[SusDet Announce] from New York Times

[Ursa Minor]

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.”
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