Then tell us about it!
Sam and many of her “diving buddies” identify as freegan: as part of a subculture whose basic premise is to reject consumer culture and strive to live in an economically minimalist manner. The website freegan.info explains it as a “commitment to creating models of living that allow us to limit the control that corporations and money have over our lives, reduce our financial support for the destructive practices of mass producers, and act as a living challenge to waste and over-consumption.”
While freegans make up a large portion of the dumpster-diving population, they do no compose all of it. “I run into everyone from spoiled college students who would rather spend their allowance on alcohol to homeless people just looking to eat,” said Sam.
Of course, the homeless who dumpster-dive do so in such a different way that the term “dumpster-diving” and all it has come to connote is almost inapplicable. Consider these two very different images. First, a website devoted to proud hippy types displaying pictures of their best hauls, trading tips, and arranging meet-ups. This type of dumpster-diving is more a hobby than anything else. Then there is the image of the poor and dispossessed, people who sift through garbage in desperation, seeking their next meal. This does not speak to the happy subculture previously described.
Yet it does speak to an obvious ethical problem: If you can pay for food but choose not to do so, what have you done to people without that choice? Are you stealing from the poor? This I found especially troubling in relation to dumpster-divers on the South Side of Chicago, where homelessness and unemployment are more of an issue than in the yuppie neighborhoods to the north.
As it turns out, however, the freegans’ conscience is clear, for the homeless participate in an altogether different kind of dumpster-diving. In Chicago’s South Side, for example, Fifty-Third Street features Hyde Park Produce, a grocery store, as well as a strip of restaurants. While Hyde Park Produce is a favorite of college students and freegans, divers claim to have never seen a homeless person take advantage of the refuse out back. Nevertheless, many of the restaurants down the street leave out leftover food in packages, which college students and freegans avoid because they are clearly intended for those in need.
This is good business for the freegans, who can continue their political crusade without fear of causing more harm than good. In fact, certain organizations, like Food Not Bombs, recover wasted foods through dumpster-diving and then prepare warm meals to serve on the streets. There are currently two chapters of Food Not Bombs in Chicago, and over one-thousand nationwide. The Food Not Bombs website explains the organization’s objective to “protest war, poverty and the destruction of the environment. With over a billion people going hungry each day, how can we spend billions on war?”
Not only are the freegans fighting an ideological crusade against waste, but they are also using the spoils of this crusade to help the poor in a very real way. This is perhaps the crux of the freegans’ subversive campaign: Simply refusing to partake of an exploitive consumer economy is the localized beginning, they believe, of a global movement to redistribute the world’s wealth through waste. The fact that its praxis will never actually catch up to its idealism merits little criticism, however; for while dumpster-diving is certainly a trashy habit, it is the opposite of a wasteful one, and that’s not rubbish .
