Freegans
My Favourite Newspaper article today. It's about a bunch of people who call themselves Freegans. To me they seem to embody the buddhist principle that to change society follow three precepts.
May 20, 2006
Freegans live off what supermarkets discard as a way to reduce their imprint on the world. Peter Singer and Jim Mason spend a night dumpster diving in Melbourne.
It's about 7.30 on a mild Tuesday evening in one of Melbourne's northern suburbs. I'm in a small Toyota station wagon with Tim, Shane, G (Gareth) and Danya. They are "freegans": people who minimise their impact on animals and the environment by living on what supermarkets throw out.
They're all in their 20s, wearing old denim or waterproof jackets, except for G who is wearing a jacket that might once have been more stylish and formal, but is now so worn that it would have suited Charlie Chaplin in The Tramp. The comical appearance is reinforced by the fact that G is tall and lanky and this jacket was made for someone much smaller.
To see what food it is possible to gather in this way, I accepted an invitation to join a foraging expedition. We park in the Safeway parking lot, but avoid the customer entrance, heading instead to the delivery ramp. A dumpster bin stands at the side.
The lid is chained and locked, but the chains have enough slack to allow you to raise the lids and insert an arm. G and Danya get their arms in and start bringing out loose potatoes, plastic wrapped packages of broccoli, a bunch of asparagus, plastic packs of flat Lebanese bread and a small can of tuna. The tuna can is dented, the broccoli is looking a little tired, and some of the potatoes have a slight greenish tinge.
We collect what we want, throw the rest back, replace the plastic bags and other trash that has come out accidentally, and leave the area at least as tidy as we found it.
We move around the corner to where there is another bin, this time unlocked. We throw the lid open to reveal boxes of strawberries. Tim says strawberries are not worth taking; they usually taste bad. Instead he picks out some tomatoes and capsicums, two large bottles of orange juice, wholemeal loaves of bread, white rolls, packs of croissants and maybe 30 packets of flat bread. Shane comes up with a long piece of fish. "Ah, blue grenadier!" he says, but he's laughing, because it smells really bad, and he throws it back.
"There's some really skank stuff down here," Danya warns, "watch out for the orange plastic bags, they're full of bad meat."We pick up the pile of food we have collected but put back most of the bread, keeping just a few of the flat breads and one pack of croissants. "We don't need that much, and there might be others coming after us," Tim explains.
Shane and G have gone somewhere else and return with cartons full of small bottles of orange juice. But they sample one and it's fizzy. They try another, same thing. It goes back in the dumpster. We head off to another group of supermarkets. Danya, who is sitting next to Shane, complains about the bad fish smell that still lingers on Shane's hands.
The next bin we visit is standing by the loading dock and isn't locked, so this time we climb up onto the dock and investigate the contents from above. Danya is delighted to find several cakes, still in clear plastic display boxes. It's her 21st birthday today, and she claims one as a birthday cake. She also finds a tray of chicken breasts and one of chicken drumsticks. "Are they cold?" Tim asks. Yes, they still feel cold. That means they haven't been out of refrigeration long, and that makes them acceptable.
Two dozen eggs, still in their cartons, are another find worth taking. So too are a bag of sugar, some tins of tomatoes, a large pack of Chinese noodles and a torn bag of pasta shells. "Does anyone drink Coke?" G asks. He's found a pack of 24 cans. Shane says yes, he'll have them. The carton is ripped, but the cans are intact, so he starts loading them into another cardboard box. G pulls out a chocolate cake covered in cream, removes the plastic packaging, takes a large bite and pronounces it good. There are large packs of toilet paper. "That's good, we always need them," says Shane. There is even an electric toothbrush, still in its package.
While we are going through the bin, the roller door behind us starts moving, and an employee who looks about 16 comes out with a wheelie bin to empty into the dumpster. He doesn't look particularly surprised to see us there, but he says, "If security come around you'll be in trouble." Tim nods assent and offers assistance in unloading the contents of the wheelie bin into the dumpster. The exchange is polite and friendly. We never see any security people, and this turns out to be the only encounter with anyone from one of the stores this evening. That's fairly typical. If they are asked to leave, they say, they just go.
