GIVE IT TO THE FOOD PANTRIES. DAILY.

There. I just solved two huge problems in this country with one idea: grocery waste, and starving Americans who don’t have enough money to be able to buy food.

But in commercial stores, they have to follow a health code, or else they could get shut down. Their trash cans must be fairly clean. Their food must be handled cleanly. Even when it’s thrown out, it’s not like it’s tossed in the normal trash. The deli department tosses their stuff in their own trash bins/bags. Bakery the same. Produce, the same. Each department bags up their own “trash”, which as these people are pointing out, usually is not trash in the sense we typically think of. It’s merely things that are “past their prime” per health code or that store’s personal ethic (EG: a fresh bakery would get rid of day-old bread … it’s still perfectly good, it just doesn’t meet their “baked that day” standard anymore). This “trash” is tossed into clean trash bags, which in residential cases act like a barrier to keep nasty stuff in, but in this commercial sense keeps nasty stuff out and protects the perfectly good stuff on the inside. Again, some of what they pulled out was still in the original wrappings. The produce they pulled out would get inspected and cleaned, just as if you were buying it normally.

It’s just the word “trash” that’s throwing a negative light on this. It’s merely “food reclamation”. Think of it this way, if you harvest food on a farm, you run the risk of it being spoiled, contaminated with god knows what, who knows what kinds of insects eating it. You run the same “risk” when reclaiming “trash” food from commercial stores.

Also, stores that notice this pattern (the night-time clean up folks, not the store owners) will usually take care to pack up the “good stuff” in its own bags, so real trash is kept separate from good things. The average working joe looks favorably on folks like this “fighting the system” and making the most out of what they can find, so they’ll take a little extra effort to help out.

Also note that these folks were NOT digging in the back alley of a restaurant’s trash. They were digging in trash that came from a corner super-market … produce, baked goods, etc. These were not half-eaten, cooked meals they were digging through, which WOULD be a very real health hazard.

Also, the reporters prejudice against this activity was sort of showing through on this report. Even though it was generally a positive report, you could just tell that she wasn’t all too enthusiastic about this assignment.

Dumpster diving for food by choice…

People who call themselves freegans take frugality to the extreme — going through garbage for food,…

[...] talked about Freegans, which are basically freaks who go through other people’s trash in order to find food. – [...]

[...] talked about Freegans, which are basically freaks who go through other people’s trash in order to find food. – [...]

She got enough to feed her family of 5, can and freeze leftovers, feed several friends too. It wasn’t exactly dumpster diving but close.

My Mom did the same thing and gets bread and all kinds of stuff from a grocery store and leftover bread from an Atlanta Bread Company.

My favorite spot is the Barnes and Noble dump. Free books

I saw an episode of 30 days (from the guy who did Supersize Me), that showed you what it was like to live off the grid. Growing your own vegetables, driving a car powered by cast off deep fryer oil collected from restaurants, no electric lights, composting toilet, cold showers with biodegradeable homemade soap, etc etc. It was a very eye opening episode, giving you tips on how to cut down your own carbon footprint without getting in your face about it.

I highly recommend it.

I think the freegans are an echo of the back-to-the-land movement, albeit a slightly weirder version. Back-to-the-landers at least rejected modern society by actually leaving it rather than just living off its waste.

I’ve read that the idealization of the pastoral, agrarian lifestyle (specifically the images we associate with Christmas) started in the industrial revolution, when peasant farmers moved into cities. Prior to that there wasn’t really much to idealize about the past because your parents’ and grandparents’ lives were much like your own–they may have even lived in the same house.

I think it’s fairly natural to think wistfully about the past, mostly because the past we think about has had most of the negatives and boring bits filtered out. But I also think there’s a great deal of hypocrisy involved in any movement like freeganism which attempts to condemn our society but only reject some parts of it.

The back-to-the-landers, when push came to shove, were not willing to give up modern medicine. From the sounds of it freegans (or at least this one) aren’t even willing to give up television, let alone move to Africa and actually do something for the world’s poor.

