The Freegans are Anti-Consumers
When I first heard of the Freegans I didn't know what to think.
Although taking garbage home for dinner seems a bit odd to most people, Freegans do it every day. And they know just where to go "shopping" too. You will find them fishing around in the dumpsters of some of the finest grocery stores and restaurants all over America.
The most surprising part of all of this is that Freegans are not neccessarily poor. Most of them just hate to see food and things wasted.
They take food, clothing or home furnishings that have been discarded and transform this former garbage into edible dinners, useable clothing and repaired furnishings.
Cut the brown stuff off the apple and you've got good apple left, right?
Take a look at this eccentric lifestyle then speak up in my guestbook and share what you think.
Freeganism on Wikipedia
Freeganism is an anti-consumerist lifestyle whereby people employ alternative living strategies 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." The lifestyle involves salvaging discarded, unspoiled food from supermarket dumpsters that have passed?display date but haven't passed their edible date. They salvage the food not because they are poor or homeless, but as a political statement.
The word "freegan" is a blend of "free" and "vegan". Freeganism started in the mid 1990s, out of the antiglobalization and environmentalist movements. Groups such as Food Not Bombs served free vegetarian and vegan food that was salvaged from food market trash by dumpster diving. The movement also has elements of Diggers, an anarchist street theater group based in Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco in the 1960s, that gave away rescued food.
Article about Freegans from the LA Times
- Free-lunch foragers - Los Angeles Times
- For lunch in her modest apartment, Madeline Nelson tossed a salad made with shaved carrots and lettuce she dug out of a Whole Foods dumpster. She flavored the dressing with miso powder she found in a trash bag on a curb in Chinatown. She baked bread made with yeast plucked from the garbage of a Midd
Official Freegan Website
- Freegan.info
- Freegan.infoStrategies for Sustainable Living Beyond Capitalism Official Website
- Freegan.info | LocalDirectories
- Dumpster Sites
- Freegan.info | Events
- A listing of Freegan Events
Read What the Bloggers are Saying about Freegans
- Waste not: Meet the Freegans
- Casey Cherry, 20 a freegan, dumpster dives a few blocks from his Lincoln Park home. Cherry found som...
- 'Freegans' salvage food from the city's bountiful garbage
- and freegan advocate Janet Kalish find bags of discarded bagels and baked goods in front of a superm...
- Party Like an Alumni | Wes Alums Host Freegan Fashion Show
- By JeanDesiree (Chief Contributor) A group of recent Wesleyan grads living the Bushwick neighborhood...
- You have GOT to be kidding me
- Freegans, if you didn't know, are people who, according to Freegan.info participate in "a t...
Living Off of the Land
Books with practical information
Although I don't agree with the Freegans dumpster diving techniques, I do agree with recycling other products and believe that everyone should try to do their part in saving the environment before it becomes one big garbage heap.
Empire of Scrounge: Inside the Urban Underground of Dumpster Diving, Trash Picking, and Street Scavenging (Alternative Criminology)
From the Introduction
In December of 2001 Jeff Ferrell quit his job as tenured professor, moved back to his hometown of Fort Worth, Texas, and, with a place to live but no real income, began an eight-month odyssey of essentially living off of the street. Empire of Scrounge tells the story of this unusual journey into the often illicit worlds of scrounging, recycling, and second-hand living. Existing as a dumpster diver and trash picker, Ferrell adopted a way of life that was both field research and free-form survival. Riding around on his scrounged BMX bicycle, Ferrell investigated the million-dollar mansions, working-class neighborhoods, middle class suburbs, industrial and commercial strips, and the large downtown area, where he found countless discarded treasures, from unopened presents and new clothes to scrap metal and even food.
Richly illustrated throughout, Empire of Scrounge is both a personal journey and a larger tale about the changing values of American society. Perhaps nowhere else do the fault lines of inequality get reflected so clearly than at the curbside trash can, where one person's garbage often becomes another's bounty. Throughout this engaging narrative, full of a colorful cast of characters, from the mansion living suburbanites to the junk haulers themselves, Ferrell makes a persuasive argument about the dangers of over-consumption. With landfills overflowing, today's higly disposable culture produces more trash than ever before-and yet the urge to consume seems limitless.
In the end, while picking through the city's trash was often dirty and unpleasant work, unearthing other people's discards proved to be unquestionably illuminating. After all, what we throw away says more about us than what we keep.
Amazon Price: $22.00 (as of 07/25/2008)
Dumpster Diving: The Advanced Course: How to Turn Other People's Trash into Money, Publicity, and Power
It's been 10 years since the publication of John Hoffman's cult classic of urban scavenging, The Art and Science of Dumpster Diving. Now the Garbage Guru is back with an advanced course in the unconventional economics of exploring the trash for fun and profit. Just some of the lessons you will learn include: the key secret to dealing with locked dumpsters; how to dive for information and use it to humiliate corporations, politicians and other evil-doers; the unusual profitability of diving for movie and celebrity castoffs; the BIG-bucks potential of industrial diving, including the top 10 most lucrative places to do it; how to sell your dumpster-dived wares through the flea market of the 21st century - eBay; how to parlay dumpster diving consciousness into finding cheap property, supporting radical causes, even landing political office; and much more!
Amazon Price: $15.00 (as of 07/25/2008)
Living Well on Practically Nothing: Revised and Updated Edition
Living Well on Practically Nothing: Revised and Updated Edition is for people who need to live on a lot less money. If you have been fired, demoted, retired, divorced, widowed, bankrupted or swindled - or you just want to quit your job and remain financially self-reliant - this book is for you. In it are hundreds of tips, secrets and necessary skills for living well on little money. Chapters include: Save Up to $37,000 a Year and Live on $12,000 a Year; Low-Cost Computers for Fun, Profit, and Education; Some Ways to Live on No Money at All; A Day of Cheap Living; A New Career or Business for You; Fix Things and Make Them Last; and Protect Your Investments and Make Them Grow. From cover to cover, this book is stocked with proven methods for saving money on shelter, food, clothing, transportation, entertainment, health care and more. The author left the "system" in 1969 and has worked for himself ever since. Let him show you how you, too, can live happily, comfortably and with complete financial freedom.
Amazon Price: $19.71 (as of 07/25/2008)
What is Your Opinion
Are you for freeganism or against it and why?
Do you think Freeganism is a good idea?
Fetching blurbs now... please stand byYes. definitely!
Jennie says:
I think it is a great idea! We have so much waste that goes in our garbage because we think we had to have it when we bought it. I'm guilty of this as well. I wouldn't know where to even begin to start this type of lifestyle, are there baby steps to take or do you just dive in?
Posted February 27, 2008
No way!
spirituality says:
I don't think I could see myself doing this. Costs way to much energy, for instance. But I'm not against other people doing it. I'm not for other people doing it. Trash is nobody's property, so if they want to use it, let them.
Posted May 23, 2008
Freegan Reader Feedback
Personally, umm, no thanks . . . I think I'll pass.
What do you think of the concept of Freeganism?
Are you a Freegan? Do you know any freegans?
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stargazer00
First I've heard of it. Some of my furniture comes from yard sales but I think I draw the line at dumpsters. Thanks for the good info! Posted May 02, 2008 |
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WhitneyWells
LOL I had heard of dumpster diving, but never about freegans - good lens! Posted March 17, 2008 |