We move on to another supermarket up the road. The bins here are chained down again, but the gap is wide enough for G to spot some coffee he wants. It's too far down for even his long arm to reach, so for the first and only time tonight we see some real "dumpster diving" as G gets his upper body right into the bin, only his legs sticking out the top. The loot is eight 250-gram vacuum-sealed packets of an imported Italian Arabica coffee, just a couple of days past the expiry date.
By now the back of the car is getting full and we are hungry, so we head home to cook. Home is an office-warehouse building that the group has been squatting in for about six months - apparently there is a legal dispute about who owns it, and the property had been vacant for years before they moved in. They've furnished it almost entirely with discarded items and had electricity and gas put back on, so it's comfortable and very spacious.
Tonight Tim does most of the cooking, with some advice and assistance from others. He chops up the asparagus, zucchini, broccoli and fresh tomatoes, and opens two tins of tomatoes as well. That all goes into a pot and gets cooked up. Meanwhile the pasta is boiling away, and when everything is ready we serve ourselves some pasta and add the sauce.
If this were a restaurant they'd probably call it Pasta Primavera. We wash it down with sparkling organic apple juice from New Zealand, in individual bottles. I've had better meals in restaurants, but I've had worse too. Although some of the items we got were past their use-by date or had damaged packaging, with others there was no obvious reason why they had been thrown out.
The expiration date on the eggs was still two weeks away and none were broken. The cans of Coke and the Chinese noodles weren't damaged or about to go bad. The toilet paper and electric toothbrush would have lasted indefinitely. "You find stuff and can't figure out why it has been thrown away," Tim says. "We got cartons of organic breakfast cereal and the use-by date was two months ahead."
"And what about this organic apple juice?" I ask, holding up the bottle I've just enjoyed drinking. "That had a use-by date about a year ago," Tim says, and everyone laughs at my evident discomfort. "But don't worry, it's perfectly fine." And indeed it was. I experienced no after-effects, from that or any of the other ingredients in the meal. Nor have any of the others ever had any stomach problems from a dumpster meal.
After we've eaten, Danya goes out with a friend to celebrate her birthday, and the rest of us start talking about lifestyles and "dumpstering". G says he got started about two years ago when he was reading Georges Bataille, the French writer and thinker who died in 1962. In contrast to conventional economists, who start from the problem of scarcity and how best to overcome it, Bataille analysed the prevailing social and economic order by seeing what it does with its excess. So the next time G passed a supermarket's dumpster, he looked in.
"There were about a hundred bananas in there," he said. That got him really excited, and he has been dumpstering ever since. Now he gets all his meals from dumpstering, living from the excess of corporate capitalism. Some days are better than others, he says, but you can always find a meal. G is studying at university. He would be eligible for Austudy payments, but G feels no need for it and hasn't applied. "I can live without money."
Tim takes a slightly different view. He earns some money, but goes dumpstering in order to save for things he can't get free. "It's a question of priorities. Beyond wanting to save money, it's about how you want to spend it. Whether you want to be just a mindless consumer, or whether you want to put your money into useful stuff, and save money for things that are tools, like keeping a car that I need on the road, buying laptops and digital video players. It means that you are able to have access to resources that we couldn't otherwise afford."
Shane has been dumpstering for about five years. Dumpstering, he says, is empowering. "Think of the single mother who has to scrape together enough money to be able to buy a tin of baked beans and some white bread for herself and her kid. If she had the confidence to go around the back and walk up to the bin, she could get much better food for nothing. But she can't transcend the cultural shame.
For us, it's culturally acceptable to do it, and we have the skills and the confidence as well. So although none of us has a high-paying job, we live a very comfortable lifestyle, much better than we could afford on what we earn if we had to pay for everything we use. "What's better about dumpstering is that you're not buying into that whole process of consumption. Even buying organic food involves being part of the consumer economy. Dumpstering really does break the consumer chain," he says.