So, thank the litigious opportunists and their scumbag trial lawyers for their contribution to this problem.

Also, a hearty “hear hear” for icup’s comment

I like that the author mentions Jared Diamond. I highly recommend Diamond’s “Guns, Germs, and Steel” and also “Collapse” for anyone who seeks to have a better understanding of the way our world works today.

Finally, I fully agree that the freegan girl suffers from an affliction that affects far to many otherwise intelligent well-meaning people. I am referring of course to “Liberal Guilt”. People, Its not your personal fault that there are people starving in Africa, even if you own an ipod, which, let’s face it, is basically the pinnacle of hundreds of years of achievement built on colonial oppression the world over. You should feel bad for them of course, and do what you can to help, but you don’t need to reject your entire consumerist society. Just turn off your lights when you aren’t using them for crying out loud. Be conservative with energy and water. Don’t live to excess. But don’t go on misbegotten boycott binges, it really doesn’t do anybody any real good. Not you, not the guy who’s couch you’re living on, and certainly not the poor starving Africans.

Not so. First, there’s a very short window of opportunity to grab day-old food in the dumpster, so they would have to be ripping it out of the hands of the homeless for that to be true.

Second, working-class people are the ones who are throwing out a lot of the perfectly good non-food items. They won’t accept “sharing the surplus wealth” because wearing and using used stuff would in their minds prove that they’re poor. This is Exhibit A for the truth of an ancient proverb– “the Devil wipes his ass with a poor man’s pride.”

What this is actually about is culture being the original sacred cow of western civilization. Oh, spending money stupidly (in this case, to replace perfectly good things) is part of your cultural habits. Guess we can’t criticize that.

[...] may be a little extreme. You could always spend your days scavenging for food, even though you can easily afford it. This will help you prepare for the absolute worst case [...]

Is technology really going to rescue us and solve our problems? Doesn’t it seem technology started the problem to begin with? Wisdom yes, technology – I don’t think so.

Of course the waste isn’t just at the supermarket level, it’s also at the farm level – vegetables that aren’t the “right” shape or size, or that have been damaged by machinery is also thrown out. Agnes Varda made an award-winning documentary about this a couple of years ago called “The Gleaners & I”.

The thing we have to watch out for, is building a technology and economic infrastructure that can comfortably support six billion people–except that by the time it’s implemented, it’s comfortably supporting two billion and supporting twenty billion more in extreme poverty … Human population does seem to expand to the limits of the available resources, no matter what those limits are.

As I said, though, still lacking in the guts. I don’t like cold calling.

I spent 30 minutes at a toy store this weekend, just trying to find birthday gifts that were not made or plastic or made in China, for example.

So she saved $1200 in a month by not shopping and eating free? What’s wrong with the rest of us that we keep going to the stores? Here’s the ticket to getting rich (insert sarcasm)

I noticed she didn’t bother to set aside watching dvds during her freegan month, since she wanted to kill her hubby for the remote. So much for reducing her electricity footprint.

Sorry, I just have a hard time with this sort of thing. I do agree that a lot of food is wasted in this country — shameful amounts. I also really do agree with living gently on the earth. And I DON’T think that living frugally is necessarily equivalent with being miserly.

But dang — she was setting herself up to be miserable. Because she treated being freegan as an external thing — she didn’t take it internally at all. It’s like people who go to church because it’s correct, not because they love God.

The simple truth of it is we could ALL stand to live more ecologically friendly. But we don’t have to be miserable to do so. It comes down to choices — choosing to eat more mindfully, choosing to wash clothes, dishes or our bodies more mindfully. Choosing to shop more mindfully. That doesn’t mean you have to lay a guilt trip on yourself every time you use a drop of water.

If you were to go back 150 years and ask people if they wouldn’t prefer to have running water rather than a bucket from the well, I really doubt they’d have to think very hard about it. Technology and progress aren’t the problem — taking them for granted is the problem. We should be grateful stewards of all the conveniences we have the luxury of living with.

I think this lady must have been a pretty stout consumer before her freeganism.

db