Freeganism, Dumpster Diving and Social Justice

Ever unable to resist a dare, at one of Utah County’s finest Indian dining establishments, I stealthily glided over to an abandoned table to steal (commandeer? save from waste?) the scarcely touched mango sorbet the obviously-on-a-first-date couple had left to melt. I have never harbored a phobia of germs. My propensity to take on any dare coupled with the occasional flare-up of my compulsion to shock people has led to me consume dried-up gunk caking the bottom of my shoe, earthworms, grasshoppers and yesterday, a peanut butter, jelly and fish stick sandwich (although, there was never any germ concern in that circumstance, just an unpleasant taste/texture). Anyway, I didn’t care that an unknown couple had stuck their spoons into the mango sorbet a time or two. I just loved the thrill of taking it from their table, placing it squarely in front of me and digging in.

I learned of freeganism after I related the tale of the mango sorbet to a friend. I had never heard the term and when she said, “That makes you sound like a freegan”, I demanded she explain this concept further. I’d heard of dumpster diving, but never the all-in commitment to refusing to pay for food by foraging the urban landscape. I had never met—and still never have—met a devoted freegan, but friends who have been acquainted with those whose only dietary restriction is “free” told me that it was more than dumpster diving in most cases and included signing up for clubs where food could be guaranteed at meetings, crashing social gatherings for the grub, and routinely asking, “are you going to finish that?”. It sounded awesome to me. It still sounds awesome. It highlights how much completely edible food—it overripe fruit, past sell-by date preserved goods or half-eaten hotdogs—gets wasted in America. But even cooler, it transforms you into a food vigilante, rescuing innocent food from a life of decomposition outside of human intestines.

I want to try my hand at the freegan lifestyle. I am a college-educated girl raised in an upper-middle class family. My wages may be just a bit above a pittance now (I am an AmeriCorps VISTA making 110% of the poverty line), but I could buy myself food. I may have to offset my penchant for fancy cheeses by making top ramen my main entrée several times a week, but I eat pretty well. I get the vitamins, minerals, grains, protein and dairy I need and don’t go to bed hungry. What I am saying is this: I don’t need to sort through discarded food to fill my belly. However, I think preventing waste of any kind is great, wonderful, absolutely marvelous. Despite all my dreaming of living a gypsy vagabond sort of life, my life is pretty standardly middle-class americana. But I love alternative lifestyles. I love little niche societies that spawn out of dissatisfaction of American capitalism and consumerism and exist as their own irrepressibly idealistic and undeniably cool subcultures. In high school one of the fantasy-life concoctions I whipped up with friends was living in a moneyless commune where we used dollar bills for menial things, assigning them no use outside of their utility as paper.

But I am a girl of upper-middle class upbringing. I have been trained and am fully capable of living according to the mores of this society. I feel like if I dumpster dive I am depriving some person who for whatever reason is not fully capable of taking care of himself or herself because they cannot adapt to the rules of our culture. I feel like that if I found an incredible cache of past sell-by date canned corn behind a supermarket that I should allow someone who needs the corn more than I do. Or that if I am going to be a freegan, I should donate at least some of what I might have spent on victuals to feeding those who cannot make the money to feed or don’t have the capacity to forage for themselves.

I know that grocery rescue is catching on. Nonprofits organize pickups with local grocery stores to take the food that they can no longer sell because of that dratted sell-by date and it gets distributed to people that will it eat before it has noticeably “gone bad.” However, I think we could go further than grocery rescue in keeping food from going to waste.

I worked at a thriving dive of a Mexican restaurant for five years. I started out as a lowly busser and was floored by how much food was left on the plates as we piled them into our bus tubs. At the restaurant is was customary for patrons to inhale the complimentary chips and salsa before their meal arrived and they tended to do a decent job polishing off their enchiladas or burritos but more often than not globs of beans and rice remained on their plate, often untouched. The freegan movement could benefit from busser allies. It is insane to think how many people could have been fed from the discarded rice and beans or half-eaten tacos.

Of course, only people who have freely and willingly committed to eat free food regardless of whoever else’s fork tines may have touched should be served this food; them and perhaps the truly desperate. It becomes a social justice issue. Just because someone is poor doesn’t mean they should have to eat beans I scraped off of someone else’s plate. Even if it could provide them a meal and save them money they could spend on other goods. Again, I do not know any self-declared freegans. But I imagine them mostly middle-class kids disillusioned with the establishment. Otherwise, they would probably just call themselves homeless people. But freegans can be freegans because they made the decision to live life that way. Other scroungers may or may not have made the implicit decision to live outside the confines of accepted behavior.

The mango sorbet I saved from an early retirement to a bus tub was delicious. It saved me money that I might have spent on dessert had I decided to splurge and the mild act of deviance gave me a bit of a high. I would love to be a freegan even though I don’t need to be. And for some reason, the second line of that statement, spawned all of this musing on Freeganism, Dumpster Diving and Social Justice.