruised produce or just-expired canned goods that are 
>routinely thrown out, and negotiate gifts of surplus food from 
>sympathetic stores and restaurants.
>
>They dress in castoff clothes and furnish their homes with items found 
>on the street; at freecycle.org, where users post unwanted items; and at 
>so-called freemeets, flea markets where no money is exchanged. Some 
>claim to hold themselves to rigorous standards. “If a person chooses to 
>live an ethical lifestyle it’s not enough to be vegan, they need to 
>absent themselves from capitalism,” said Adam Weissman, 29, who started 
>freegan.info four years ago and is the movement’s de facto spokesman.
>
>Freeganism dates to the mid-’90s, and grew out of the antiglobalization 
>and environmental movements, as well as groups like Food Not Bombs, a 
>network of small organizations that serve free vegetarian and vegan food 
>to the hungry, much of it salvaged from food market trash. It also has 
>echoes of groups like the Diggers, an anarchist street theater troupe 
>based in Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco in the 1960’s, which gave away 
>food and social services.
>
>According to Bob Torres, a sociology professor at St. Lawrence 
>University in Canton, N.Y., who is writing a book about the animal 
>rights movement — which shares many ideological positions with 
>freeganism — the freegan movement has become much more visible and 
>increasingly popular over the past year, in part as a result of growing 
>frustrations with mainstream environmentalism.
>
>Environmentalism, Mr. Torres said, “is becoming this issue of, consume 
>the right set of green goods and you’re green,” regardless of how much 
>in the way of natural resources those goods require to manufacture and 
>distribute.
>
>“If you ask the average person what can you do to reduce global warming, 
>they’d say buy a Prius,” he added.
>
>There are freegans all over the world, in countries as far afield as 
>Sweden, Brazil, South Korea, Estonia and England (where much has been 
>made of what The Sun recently called the “wacky new food craze” of 
>trash-bin eating), and across the United States as well .
>
>In Southern California, for example, “you can find just about anything 
>in the trash, and on a consistent basis, too,” said Marko Manriquez, 28, 
>who has just graduated from the University of California at San Diego 
>with a bachelor’s degree in media studies and is the creator of “Freegan 
>Kitchen,” a video blog that shows gourmet meals being made from 
>trash-bin ingredients. “This is how I got my futon, chair, table, 
>shelves. And I’m not talking about beat-up stuff. I mean it’s not Design 
>Within Reach, but it’s nice.”
>
>But New York City in particular — the financial capital of the world’s 
>richest country — has emerged as a hub of freegan activity, thanks 
>largely to Mr. Weissman’s zeal for the cause and the considerable free 
>time he has to devote to it. (He doesn’t work and lives at home in 
>Teaneck, N.J., with his father and elderly grandparents.)
>
>Freegan.info sponsors organize Trash Tours that typically attract a 
>dozen or more people, as well as feasts at which groups of about 20 
>people gather in apartments around the city to share food and talk 
>politics.
>
>In the last year or so, Mr. Weissman said, the site has increased the 
>number and variety of its events, which have begun attracting many more 
>first-time participants. Many of those who have taken part in one new 
>program, called Wild Foraging Walks — workshops that teach people to 
>identify edible plants in the wilderness — have been newcomers, he said.
>
>The success of the movement in New York may also be due to the quantity 
>and quality of New York trash. As of 2005, individuals, businesses and 
>institutions in the United States produced more than 245 million tons of 
>municipal solid waste, according to the E.P.A. That means about 4.5 
>pounds per person per day. The comparable figure for New York City, 
>meanwhile, is about 6.1 pounds, according to statistics from the city’s 
>Sanitation Department.
>
>“We have a lot of wealthy people, and rich people throw out more trash 
>than poor people do,” said Elizabeth Royte, whose book “Garbage Land” 
>(Little, Brown, 2005) traced the route her trash takes through the city. 
>“Rich people are also more likely to throw things out based on style 
>obsolescence — like changing the towels when you’re tired of the color.”
>
>At the N.Y.U. Dorm Dive, as the event was billed, the consensus was that 
>this year’s spoils weren’t as impressive as those in years past. Still, 
>almost anything needed to decorate and run a household — a TV cart, a 
>pillow, a file cabinet, a half-finished bottle of Jägermeister — was 
>there for the taking, even if those who took them were risking health, 
>safety and a $100 fine from the Sanitation Department.
>
>Ms. Brewster and her mother, who had come from New Jersey, loaded two 
>area rugs into their cart. Her mother, who declined to give her name, 
>seemed to be on a search for laundry detergent, and was overjoyed to 
>discover a couple of half-empty bottles of Trader Joe’s organic brand. 
>(Free and organic is a double bonus). Nearby, a woman munched on a found 
>bag of Nature’s Promise veggie fries.
>
>As people stuffed their backpacks, Ms. Kalish, who organized the event 
>(Mr. Weissman arrived later), demonstrated the cooperative spirit of 
>freeganism, asking the divers to pass items down to people on the 
>sidewalk and announcing her finds for anyone in need of, say, a Hoover 
>Shop-Vac.
