There Ain’t No Such Thing as a Free Lunch: Freeganism, Foraging for Economic Freedom
Until I found myself eyeing Trader Joe’s heaping dumpster, I thought that only the desperate ate trash. Bruised bananas, individually wrapped pastries, calcium vitamins, bags of coffee—that dumpster was chockfull of treasure. Growing numbers of people are trading credit cards for rubber gloves and a pair of solid boots, choosing the dumpster over the supermarket. In New York City, where trash is particularly desirable and plentiful, apartments are increasingly the product of curbside shopping and meals are composed of recently expired, landfill-destined produce. This growing anti-consumerist counterculture lives off corporate waste in attempt to minimize participation in the capitalist system and impact on the planet. It’s called freeganism, and according to the movement’s guiding website, “freegans are people who practice strategies for everyday living based on sharing resources, minimizing the detrimental impact of our consumption, and reducing and recovering waste and independence from the profit-driven economy” [1].
As with most movements, there are varying gradations of freeganism with varying motivations and levels of participation in the capitalist system. Although generally anti-consumerist and environmentally conscious, some freegans are exclusively interested in the economic advantages (there’s no cheaper way to live than without money). Others are certainly capable of participating—even dominating—the consumer market, a freedom that perhaps allows them to more easily reject it (trash-picking as a choice, not as a necessity). Some squat instead of rent, volunteer instead of work, and lead a life of scavenging and bartering, without buying a thing.
***
Initially, I was skeptical about the whole movement. I was so quick to point out its gaping holes and areas of contradiction. How could freeganism truly reject capitalism when it relied exclusively on consumer waste for sustenance? In a section of the freegan philosophy, it is stated that they “provide for [their] needs without feeding the monster.” A later section says that “since the goods are salvaged and therefore do not support the destruction behind the market, freegans can have a clear conscience about enjoying these goods.”
I was full of doubts about the actual benefit of the lifestyle. Despite being an environmentally-conscious, carbon-footprint-concerned, local-food-supporting citizen, something in me rejected freeganism pretty adversely. It felt like an overzealous pseudo-movement of trustafarians who had forgotten to fully think through their cause. It was an undeveloped twist on the social norm that held money at the root of all evil. It’s as if their view of activism was really so shallow that they believed that if money were eliminated, evil, too, would disappear. But in reality, even though the freegans weren’t directly contributing to the evil, they were still profiting from it. They were rejecting the consumerist lifestyle, but failing to rid themselves of materialistic desire, an incompatibility that they reconciled by taking stuff for free.
I assumed they were of immense privilege—privilege that allowed them to so easily spit on American capitalism. Yet instead of doing anything constructive in response, or helping those who suffered the most from capital inequality, they focused on self-benefit.
A 2004 article on Food Waste in New York City quoted an upscale grocery store manager as he watched two young women, Morlan and Catherine, root through the trash he had just taken out. “They are picking up garbage,” he said. “I don’t know why they are doing this” [2].
In response, 19-year-old Morlan said, “I have zero cash right now, and no place to stay. What do you expect me to do?” This was trash picking out of true necessity, not out of a self-righteous “political statement.” Freegans were competing for a limited amount of food with people of true need, taking advantage of the whole system by networking on the Internet to find the best trash spots and dumpsters. It was an ironic exploitation—a “survival of the fittest” scenario—which, instead of subverting capitalist ideology, actually seemed to reinforce it.
On top of that, let’s be honest: it was just weird. To live a life without spending a dime—a life of voluntary impoverishment—it felt strange and creepy and a bit cult-like. I had heard the story of an NYU freshman who, after becoming intimately involved in the Freegan underworld, rejected her full-scholarship and academic promise in favor of life in a collective home in Bed Stuy. Sure, Bex claimed to spend less than $10 a week and operated on the fringe of society, but there was something off-putting about a community that reproved the pursuit of education, regardless of its institutional affiliation.
But at the same time, I knew that it was somewhat hypocritical of me to condemn “them” for being ineffective poser pseudo-anarchists while I sat back stroking my chin and pondering my moral superiority. Before I came to any conclusion about these people, I had to try it out for myself, to give it a whole-hearted attempt.
***
I didn’t exactly throw away all the cash in my wallet as I may have if I were a true freegan, but for two days I resolved to spend none of it. No pre-paid dining hall swipes, no leftovers, no grocery store items previously purchased. Humans can generally go about three weeks without food, so I expected a couple days to be a breeze, especially if I gorged myself the prior few days. But the point was not starvation. It was the opposite, in fact. Freegans rightly believe that there is enough food in the world to feed everyone. By taking advantage of the incredible excess of the corporate system, Freegans are able to subsist without direct participation in the consumer culture.