G says that dumpstering has "an ethical dimension ... We're saving food that would otherwise totally go to waste - perfectly good food. We're recycling it." Tim adds: "It's got to be the lowest-impact form of food consumption." Then he goes on to say that because you don't need much money, you can spend your time doing something socially useful, rather than getting a meaningless job to earn money to buy food. To judge by the leaflets and notices stuck on boards in the house, people living there are spending time on campaigns for indigenous Australians, against duck shooting, for environmental protection, and against the war in Iraq.
Apart from all that, this way of getting food just seems to be a lot of fun. "It's a daily victory against the system," Tim says. "Every day you come home and think 'I've won. It may be only a small victory, but I've won'." Shane talks about the "rush" of finding great stuff, and G mentions the communal aspect of dumpstered meals: "There's a really good alternative economy in terms of the way you can share and distribute your food as well. Every meal you can share with a couple of people, and there's never any hassle or concern about where the food is coming from. You know it is from this resource that is kind of ... unending. It's a permanent gift." G also relishes the challenge of getting a few things and working out what you're going to cook with them.
Our evening of dumpstering in Melbourne could have been replicated in any large city in the US, Canada or much of Europe. Nobody knows how many people do it, but at the time of writing, http://www.meetup.com/ listed 1888 people interested in dumpstering, and the New York City group alone had 199 members. I had imagined that dumpstering would retrieve only old or blemished food and was astonished by the non-perishable items in perfect condition we found in dumpster bins; later I discovered that our gleanings were typical of what is thrown out in many countries. A New York dumpster diver recounts finding dumpsters full of expensive packages of gourmet nuts and dried fruit, luxury chocolates, three or four 50-pound bags of bagels regularly thrown out by a single deli, and large quantities of non-perishable food like rice pilaf mixes and instant soups.
Some of this waste is easily explained. Bakeries, doughnut stores, delis and salad bars often advertise that they bake fresh, or get freshly made food every day, and they also like to keep their racks and salad bowls full, so that customers don't get the impression that they are buying the dregs after other customers have picked them over.
This combination ensures that at the end of the day a lot of perfectly good food gets thrown out. A small fraction of it may be donated to food banks or shelters for homeless people, but most of it is simply put in the bin, probably because the stores are worried about undermining their own sales - if the word gets around that you can get something for free at 10pm, fewer people will buy it at 8pm.
But the reasons for throwing away non-perishable goods are more mysterious. On some products, stores get lower prices for ordering large quantities, so it can be cheaper for them to order more and put what they don't sell in the bin than to buy only what they can sell. Perhaps more importantly, shelf space is a limited resource, and stores regularly clear out shelves for new deliveries.
The store may have a long-term contract with a supplier to provide a specified quantity of a product each week. If an item has not sold as well as expected, the old stock will be dumped, even if it is not out of date, to make way for the new stock.
Many dumpster divers began as vegans, but became convinced that boycotting animal products is not radical enough. An anonymous vegan has said that being a freegan means that "you are boycotting EVERYTHING! ... That should help you get to sleep at night."
While freegans are more radical than vegans in refusing to purchase any kind of food at all, they are also more flexible, in that they see no ethical objection to eating animal products that have been thrown out. They want to avoid giving their money to those who exploit animals.
Once a product has been dumped, whether it gets eaten or turned into landfill can make no difference to the producer. Some freegans still don't like the idea of dining on a corpse, and - although they are prepared to eat food from dumpsters - they know about fecal contamination on meat and see health risks in eating anything that has passed through a slaughterhouse. But their reasoning is impeccably consequentialist: if you oppose the abuse of animals but enjoy eating meat, cheese or eggs - get it from a dumpster.
Freeganism is not only about free food. Behind it lies a view about how to live one's life, one that rejects the priorities set by the consumer society and the lifestyle that results from accepting those priorities. Because most people see their status as linked to wealth and what they can buy, they are locked into working, often in unsatisfying jobs, to earn the money they need to enhance their status. Freegans reject that idea of status and do not even need to earn money to satisfy their basic needs. Freegans see happiness as something that comes from doing things, rather than having things.