>
>“Sometimes people will swoop in and grab something, especially when you 
>see a half-used bottle of Tide detergent,” she said. “Who wouldn’t want 
>it? But most people realize there’s plenty to go around.” She rooted 
>around in the trash bin and found several half-eaten jars of peanut 
>butter. “It’s a never-ending supply,” she said.
>
>Many freegans are predictably young and far to the left politically, 
>like Ms. Elia, the 17-year-old, who lives with her father in Manhattan. 
>She said she became a freegan both for environmental reasons and because 
>“I’m not down with capitalism.”
>
>There are also older freegans, like Ms. Kalish, who hold jobs and appear 
>in some ways to lead middle-class lives. A high school Spanish teacher, 
>Ms. Kalish owns a car and a two-family house in Queens, renting half of 
>it as a “capitalist landlord,” she joked. Still, like most freegans, she 
>seems attuned to the ecological effects of her actions. In her house, 
>for example, she has laid down a mosaic of freegan carpet parcels 
>instead of replacing her aging wooden floor because, she said, “I’d have 
>to take trees from the forest.”
>
>Not buying any new manufactured products while living in the United 
>States is, of course, basically impossible, as is avoiding everything 
>that requires natural resources to create, distribute or operate. Don’t 
>freegans use gas or electricity to cook, for example, or commercial 
>products to brush their teeth?
>
>“Once in a while I may buy a box of baking soda for toothpaste,” Mr. 
>Weissman said. “And, sure, getting that to market has negative impacts, 
>like everything.” But, he said, parsing the point, a box of baking soda 
>is more ecologically friendly than a tube of toothpaste, because its 
>cardboard container is biodegradable.
>
>These contradictions and others have led some people to suggest that 
>freegans are hypocritical, making use of the capitalist system even as 
>they rail against it. And even Mr. Weissman, who is often doctrinaire 
>about the movement, acknowledges when pushed that absolute freeganism is 
>an impossible dream.
>
>Mr. Torres said: “I think there’s a conscious recognition among freegans 
>that you can never live perfectly.” He added that generally freegans 
>“try to reduce the impact.”
>
>It’s not that freeganism doesn’t require serious commitment. For 
>freegans, who believe that the production and transport of every product 
>contributes to economic and social injustice, usually in multiple ways, 
>any interaction with the marketplace is fraught. And for some freegans 
>in particular — for instance, Madeline Nelson, who until recently was 
>living an upper-middle-class Manhattan life with all the attendant 
>conveniences and focus on luxury goods — choosing this way of life 
>involves a considerable, even radical, transformation.
>
>Ms. Nelson, who is 51, spent her 20s working in restaurants and living 
>in communal houses, but by 2003 she was earning a six-figure salary as a 
>communications director for Barnes & Noble. That year, while 
>demonstrating against the Iraq war, she began to feel hypocritical, she 
>said, explaining: “I thought, isn’t this safe? Here I am in my corporate 
>job, going to protests every once in a while. And part of my job was to 
>motivate the sales force to sell more stuff.”
>
>After a year of progressively scaling back — no more shopping at Eileen 
>Fisher, no more commuting by means other than a bike — Ms. Nelson, who 
>had a two-bedroom apartment with a mortgage in Greenwich Village, quit 
>her job in 2005 to devote herself full-time to political activism and 
>freeganism.
>
>She sold her apartment, put some money into savings, and bought a 
>one-bedroom in Flatbush, Brooklyn, that she owns outright.
>
>“My whole point is not to be paying into corporate America, and I hated 
>paying a big loan to a bank,” she said while fixing lunch in her kitchen 
>one recent afternoon. The meal — potato and watercress soup and crackers 
>and cheese — had been made entirely from refuse left outside various 
>grocery stores in Manhattan and Brooklyn.
>
>The bright and airy prewar apartment Ms. Nelson shares with two cats 
>doesn’t look like the home of someone who spends her evenings rooting 
>through the garbage. But after some time in the apartment, a visitor 
>begins to see the signs of Ms. Nelson’s anticonsumerist way of life.
>
>An old lampshade in the living room has been trimmed with fabric to 
>cover its fraying parts, leaving a one-inch gap where the material ran 
>out. The ficus tree near the window came not from a florist, Ms. Nelson 
>said, but from the trash, as did the CD rack. A 1920s loveseat belonged 
>to her grandmother, and an 18th-century, Louis XVI-style armoire in the 
>bedroom is a vestige of her corporate life.
>
>The kitchen cabinets and refrigerator are stuffed with provisions — 
>cornmeal, Pirouline cookies, vegetarian cage-free eggs — appropriate for 
>a passionate cook who entertains often. All were free.
>
>She longs for a springform pan in which to make cheesecakes, but is 
>waiting for one to come up on freecycle.org. There are no new titles on 
>the bookshelves; she hasn’t bought a new book in six months. “Books were 
>my impulse buy,” said Ms. Nelson, whose short brown hair and glasses 
>frame a youthful face. Now she logs onto bookcrossing.com, where readers 
>share used books, or goes to the public library.
