Freegans in the news

To the Freegan go the Spoils

 

Whether it’s due to growing environmental principles or increasingly empty wallets, some UCSD students are flocking to trash as the answer to their consumption woes.

Freeganism, a term coined in the 1990s, is a way of living in which individuals reject the consumerist economy by practicing unconventional strategies such as Dumpster diving for food. Now with increased concern for the Earth’s climate, freeganism has become more popular among students like Eleanor Roosevelt College junior Justin Lowenthal, a Sixth College resident advisor who organized an educational event on freeganism for students during Fall Quarter 2007.

“Personally, it’s a value of mine to be more conservative,” Lowenthal said. “That’s what I want to introduce to other people so they can understand the impact they have being a consumer in our society.”

In a similar effort to educate others, UCSD alumnus Marko Manriquez created www.freegankitchen.com, a Web site where he hosts a gourmet cooking show using only ingredients taken from Dumpsters.

“The United States is a culture of enormous consumer appetites,” Manriquez said in an e-mail. “We consume and waste so much but it never really seems to satisfy our desires. I wanted to share this revelation with others. I created [Freegan Kitchen] as a way to both satirize our consumer media bubble while at the same time empower others to alternative forms of sustainability — all the while leveraging the tools of the system to critique itself.”

In addition to offering cooking tips and insight into the movement’s main philosophies, Freegan Kitchen also includes an educational video on how to Dumpster dive. According to Manriquez, looking through Dumpsters is the most exhilarating part of freeganism.

 

One Man's Trash

According to freegan.info, “Freegans are people who employ alternative strategies for living based on limited participation in the conventional economy and minimal consumption of resources. Freegans embrace community, generosity, social concern, freedom, cooperation, and sharing in opposition to a society based on materialism, moral apathy, competition, conformity, and greed.”

However, those familiar with freeganism summarize it much more succinctly. Strict freegans are people who don’t pay for food or anything else.

“[I am] capable of eating roadkill [or] sloppy garbage,” said freegan Theodore Schmidkonz. “I’ve seem many people here in America go into wet sloppy garbage and throw it in a bucket and light a fire under it and eat it … and these guys have been doing it for 30 or 40 years.”

[...]

While some choose the freegan lifestyle for political reasons, others, like Schmikonz, choose it for financial reasons. “We’re scraping by individually on several hundred dollars apiece, and the only way we can do it is being freegan,” Schmidkonz said.

His community is one of a very small number of similarly freegan communities across the country. According to Schmidkonz, “We’re focused on benevolent activities, recycling, clean living, and mutual survival and coexistence. We try to be as independent as we possibly can.”

 

The Roots of Freeganism

New York City’s freegans place a high premium on community, and the success of the 123 Community Space is a case in point. The space now hosts programs every day of the week, from a bike repair workshop to a screen-printing class. It hasn’t always been easy, and the space’s website describes some of the challenges that have come up along the way. The center was founded by a group of mostly white young people in what has long been a predominantly black neighborhood. As the rap music incident demonstrates, building community in a diverse environment isn’t always an easy process.

Nevertheless, New York City freegans still pursue it rather doggedly, holding regular group meetings and ‘trash tours,’ and organizing potlucks with the loot from their dumpster-diving expeditions. Whatever benefits these rituals provide, they are also a reaction against what many perceive as the decline of community in the broader culture.
“I do think people work too hard chasing the almighty dollar and spend too little time doing what is meaningful in life, such as sharing time with loved ones, being artistic, creative, and active within a community,” said Kalish in an email message. She pointed to obesity and the rise of third-party childcare as evidence that today, many people are too busy to exercise or even raise their own children.

This is more than just abstract philosophizing: in recent years, social scientists and critics have documented the decline of community in America rather exhaustively. In 2000, Harvard political scientist Robert D. Putnam published the book Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. In it, he described how social networks generate social capital by facilitating information flows between people and encouraging reciprocity among community members. Putnam also introduced a mountain of data showing that social capital in the U.S. has been declining over the past 25 years. For instance, surveys conducted during that period have shown a 50 percent drop in attendance of club meetings, a 43 percent drop in family dinners, and a 35 percent drop in “having friends over.”

The likely forces behind these shifts are familiar to anyone who has picked up a newspaper in the last decade. Technological innovation has certainly played a role, with the advent of devices like the Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) rendering every spare moment a potential working moment. The increasingly global nature of economic life may be another culprit. In his 2005 book American Mania: When More is Not Enough, UCLA neurobiologist Peter Whybrow points out that in the model of capitalism concieved by Adam Smith, devotion to the market was balanced by the demands of community. “With globalization,” as one reviewer for the New York Times put it, “the idea of doing business with neighbors one must face the next day is a quaint memory, and all bets are off.”

Arthur Crosman, a student and freegan who teaches bike repair at the 123 Community Space, agreed. “There’s something about working for a gigantic company where people become removed from the consequences of their work,’ he said. “Globalization makes us forget the local.”

 

He's Just Not Buying It

Scardino is one of a growing subculture of people called freegans. Originally coined as a combination of "free" and "vegans," freegans originated, reportedly in San Francisco, as a small group of vegans who wanted to remove themselves from what they see as a consumption-obsessed society.

The movement has grown among non-vegans and has many levels of participation, from those who disavow all economic participation (including refusal to pay rent and voluntary joblessness) to those who simply want to lessen their impact by recycling and living off the waste of others.

Most people assume trash cans and Dumpsters are full of just garbage: things nobody would want or could use. But according to the United States Department of Agriculture, about half of all food in the country is wasted at a cost of $100 billion every year. And then there are the clothes, furniture and electronics that people throw away rather than donating.

'A Very Small Ecological Footprint'

There's no way to say how many freegans populate the country or world, but it's a movement that's gained the most traction in large cities such as New York, Seattle and San Francisco. Scardino still has a hard time explaining it to people here. When he wanders the streets on trash night, picking through garbage, people seem to know he's not homeless. "They say, 'You can't be homeless. You're too fucking clean to be homeless,'" he says. So they can't understand why he would want to grocery shop in the trash.

"There's many reasons to do this stuff," he says. "I mean, at work a lot of food gets thrown away. I'm the guy that takes it. They don't mind that."

And Scardino isn't as far-removed from homelessness as some people might guess. When he was 14 years old, Scardino and his mom were evicted from their home, and he began wandering the streets on his own. "At the time, I was like 'Sweet! I can do whatever I want,'" he says. "I was hanging out with 50-year-old bums drinking beer with them, you know, in an alleyway somewhere and not really caring, having a fun time."

But a "fun time" turned into a way of life as Scardino picked up on the secrets of Rochester's streets: where the safe places to squat are, how to work the system for free showers -- and where the best garbage can be found.