So when I set out to give the lifestyle a try, my first act of business was to define my freegan rules. In a way, this is actually a major complication of the movement. I wanted to try the most extreme, removed and minimalist approach to freeganism, and therefore opted against many of the loopholes that I imagined abusing. Would I be allowed to eat fruit that I had coerced friends to steal from the dining hall? What about requesting that they grab an extra sandwich to go? This all still seems to create the illusion of demand, which perpetuates the system. Was anything actually free and fully exempt of capitalist venom?
In my situation (as it may be in all), it was nearly impossible to disassociate from the consumer economy. I had to accept the reality that I was a part of an extremely wasteful institution—NYU—and that the absurd price of my affiliation sometimes included “free” pizza. I decided not to let my financial contribution to the school restrict my ability to subsist off of its seemingly permissible surplus. So for a few days, I was one of the most involved students around. Suddenly I was a member of my dorm’s general assembly, the Bollywood club, and—hit the jackpot on this one—a vegetarian cooking class, which featured an event with “8 courses of delicious and healthy food.” How opportune.
I couldn’t pretend as if there wasn’t bountiful food just waiting to be eaten around every corner. And yes, perhaps I was indirectly buying this food in a way, but it was the closest thing to freeganism that I could pull off, and even then, it wasn’t easy. After all, I wasn’t going to start rooting around in the trash for a few overripe and bruised bananas like those real freegans.
***
The most cohesive community and largest concentration of freegans is in the New York City area. Their website, freegan.info, is run largely by a man named Adam Weissman. Although it’s difficult to trace the brains behind the comprehensive site, the New York freegan community is clearly well intact, accessible, and vibrant. Even a passing glance at the “organizations and communities” section of the site reveals a number of affiliate websites as well as local and regional gathering places. Meetup.com is also a popular virtual venue for freegans to post messages, share stories and photos of exceptional dumpster bounty, and exchange tips on diving technique.
The “Freegan Events in New York” page began to serve as my calendar. Updated regularly, the schedule of dumpster dives and dinners made it easy to tap into the greater freegan community. I figured it was time to get my hands dirty.
The Dive
It’s easy to walk through New York without even noticing the heaping bags of trash along the curb. Endless garbage bags are piled outside delis and supermarkets every night, only to disappear by morning. Each day, New York City creates roughly 77 million pounds of trash [3]. As we walked up First Avenue in the Upper East Side, stopping at every Duane Reade and D’Agostinos, I learned that a huge portion of this weight is composed of goods that aren’t garbage at all. In fact, according to a study conducted by the University of Arizona, forty to fifty percent of all food ready for harvest never gets eaten [4]. The Natural Resources Defense Council estimates that, every night, the average grocery store throws away $2,300 worth of food [5].
“The produce thrown in the trash is fresher than the produce for sale in the low-income neighborhood where I live,” said Nancy, an active Freegan. Bag after bag we untied, only to rescue more perfectly good food than we could carry. There were countless bags of lettuce, fresh cut vegetables wrapped in plastic, potatoes, onions, oranges, and bananas fresher than the often mangled bunches up for grabs in the dining hall. The trash was riddled with dented boxes of toothpaste and other cosmetically damaged items. Health laws often require companies to discard food by the sell-by date and products with irregularities, blemishes, or superficial damages. We sifted through bars of soap, a variety of shampoos, and sticks of deodorant.
Stores intentionally overstock their goods so that their shelves look plentiful and appealing. No one wants to shop in a grocery store that’s half empty. But that excess ends up in the garbage for those resourceful enough to go digging.
Managers came out of supermarkets, disgusted and irritated by our scavenging (or “rescuing,” as the freegans prefer to call it), but powerless. Once trash hits the sidewalk, it is free game. Until 1am, we traveled from garbage pile to garbage pile, skipping the fast food restaurants. “There’s nothing I’d want at Dunkin’ Donuts,” said one of the more experienced divers. They preferred the individually wrapped hummus packs and organic greens. “I’m a bit of a health nut and a total germaphobe,” she continued. I paused to consider her words as she pulled onions out of a garbage bag, but she continued before I had a chance to raise my eyebrows too high. “I cook everything I find at 150 degrees, at least. I don’t use outer layers of any produce. I wash everything extremely thoroughly,” she said confidently. I was a little skeptical, but had to believe her. After all, she looked and claimed to feel great, with the strongest immune system of anyone she knew. For a woman in her late-sixties, I was impressed.
