| Freegans consume waste food to protest consumer waste. |
IT'S COLD AND DARK. A light drizzle adds to the gloom of the asphalt parking lot in downtown Melbourne where I stand beside a dumpster bin. Cars rumble by, windshield wipers slapping, as shoppers swoop out of the grocery store grasping plastic bags. Muffled sounds emanate from inside the bin. A hoot of joy precedes the emergence of an outstretched arm clasping an unidentifiable object.
"What is it?" I ask.
"It's a chocolate bilby!" my whiskery friend proclaims. "A bilby in entirely one piece!" brags Jim as he proudly peels back the foil and takes a large bite.
Jim is a "freegan." He has enough money to buy food but chooses to eat out of dumpster bins to protest against wasteful consumption. Despite how distasteful this practice might seem to most people, my friend is not alone. Reports of freegan activities span the Western world. Aside from disadvantaged people who cannot afford to buy adequate food, there is an international stirring of people who glean edible food that would normally be thrown away. Political and environmental concerns motivate these individuals.
Freegans include "dumpster divers," such as my friend Jim who collects food from supermarket dumpster bins. But freegans may also be members of Food Not Bombs, an international group that encourages members to collect surplus food before it hits the bins and then give it to street people. The very existence of these groups makes plain the staggering amount of good food that is thrown away. In turn, they emphasize society's need to rethink its ethics around eating.
The typical Western food cycle flows from field to factory to supermarket to consumer. Along the way, a lot of food is discarded. In Wasteful Consumption in Australia, The Australia Institute, an independent public policy research centre, indicates that Australians threw away food worth almost four billion US dollars in 2004. Meanwhile, a report by Kantor, Lipton and Oliveira published in Food Review in 1997, stated that retailers in the United States generated 5.4 billion pounds of food waste in 1995.
According to freegans, much of the food that supermarkets discard is still edible, having been removed from shelves due to cosmetic blemishes, the finishing of product lines or due to it having reached its expiry date. Expiry dates serve as an official guide to how long foods can be stored. Freegans prefer to judge for themselves.
Gleaning from Gluttony is a 2005 report (by this author) about youth subculture and ethical eating. A respondent in the study stated, "When it comes to food, anything you can think of that the supermarket stocks, you can get it in the bin. From organic macadamia nuts to apples to laundry detergent to fertilizer to jars of olives to feta cheese." This colourful quote indicates that contrary to popular belief, dumpsters offer a wide menu selection. Also surprising was the finding that only one of the 30 respondents interviewed in the study had ever taken ill from eating gleaned food.
Not all waste food reaches the bin. Good Samaritan Laws protect from liability donors who distribute food in good faith. In Canada, several provinces have Good Samaritan Laws. Thus, charities in Canada, along with those in Australia and the United States can collect food from fields, factories and commercial centres, and distribute it to the disadvantaged. For example, in 2004, One Umbrella, an Australian organization, prepared 183,000 free meals made from rescued food.
Whereas Food Not Bombs gathers up food before it hits the garbage bin, dumpster divers reclaim food that has already been discarded. These groups differ from mainstream charities since they couch their gleaning activities in the philosophy of freeganism, which embraces the ethics of what people eat and where they get it from.
Freegans avoid food that is produced by industrial agriculture since they believe it to be contaminated with chemicals and industrial waste. They also accuse large agricultural producers of being cruel to animals and using fossil fuels unnecessarily. Freegans often prefer diets that are vegan or vegetarian and locally sourced. In "The Raw and the Rotten: Punk Cuisine," an article published in a 2004 issue of Ethnology, its author, D. Clark, refers to the consumption of dumpstered food as a practice that transforms discarded products such as meat and industrially produced foods into "pure" acceptable foods.
The ethics of many study respondents seemed to fall along a similar line. They indicated that by consuming food that had already been discarded, they reduce waste without raising demand for industrial produce. Their food is also often collected by bike and eaten socially. Furthermore, many respondents indicated that they complemented their gleaned diets by purchasing organic groceries which often come from local, sustainable farms.
Ethical food sourcing for dumpster divers involves favouring the bins of large supermarket chains over smaller independent stores. Respondents reason that large supermarkets generate more waste and support large-scale industrial agriculture. Rather than supporting the demand for industrial agriculture with their dollar, freegans reduce the waste output of these suppliers.
The freegan lifestyle extends beyond consuming "garbage" to establishing subcultures that contrast with mainstream societal norms. Participants within these subcultures often support the DIY (or "do-it-yourself
Jim, my freegan friend, is not some prankster playing around in a garbage bin. Each time he lifts a dumpster lid, he reveals the world's waste on a platter: excessive quantities of discarded food that degrade the environment, produced from industrial systems that consume fossil fuels and involve animal cruelty. And all this while people go hungry.