If they work at all, it will be because they see the work they are doing as worthwhile in itself. To a far greater extent than people who pay for everything they consume, freegans' time is, as Tim said, their own, to enjoy or to use for working for what they believe in. They are thus doubly free - free from subordination to the consumer ethos and free from the need to work to satisfy their needs.
They think that an alternative, less exploitative economic system is possible, but they are under no illusion that taking food from dumpsters will in itself bring that system about. Instead they see dumpster diving both as a way of detaching themselves from the present system and, at the same time, as part of a broader life of resistance to that system.
Dumpster diving may not be an option many consumers are likely to explore, but there's still a lesson to draw. Many of agriculture's ill effects on labourers, animals and the environment could be reduced if we ate what would otherwise be wasted. According to Dr Timothy Jones, an archaeologist at the University of Arizona who led a US government-funded study of food waste, more than 40 per cent of the food grown in the United States is lost or thrown away - that's about $US100 billion of wasted food a year.
At least half of this food, Dr Jones says, could have been safely consumed. Waste could also be reduced by having better storage facilities. Some of the waste is completely pointless and reflects nothing more than a casual disregard for what went into producing the food, from the suffering of the animals, to the labour of the workers, to the natural resources consumed and the pollution generated.
Dr Jones examined what stores, restaurants and individuals throw out and found that 14 per cent of household garbage was perfectly good food that was in its original packaging and not out of date. About a third of this edible food was dry-packaged goods, and canned goods that keep for a long time made up another 19 per cent. Dr Jones speculated that discounts for bulk purchases lead people to buy more food than they want to keep, but he admits to some bafflement, remarking: "I just don't understand this."
As consumers, we have direct control over our own waste. To tread more lightly on the planet, we'd do well to follow the advice our mothers gave us: eat your leftovers.
This is an edited extract from The Ethics of What We Eat by Peter Singer and Jim Mason, Text Publishing, $32.95.
- Start with yourself
- Think small
- Start now
Here they are --- Ta-da-da-daaaaaaa.
May 20, 2006
Freegans live off what supermarkets discard as a way to reduce their imprint on the world. Peter Singer and Jim Mason spend a night dumpster diving in Melbourne.
It's about 7.30 on a mild Tuesday evening in one of Melbourne's northern suburbs. I'm in a small Toyota station wagon with Tim, Shane, G (Gareth) and Danya. They are "freegans": people who minimise their impact on animals and the environment by living on what supermarkets throw out.
They're all in their 20s, wearing old denim or waterproof jackets, except for G who is wearing a jacket that might once have been more stylish and formal, but is now so worn that it would have suited Charlie Chaplin in The Tramp. The comical appearance is reinforced by the fact that G is tall and lanky and this jacket was made for someone much smaller.
To see what food it is possible to gather in this way, I accepted an invitation to join a foraging expedition. We park in the Safeway parking lot, but avoid the customer entrance, heading instead to the delivery ramp. A dumpster bin stands at the side.
The lid is chained and locked, but the chains have enough slack to allow you to raise the lids and insert an arm. G and Danya get their arms in and start bringing out loose potatoes, plastic wrapped packages of broccoli, a bunch of asparagus, plastic packs of flat Lebanese bread and a small can of tuna. The tuna can is dented, the broccoli is looking a little tired, and some of the potatoes have a slight greenish tinge.
We collect what we want, throw the rest back, replace the plastic bags and other trash that has come out accidentally, and leave the area at least as tidy as we found it.
We move around the corner to where there is another bin, this time unlocked. We throw the lid open to reveal boxes of strawberries. Tim says strawberries are not worth taking; they usually taste bad. Instead he picks out some tomatoes and capsicums, two large bottles of orange juice, wholemeal loaves of bread, white rolls, packs of croissants and maybe 30 packets of flat bread. Shane comes up with a long piece of fish. "Ah, blue grenadier!" he says, but he's laughing, because it smells really bad, and he throws it back.