The Freegan “business meeting” was set to begin at 7:30 in the Sony public atrium on 56th and Madison. In New York City, the center of the capitalist world, a small table of about ten Freegans met to plan the coming month’s events, as well as to prepare for the night’s dive. I spotted them immediately—the skinny, middle-aged women with graying frizzy hair and khaki pants. They were the group with the grocery carts and the plastic gloves—the group that looked a little homeless, but smilingly so.
Half of the group was composed of first-time divers. There was a young Mexican couple, a threesome of recently relocated Brits, and a slew of similarly looking middle-aged hippie types who looked like they had all bought their clothes from the same Salvation Army, or more realistically, the same dumpster. The meeting opened with the assignment of two roles: time keeper, to make sure the meeting is logistically on track, and vibe watcher, to observe and mediate the energy. There is strong focus on making everyone feel comfortable.
“We’re not a card-carrying kind of organization, exactly, but we’re a community of shared values,” said Jerry, the understood, yet undeclared leader of the nonhierarchical organization. On the table, he spread out some candy he “picked up on the way here.” “This city is brimming with unsold Easter chocolate,” he explained. “But we’ll get into that on the dive.”
We scheduled the month’s organized food dives, community dinners, film screenings, and the NYU student move-out dive—appropriately set at my very dorm. Then Jerry pulled out his box of disposable (or reusable) plastic gloves “appropriated from a local hospital.”
At around 10pm, we hit the streets, recovering excessive amounts of excess before garbage trucks came to take it all away. My conceptions about the amount of waste were terribly misconstrued. Even if the number of dumpster diving freegans doubled—tripled—there would still be tons of food for the homeless. “You could cater the world’s gatherings with the waste of New York City supermarkets,” said Janet, a dedicated Freegan. Much of the world starves while loads of perfectly edible food is thrown away. If society is really so wasteful that people can subsist safely and happily on trash alone, then something about our system is clearly broken.
More and more people are dropping out and dropping off. The perhaps irreversible divide between rich and poor, powerful and powerless, continues to grow, and an ethical life in such a corrupt world is becoming an impossible prospect. To live in this world of privilege, we unwillingly oppress people around the world. Sometimes it seems as if the only way to avoid complicity is to abstain from it completely.
Take a simple cotton tee shirt, for example. The cotton is grown in the deep Mississippi Delta and picked by huge, specially designed tanks. It is then shipped off to Indonesia, where it is turned into yarn in a factory that operates 24 hours a day, 361 days a year. Indonesia is “in a sweet spot in the global T-shirt trade” because it has cheap labor, reliable electricity, and relatively stable leadership. The yarn is then sent to Bangladesh, where it is sewn by impoverished women working under dangerous conditions. On April 24th, 2013, Bangladesh experienced the deadliest garment-factory accident in human history, killing 1,129 workers in the building collapse. Revolts and protests led the country to double the minimum wage (from $39 to $68 a month), yet factory workers fear that a rise in labor costs will drive Western buyers to find a cheaper country.
The T-shirt is then packed onto a huge metal box that is then machine-loaded onto a ship. [6] By minimizing costs at all stages of production, the company, whether it be Hanes, Fruit of the Loom, or Jockey, maximizes profit. We then buy the T-shirt, creating demand and perpetuating the structure of global inequality and exploitation.
This is the deep-rooted system in which we live. Just because a Freegan does not participate in the final monetary exchange of a good, the horrors that went into its creation are not negated. In fact, it seems slightly disingenuous to benefit from the use of a consumer item, yet shirk responsibility for its material unconsciousness simply because no money was paid. To benefit from capitalism’s fruit, regardless of financial transaction, is to play a role in the greater ecosystem. But what else can one do but be a scavenger, cleaning up the unwanted bits of an unjust system? It’s hard to know if trying to run away from the nearly unavoidable embrace of our capital system is better than remaining in the infrastructure we’ve inherited in order to attempt to better it.
However, there’s something very admirable about people who take personal action to remove themselves from a system that they don’t like. Freegans are activists in demonstration. They promote change by living it.
Waste is an unrecognized capital in a resource-rich society where production trumps consumption. Freegans capitalize on this rejected resource. They don’t see their lifestyle as a panacea to the complex issues of capitalism, but they see it as a response to the depleting and unsustainable methods of our mainstream economy.