>
>But isn’t she depriving herself unnecessarily? And what’s so bad about 
>buying books, anyway? “I do have some mixed feelings,” Ms. Nelson said. 
>“It’s always hard to give up class privilege. But freegans would argue 
>that the capitalist system is not sustainable. You’re exploiting 
>resources.” She added, “Most people work 40-plus hours a week at jobs 
>they don’t like to buy things they don’t need.”
>
>Since becoming a freegan, Ms. Nelson has spent her time posting calendar 
>items and other information online and doing paralegal work on behalf of 
>bicyclists arrested at Critical Mass anticar rallies. “I’m not sitting 
>in the house eating bonbons,” she said. “I’m working. I’m just not 
>working for money.”
>
>She is also spending a lot of time making rounds for food and supplies 
>at night, and has come to know the cycles of the city’s trash. She has 
>learned that fruit tends to get thrown out more often in the summer (she 
>freezes it and makes sorbet), and that businesses are a source for 
>envelopes. A reliable spot to get bread is Le Pain Quotidien, a chain of 
>bakery-restaurants that tosses out six or seven loaves a night. But Ms. 
>Nelson doesn’t stockpile. “The sad fact is you don’t need to,” she said. 
>“More trash will be there tomorrow.”
>
>By and large, she said, her friends have been understanding, if not 
>exactly enthusiastic about adopting freeganism for themselves. “When she 
>told me she was doing this I wasn’t really surprised — Madeline is a 
>free spirit,” said Eileen Dolan, a librarian at a Manhattan law firm who 
>has known Ms. Nelson since their college days at Stony Brook. But while 
>Ms. Dolan agrees that society is wasteful, she said that going freegan 
>is not something she would ever do. “It’s a huge time commitment,” she 
>said.
>
>ONE evening a week after the Dorm Dive, a group of about 20 freegans 
>gathered in a sparely furnished, harshly lit basement apartment in 
>Bushwick, Brooklyn, to hold a feast. It was an egalitarian affair with 
>no one officially in charge, but Mr. Weissman projected authority, his 
>blue custodian-style work pants and fuzzy black beard giving him the air 
>of a Latin American revolutionary as he wandered around, trailed by a 
>Korean television crew.
>
>Ms. Kalish stood over the sink, slicing vegetables for a stir-fry with a 
>knife she had found in a trash bin at N.Y.U. A pot of potatoes simmered 
>on the stove. These, like much of the rest of the meal, had been 
>gathered two nights earlier, when Mr. Weissman, Ms. Kalish and others 
>had met in front of a Food Emporium in Manhattan and rummaged through 
>the store’s clear garbage bags.
>
>The haul had been astonishing in its variety: sealed bags of organic 
>vegetable medley, bagged salad, heirloom tomatoes, key limes, three 
>packaged strawberries-and-chocolate-dip kits, carrots, asparagus, 
>grapes, a carton of organic soy milk (expiration date: July 9), 
>grapefruit, mushrooms and, for those willing to partake, vacuum-packed 
>herb turkey breast. (Some freegans who avoid meat will nevertheless eat 
>it rather than see it go to waste.)
>
>As operatic music played on a radio, people mingled and pitched in. One 
>woman diced onions, rescuing pieces that fell on floor. Another, who 
>goes by the name Petal, emptied bags of salad into a pan. As rigorous 
>and radical as the freegan world view can be, there is also something 
>quaint about the movement, at least the version that Mr. Weissman 
>promotes, with its embrace of hippie-ish communal activities and its 
>household get-togethers that rely for diversion on conversation rather 
>electronic entertainment.
>
>Making things last is part of the ethos. Christian Gutierrez, a 
>33-year-old former model and investment banker, sat at the small kitchen 
>table, chatting. Mr. Gutierrez, who quit his banking job at Matthews 
>Morris & Company in 2004 to pursue filmmaking, became a freegan last 
>year, and opened a free workshop on West 36th Street in Manhattan to 
>teach bicycle repair. He plans to add lessons in fixing home computers 
>in the near future.
>
>Mr. Gutierrez’s lifestyle, like Ms. Nelson’s, became gradually more 
>constricted in the absence of a steady income. He lived in a Midtown 
>loft until last year, when, he said, he got into a legal battle with his 
>landlord over a rent increase — a relationship “ruined by greed,” he 
>said. After that, he lived in his van for a while, then found an illegal 
>squat in SoHo, which he shares with two others. Mr. Gutierrez had a 
>middle-class upbringing in Dallas, and he said he initially found 
>freeganism off-putting. But now he is steadfastly devoted to the way of 
>life.
>
>As people began to load plates of food, he leaned in and offered a few 
>words of wisdom: “Opening that first bag of trash,” he said, “is the 
>biggest step.”
>  
>

-- 
  Jacob Stevens Corvidae
  Green Programs Manager
  jacob at warmtraining.org

  WARM Training Center
  Promoting Affordable, Sustainable Communities Since 1981
  www.warmtraining.org

  4835 Michigan Ave.
  Detroit, MI 48210
  313.894.1030 x.119