"There's some really skank stuff down here," Danya warns, "watch out for the orange plastic bags, they're full of bad meat."We pick up the pile of food we have collected but put back most of the bread, keeping just a few of the flat breads and one pack of croissants. "We don't need that much, and there might be others coming after us," Tim explains.
Shane and G have gone somewhere else and return with cartons full of small bottles of orange juice. But they sample one and it's fizzy. They try another, same thing. It goes back in the dumpster. We head off to another group of supermarkets. Danya, who is sitting next to Shane, complains about the bad fish smell that still lingers on Shane's hands.
The next bin we visit is standing by the loading dock and isn't locked, so this time we climb up onto the dock and investigate the contents from above. Danya is delighted to find several cakes, still in clear plastic display boxes. It's her 21st birthday today, and she claims one as a birthday cake. She also finds a tray of chicken breasts and one of chicken drumsticks. "Are they cold?" Tim asks. Yes, they still feel cold. That means they haven't been out of refrigeration long, and that makes them acceptable.
Two dozen eggs, still in their cartons, are another find worth taking. So too are a bag of sugar, some tins of tomatoes, a large pack of Chinese noodles and a torn bag of pasta shells. "Does anyone drink Coke?" G asks. He's found a pack of 24 cans. Shane says yes, he'll have them. The carton is ripped, but the cans are intact, so he starts loading them into another cardboard box. G pulls out a chocolate cake covered in cream, removes the plastic packaging, takes a large bite and pronounces it good. There are large packs of toilet paper. "That's good, we always need them," says Shane. There is even an electric toothbrush, still in its package.
While we are going through the bin, the roller door behind us starts moving, and an employee who looks about 16 comes out with a wheelie bin to empty into the dumpster. He doesn't look particularly surprised to see us there, but he says, "If security come around you'll be in trouble." Tim nods assent and offers assistance in unloading the contents of the wheelie bin into the dumpster. The exchange is polite and friendly. We never see any security people, and this turns out to be the only encounter with anyone from one of the stores this evening. That's fairly typical. If they are asked to leave, they say, they just go.
We move on to another supermarket up the road. The bins here are chained down again, but the gap is wide enough for G to spot some coffee he wants. It's too far down for even his long arm to reach, so for the first and only time tonight we see some real "dumpster diving" as G gets his upper body right into the bin, only his legs sticking out the top. The loot is eight 250-gram vacuum-sealed packets of an imported Italian Arabica coffee, just a couple of days past the expiry date.
By now the back of the car is getting full and we are hungry, so we head home to cook. Home is an office-warehouse building that the group has been squatting in for about six months - apparently there is a legal dispute about who owns it, and the property had been vacant for years before they moved in. They've furnished it almost entirely with discarded items and had electricity and gas put back on, so it's comfortable and very spacious.
Tonight Tim does most of the cooking, with some advice and assistance from others. He chops up the asparagus, zucchini, broccoli and fresh tomatoes, and opens two tins of tomatoes as well. That all goes into a pot and gets cooked up. Meanwhile the pasta is boiling away, and when everything is ready we serve ourselves some pasta and add the sauce.
If this were a restaurant they'd probably call it Pasta Primavera. We wash it down with sparkling organic apple juice from New Zealand, in individual bottles. I've had better meals in restaurants, but I've had worse too. Although some of the items we got were past their use-by date or had damaged packaging, with others there was no obvious reason why they had been thrown out.
The expiration date on the eggs was still two weeks away and none were broken. The cans of Coke and the Chinese noodles weren't damaged or about to go bad. The toilet paper and electric toothbrush would have lasted indefinitely. "You find stuff and can't figure out why it has been thrown away," Tim says. "We got cartons of organic breakfast cereal and the use-by date was two months ahead."
"And what about this organic apple juice?" I ask, holding up the bottle I've just enjoyed drinking. "That had a use-by date about a year ago," Tim says, and everyone laughs at my evident discomfort. "But don't worry, it's perfectly fine." And indeed it was. I experienced no after-effects, from that or any of the other ingredients in the meal. Nor have any of the others ever had any stomach problems from a dumpster meal.