Surplus Value: the economics of freeganism
As we rooted through the trash, a role of red $2.99 price tags surfaced. For fun, we started sticking the price markers on everything we found. A bag of avocados: $2.99. A large container of organic Greek yogurt: $2.99. Natural face wash: $2.99. If the same food that costs varying amounts of money in a supermarket is free in a dumpster, what do dollars and cents even mean? It’s as if, in order for something to be valuable, it must have a price tag—it must be sellable. The innate worth and practicality of an item is reduced to its market value. But the system has stopped making sense. Prices are no longer the sum of labor and worth, but are the composition of nonessential factors, like loss (at every level of production). Marx’s theory of surplus value describes this very process. The capitalist exploits human labor in order to maximize profit for himself, a reality that certainly makes it difficult to spend money on the perfectly useful, but “unsellable.”
But here’s the thing: the first rule of economics is that nothing is free. There’s a cost to everything and to obtain more of one thing requires the sacrifice of something else. In economics, this concept is called “there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.”[7] Along the line of production, someone is absorbing the cost of the goods freegans pick from the trash. No single item, regardless of whether it was purchased or rescued from a dumpster, can be viewed in isolation, for prices are factored to compensate for product losses.
Economics are at the root of the freegan cause. Although anarchist movements tend to connote the pursuit of a physical disappearance—people running off to the Alaskan wilderness or building a cabin in rural Maine with their bare hands—there are fewer and fewer places off the grid now. There is no great frontier that has not yet been discovered. We can, however, try to remove ourselves from the economy, which is the medium in which we are most closely traced. To stop spending money is, in a sense, to go off the grid, even if home is a city.
But doesn’t the near impossibility of removing oneself from mainstream society indicate the dynasty of our economy? Freegans are trying to disassociate from the capitalist system, trying to resist the culture of monetary exchange, but they really can’t. They cannot live without playing a role in our economic empire, for the wrath of the capitalist system is inescapable. Even those who reject it all are, in a sense, living a life of indirect harm.
The Line that Divides Man and Bum
The way we think about “trash” is wrong. It is assumed that as soon as something has been rejected or thrown away, it loses all value and usefulness. In a 1994 episode of Seinfeld called “The Gymnast,” Jerry criticizes George for eating an éclair out of the garbage:
George: It wasn’t down in; it was sort of on top.
Jerry: But it was in the cylinder.
George: Above the rim.
Jerry: Adjacent to refuse, is refuse.
George: It was on a magazine, and it still had the doily on it.
Jerry: Was it eaten?
George: One little bite.
Jerry: Well, that’s garbage.
George: I know who took the bite. It was her aunt.
Jerry: You, my friend, have crossed the line that divides man and bum. You are now a bum.
Sure, there are safety concerns when it comes to eating garbage—it’s assumed that something “in the cylinder” has gotten the chance to mix with all sorts of bacteria. However, according to Dr. Ruth Kava of the American Council on Science and Health, “most food that’s thrown out by stores is still safe to eat if you clean it and cook it appropriately.”[8]
The media has affected the way we view garbage, determining culturally and socially appropriate behavior. However, as environmental consciousness has become a more mainstream concern, artists and innovators are beginning to redefine definitions of “trash.”
Spanish street artist, Francisco de Pájaro, searches New York streets nightly for his materials—curbside trash.[10] In an interview with The Guardian, he describes his work as “creating fun and beauty out of something society considers gross and disgusting.” As fleeting as his projects may be, he aims to shift the way we see that which we discard. "Garbage is hated, ignored, considered smelly and rotten. But for me it has become a place to create monsters, to make fun of politicians and the humorless," he said [11].
Freeganism: The Diggers, literally
Freeganism did not materialize out of nothing, but rather is the contemporary product of a long history of similar social movements. One of the earliest traces of freegan ideology can be found in a Protestant group of British agrarian socialists called The Diggers. In 1649, England was facing great social and political instability. In the midst of the country’s power struggle, The Diggers scorned private property, ownership, and monetary exchange, promoting the shared cultivation of common land. They were widely rejected, however, and within a year, after facing legal harassment and mob violence, they dispersed [12].
In the mid nineteenth century, aspects of freeganism were, again, displayed in the transcendental movement, which rejected the increasingly industrial and materialistic American society. Henry David Thoreau was the pioneer of “back to our roots” living. In his book, Walden, he recorded his experience living in a cabin he built in the Massachusetts woodlands. He advocated simple living and self-sufficiency with a focus on discovering human truths through nature.
