Julia Sanches explores the trendy new philosophy of ‘freeganism’, where eating garbage and raiding dumpsters is the height of cool.

Free-gan-ism: If you tear the word apart, syllable by syllable, you’ll still find that you won’t be much more enlightened than you were a couple of seconds ago. It’s not a word of tradition, it’s a new phenomenon, spawned from the capitalist womb.

Someone came up with a clever play on words that compiled “free”, as in no money, liberated etc. and “vegan” (which means no animal products at all) and then stuck an “ism” on the end. It is an ethically charged word, a political statement. But only if you understand the whole scope of the term, because the word itself is only half of any meaning at all.

Being Freegan means living by spending as little money as possible, or no money at all. However, it doesn’t mean living cheaply for the sake of living cheaply; Freegans aren’t stingy people who glorify their stinginess by slyly turning it into a political movement. It is living cheaply as a political statement; it is spending little to nothing on food by salvaging trade waste and then dedicating the time that needn’t be spent working to pay for said food in creating community projects. It’s trading skills instead of paper and pennies, swapping clothes instead of buying the latest fashion from Topshop or H&M because, let’s face it, those shops are cheap for a reason. It’s getting from A to B and leaving as little a carbon footprint as possible. It’s dodging an inundation of advertising. It’s either just plain recycling or using recyclable materials for creative projects. In other words, it’s optimising what other people deem obsolete, and by so doing, living both within and without a system that is, sadly, all-pervasive. It’s going Green with a twist.

It may still sound like Freeganism is essentially a form of glamorous laziness, scavenging other people’s labour under the guise of politics because really they just can’t be bothered to get a job. And in some fairly skewed way, Freegans are dependent on the system they challenge. However, there’s only so much that can be done from the inside. It is difficult to conceive of a society in which everyone lives off waste. It’s paradoxical, even. Being Freegan is not a movement towards absolutes, it is not an attempt to enforce an ideology on everyone, but more of an attempt to live as ethically as possible in a system that is consumer driven.

It is a way of bringing to light how illogical it is to produce a demand for goods that, at the end of the day, are chucked away. Let’s face the facts -  we’re no longer dealing with consumerism as we know it, but over consumption. Over consumption which leads to overproduction, which leads to more and more unnecessary waste.

Skippers, dumpster-divers, bin-raiders, etc. generally have the reputation of being something akin to scavengers, jumping into dumspters,  swimming in rotten vegetables and waste juice. However, if you consider the amount of packaged food that will go into bins, you’ll come to see how they are mostly swimming in otherwise recyclable materials, such as plastic and cardboard packaging that we might hope shops would have the decency to recycle, just as most households do.

In Britain alone, 17 million tonnes of food goes into landfills every year, 4 million of which is perfectly good to eat; and it is estimated that by 2016, Britain will run out of landfill space. Shops, from the independent ones to M&S and Scotmid, have to bin all food that has passed its sell-by date. Yet, there’s a curious gap between the sell-by and use-by date that makes most of the food they chuck still edible. And this is only one of the reasons why such a large quantity of perfectly digestible food gets chucked everyday.

Certain shops will throw their food into unlocked bins, probably knowing that skippers will raid them as soon as the doors are locked and the lights are out. On the other hand, there are shops that will go to costly lengths to prevent people from stealing their waste. They might secure the bins and fence them in, hiring security guards to watch over their rubbish and compromising the food by spilling blue dye on it, in the hope that skippers will be deterred.

And just to clarify, yes, skipping is illegal; shops’ waste is considered to be their private property until it gets delivered to the tip. Now, let’s not get hung up on the fact that this private property of theirs is rubbish, literally, metaphorically, or in any way you’d like it to be. The truth is that shops are far too aware of the ethical can of worms that the prosecuting of skippers would eventually pry open. How dare they, those skippers, how dare they eat this food that we no longer want! How dare they recycle the plastic and cardboard that our unwanted food is packaged in! Surely, if they weren’t diving in our bins, they’d most certainly be in our shops buying the food.

Freeganism, however, is not a solution. As far as solutions go, Freeganism would have to be inciting change to be one.

And skipping is not without its problems. Just like most trends that start with a political purpose, it has become fashionable; where more vulnerable people, i.e. people who actually need the food, would skip for meals, Freegans and skippers have become a middle-class phenomenon. Although Freeganism is not, strictly speaking, a solution, neither is it without its merits.

It is more of a personal choice than a pro-active change provoking lifestyle. Maybe the next step is to stop shirking around in the shadows (of dumpsters, undeniably) and finally get conglomerates to open that afore mentioned ethical can of worms and face the facts: while they are chucking away tonnes of fit for feasting food, there are millions in Britain alone who can’t afford to buy healthy meals.

Even now, with the recession, the (ironic) trend is that the cheaper goods get bought in shops and the luxury items go to skippers. Essentially, plans need to be devised so that their waste and others’ food be fairly distributed.

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skippy (194.81.255.xxx) 2009-01-12 11:49:39 be careful what you take....after a particularly good haul one night we turned on the news and found out precisely why so much irish meat had been thrown out that night....but it's all in the fun of the free Reply 0   0

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