After we've eaten, Danya goes out with a friend to celebrate her birthday, and the rest of us start talking about lifestyles and "dumpstering". G says he got started about two years ago when he was reading Georges Bataille, the French writer and thinker who died in 1962. In contrast to conventional economists, who start from the problem of scarcity and how best to overcome it, Bataille analysed the prevailing social and economic order by seeing what it does with its excess. So the next time G passed a supermarket's dumpster, he looked in.
"There were about a hundred bananas in there," he said. That got him really excited, and he has been dumpstering ever since. Now he gets all his meals from dumpstering, living from the excess of corporate capitalism. Some days are better than others, he says, but you can always find a meal. G is studying at university. He would be eligible for Austudy payments, but G feels no need for it and hasn't applied. "I can live without money."
Tim takes a slightly different view. He earns some money, but goes dumpstering in order to save for things he can't get free. "It's a question of priorities. Beyond wanting to save money, it's about how you want to spend it. Whether you want to be just a mindless consumer, or whether you want to put your money into useful stuff, and save money for things that are tools, like keeping a car that I need on the road, buying laptops and digital video players. It means that you are able to have access to resources that we couldn't otherwise afford."
Shane has been dumpstering for about five years. Dumpstering, he says, is empowering. "Think of the single mother who has to scrape together enough money to be able to buy a tin of baked beans and some white bread for herself and her kid. If she had the confidence to go around the back and walk up to the bin, she could get much better food for nothing. But she can't transcend the cultural shame.
For us, it's culturally acceptable to do it, and we have the skills and the confidence as well. So although none of us has a high-paying job, we live a very comfortable lifestyle, much better than we could afford on what we earn if we had to pay for everything we use. "What's better about dumpstering is that you're not buying into that whole process of consumption. Even buying organic food involves being part of the consumer economy. Dumpstering really does break the consumer chain," he says.
G says that dumpstering has "an ethical dimension ... We're saving food that would otherwise totally go to waste - perfectly good food. We're recycling it." Tim adds: "It's got to be the lowest-impact form of food consumption." Then he goes on to say that because you don't need much money, you can spend your time doing something socially useful, rather than getting a meaningless job to earn money to buy food. To judge by the leaflets and notices stuck on boards in the house, people living there are spending time on campaigns for indigenous Australians, against duck shooting, for environmental protection, and against the war in Iraq.
Apart from all that, this way of getting food just seems to be a lot of fun. "It's a daily victory against the system," Tim says. "Every day you come home and think 'I've won. It may be only a small victory, but I've won'." Shane talks about the "rush" of finding great stuff, and G mentions the communal aspect of dumpstered meals: "There's a really good alternative economy in terms of the way you can share and distribute your food as well. Every meal you can share with a couple of people, and there's never any hassle or concern about where the food is coming from. You know it is from this resource that is kind of ... unending. It's a permanent gift." G also relishes the challenge of getting a few things and working out what you're going to cook with them.
Our evening of dumpstering in Melbourne could have been replicated in any large city in the US, Canada or much of Europe. Nobody knows how many people do it, but at the time of writing, http://www.meetup.com/ listed 1888 people interested in dumpstering, and the New York City group alone had 199 members. I had imagined that dumpstering would retrieve only old or blemished food and was astonished by the non-perishable items in perfect condition we found in dumpster bins; later I discovered that our gleanings were typical of what is thrown out in many countries. A New York dumpster diver recounts finding dumpsters full of expensive packages of gourmet nuts and dried fruit, luxury chocolates, three or four 50-pound bags of bagels regularly thrown out by a single deli, and large quantities of non-perishable food like rice pilaf mixes and instant soups.
Some of this waste is easily explained. Bakeries, doughnut stores, delis and salad bars often advertise that they bake fresh, or get freshly made food every day, and they also like to keep their racks and salad bowls full, so that customers don't get the impression that they are buying the dregs after other customers have picked them over.