As ideas around “simple-living” progressed, a clearer connection grew between rejecting corporate economic practices and endorsing natural living. Many young people began to consider food an essential ingredient in their personal and generational identity. The late 1960s presented, again, The Diggers, yet this time reincarnated and appropriated, based in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury neighborhood. This group shared the most characteristics with modern freegans. They fused two radical traditions of the era: the bohemian, underground art scene and the civil rights, peace movement. In practice, they aimed to create a “Free City,” dumpster-diving to distribute free food to people. To receive their free meal, people had to walk through a large wooden “Frame of Reference,” thus shifting their frame of reference in regard to food consumption: their “passive receptivity” towards the food they ate turned into an awareness of the heavy environmental costs of American food production and consumption [13]. It’s a practice that seems to resonate on some level with contemporary freegan’s sensitivity to meta-consciousness, hence the role of the vibe-watcher in every gathering.
All of these movements reject an evolving society, promulgating, instead, that in order to be natural and wholesome and human, we must live as closely as we conceivably can to the land that made us. “We harken back to older ways, where people lived as participants, not masters in the continuum of life. We remember our nomadic foraging ancestors,” wrote an unidentified freegan on the “Visions” page of freegan.info [14]. They conflate artifice and human advancement and see societal development as increasingly immoral.
Freeganism is more than a way of obtaining food. It is about shifting economic ideology away from capitalism and towards the concept of a gift economy. “We have a free store every Friday that people donate/dumpster items to for people in the community to get free goods,” said Bex, a nineteen-year-old freegan. They host community-wide repair workshops, aiding each other in handy-man tasks in order to stretch the longevity of their goods. There are bi-monthly sewing workshops, fixer collectives, and bike tune-ups.
It’s far from perfect. It may even dabble in the realm of the contradictory. But freegans live in a way that does not create any demand and therefore their lives do little to propagate the system they are protesting. As a freegan manifesto argues: “Individually, our actions have little impact on the overall economy, but like the individual choice of a vegan diet, the cumulate impact of individual action by large numbers of people has the potential to create direct economic impacts while forcing the issue into the minds of many others”[15]. Even when it seems that the world will only continue to descend into the pit of capitalist self-annihilation, the power of individual change is the glimmer of hope that gives inspiration to the dumpster-diving, squatting, free store browsing, organic gardening activists everywhere.
[1] "Freegan Philosophy : Freegan.info." Freeganinfo RSS. Web. 18 Apr. 2014.
[2] Rizvi, Haider. "DEVELOPMENT-U.S.: Food Waste and Hunger Exist Side by Side – Inter Press Service." Inter Press Service. 3 Sept. 2004. Web. 14 May 2014.
[3] "PlaNYC 2030 - The Plan." Solid Waste. Web. 14 May 2014.
[4] Harrison, Jeff. "Study: Nation Wastes Nearly Half Its Food." UANews. 18 Nov. 2004. Web. 14 May 2014.
[5] Gunders, Dana. Wasted: How America Is Losing Up to 40 Percent of Its Food from Farm to Fork to Landfill. National Resources Defense Council. Aug. 2012. Web. 15 Apr. 2014.
[6] Blumberg, Alex. "Planet Money Makes a T-Shirt." Video blog post. NPR. 2 Dec. 2013. Web. 12 May 2014.
[7] Martin, Gary. "There's No Such Thing as a Free Lunch." The Phrase Finder. Web. 15 May 2014.
[8] Burke, Kerry. "THE DAY I ATE TRASH. Diving into Dumpster Feast with Scavenging 'freegans'" NY Daily News. 12 Feb. 2006. Web. 10 May 2014.
[9] "Homeless Homes Project." Homeless Homes Project. Web. 16 May 2014.
[10] McGlensey, Melissa. "This Artist Turns Street Trash Into Quirky Monsters Just To Make You Laugh." The Huffington Post. TheHuffingtonPost.com, 16 May 2014. Web. 16 May 2014.
[11] Gillan, Audrey. "Art Is Trash: The Sculptor Who Uses Rubbish in the Street."The Guardian. Guardian News and Media, 03 Oct. 2013. Web. 18 May 2014.
[12] "Overview: Who Were (are) the Diggers?" The Digger Archives. 13 Dec. 2013. Web. 15 May 2014.
[13] "The Diggers Mystique." Long Hair Times 13 Feb. 1967: 11. International Times Archive. Web. 15 May 2014. <http://www.internationaltimes.it/archive/index.php?item=IT_1967-02-13_B-IT-Volume-1_Iss-8_011>.
[14] "Freegan Visions." Freegan.info. Web. 20 May 2014.
[15] "Freeganism, Waste and the Ideology of the Product." Freegan.info. Web. 18 May 2014.