This combination ensures that at the end of the day a lot of perfectly good food gets thrown out. A small fraction of it may be donated to food banks or shelters for homeless people, but most of it is simply put in the bin, probably because the stores are worried about undermining their own sales - if the word gets around that you can get something for free at 10pm, fewer people will buy it at 8pm.
But the reasons for throwing away non-perishable goods are more mysterious. On some products, stores get lower prices for ordering large quantities, so it can be cheaper for them to order more and put what they don't sell in the bin than to buy only what they can sell. Perhaps more importantly, shelf space is a limited resource, and stores regularly clear out shelves for new deliveries.
The store may have a long-term contract with a supplier to provide a specified quantity of a product each week. If an item has not sold as well as expected, the old stock will be dumped, even if it is not out of date, to make way for the new stock.
Many dumpster divers began as vegans, but became convinced that boycotting animal products is not radical enough. An anonymous vegan has said that being a freegan means that "you are boycotting EVERYTHING! ... That should help you get to sleep at night."
While freegans are more radical than vegans in refusing to purchase any kind of food at all, they are also more flexible, in that they see no ethical objection to eating animal products that have been thrown out. They want to avoid giving their money to those who exploit animals.
Once a product has been dumped, whether it gets eaten or turned into landfill can make no difference to the producer. Some freegans still don't like the idea of dining on a corpse, and - although they are prepared to eat food from dumpsters - they know about fecal contamination on meat and see health risks in eating anything that has passed through a slaughterhouse. But their reasoning is impeccably consequentialist: if you oppose the abuse of animals but enjoy eating meat, cheese or eggs - get it from a dumpster.
Freeganism is not only about free food. Behind it lies a view about how to live one's life, one that rejects the priorities set by the consumer society and the lifestyle that results from accepting those priorities. Because most people see their status as linked to wealth and what they can buy, they are locked into working, often in unsatisfying jobs, to earn the money they need to enhance their status. Freegans reject that idea of status and do not even need to earn money to satisfy their basic needs. Freegans see happiness as something that comes from doing things, rather than having things.
If they work at all, it will be because they see the work they are doing as worthwhile in itself. To a far greater extent than people who pay for everything they consume, freegans' time is, as Tim said, their own, to enjoy or to use for working for what they believe in. They are thus doubly free - free from subordination to the consumer ethos and free from the need to work to satisfy their needs.
They think that an alternative, less exploitative economic system is possible, but they are under no illusion that taking food from dumpsters will in itself bring that system about. Instead they see dumpster diving both as a way of detaching themselves from the present system and, at the same time, as part of a broader life of resistance to that system.
Dumpster diving may not be an option many consumers are likely to explore, but there's still a lesson to draw. Many of agriculture's ill effects on labourers, animals and the environment could be reduced if we ate what would otherwise be wasted. According to Dr Timothy Jones, an archaeologist at the University of Arizona who led a US government-funded study of food waste, more than 40 per cent of the food grown in the United States is lost or thrown away - that's about $US100 billion of wasted food a year.
At least half of this food, Dr Jones says, could have been safely consumed. Waste could also be reduced by having better storage facilities. Some of the waste is completely pointless and reflects nothing more than a casual disregard for what went into producing the food, from the suffering of the animals, to the labour of the workers, to the natural resources consumed and the pollution generated.
Dr Jones examined what stores, restaurants and individuals throw out and found that 14 per cent of household garbage was perfectly good food that was in its original packaging and not out of date. About a third of this edible food was dry-packaged goods, and canned goods that keep for a long time made up another 19 per cent. Dr Jones speculated that discounts for bulk purchases lead people to buy more food than they want to keep, but he admits to some bafflement, remarking: "I just don't understand this."
As consumers, we have direct control over our own waste. To tread more lightly on the planet, we'd do well to follow the advice our mothers gave us: eat your leftovers.
This is an edited extract from The Ethics of What We Eat by Peter Singer and Jim Mason, Text Publishing, $32.95.
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