Freegan - strategies for sustainable living beyond capitalism

Freegans are people who employ alternative strategies for living 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. After years of trying to boycott products from unethical corporations responsible for human rights violations, environmental destruction, and animal abuse, many of us found that no matter what we bought we ended up supporting something deplorable. We came to realize that the problem isn’t just a few bad corporations but the entire system itself.

Freeganism is a total boycott of an economic system where the profit motive has eclipsed ethical considerations and where massively complex systems of productions ensure that all the products we buy will have detrimental impacts most of which we may never even consider. Thus, instead of avoiding the purchase of products from one bad company only to support another, we avoid buying anything to the greatest degree we are able.
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The word freegan is compounded from “free” and “vegan”. Vegans are people who avoid products from animal sources or products tested on animals in an effort to avoid harming animals. Freegans take this a step further by recognizing that in a complex, industrial, mass-production economy driven by profit, abuses of humans, animals, and the earth abound at all levels of production (from acquisition to raw materials to production to transportation) and in just about every product we buy. Sweatshop labor, rainforest destruction, global warming, displacement of indigenous communities, air and water pollution, eradication of wildlife on farmland as “pests”, the violent overthrow of popularly elected governments to maintain puppet dictators compliant to big business interests, open-pit strip mining, oil drilling in environmentally sensitive areas, union busting, child slavery, and payoffs to repressive regimes are just some of the many impacts of the seemingly innocuous consumer products we consume every day.
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Urban Foraging: Liberating Our Consumption, Liberating Our Lives

By Adam Weissman  ....... Can we really save the world with Body Shop cosmetics?

Will Vegetarian Shoes march us on the road to animal liberation?

Is Burger King’s BK Veggie the vanguard of a new era of compassion?

In a word, no.

As people of conscience have questioned the cruelty and suffering inherent in the products that we consume, a burgeoning industry has arisen to profit richly from tapping into this niche market. In return, vegetarians, vegans, and other socially conscious consumers have embraced these “guilt-free” products with open arms as a solution whose only drawback is that they have not been universally embraced by the general public. One national animal rights leader has gone so far as to say that the most important development towards animal liberation is the advent of “packaged vegan convenience foods.”

In treating these products as marketplace messiahs, we betray the questioning spirit that led many of us to challenge the impact of our purchases in the first place. When we call a product, ANY product, “cruelty-free” then we are simply buying into its advertising copy. In reality, the dichotomy between “cruelty-free” and other goods is, if not false, limited.

The concept of the cruelty-free product denies a fundamental and unavoidable reality. In a civilization that was built upon and continues to exist through the subjugation of the earth, animals, women, people of color, and the poor, exploitation is woven into every level of every activity condoned within that civilization. For example, a relatively recent development in civilization’s commodfication and devaluation of life, all productive activity is designed to produce economic growth, generate great wealth for a tiny superelite, and transform our living planet into capital through the labor of the working class.

We can look at any “cruelty-free” product and find massive amounts of exploitation in its production, even if it abstains from exploitation on one or two significant, and inevitably, heavily advertised, ways. Take a pack of Tofu Pups for example. These non-meat hot dogs are a favorite of people who wish to abstain from flesh-eating, but still wish to enjoy some of the comfort foods that they have eaten for decades.
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For starters, we can look at the growing of the soybeans used. Vegetarians and vegans have been so horrified by the atrocity of raising and slaughtering animals for consumption, that they have turned a blind eye to the exploitation and suffering involved in raising crops.

From the outset, the creation of farmland involves the complete destruction of preexisting habitat and ecosystems, whether this means logging a forest or simply threshing preexisting browse and to clear land for crop rows and loosen soil, inevitably leading to significant topsoil loss. Animal species and the ecosystems they are part of rely on a highly specific and delicate set of habitat conditions to survive. When we turn biodiverse, unspoiled plains and forests into farmlands, we kill countless animals that fall to their deaths as trees crash to the ground or who are crushed or to ground to their deaths by tractors or plows.

According to Oregon State University Steven Davis, “the unseen losses of field animals are very high. One study documented that a single operation, mowing alfalfa, caused a 50 percent reduction in the gray-tailed vole population. Mortality rates increase with every pass of the tractor to plow, plant, and harvest.”

Those animals that survive the decimation of their habitat, escape being crushed or shredded by farm equipment, and do not starve from inability to adapt to the field that has replaced their habitat attempt to subsist by consuming the crops that have replaced the native flora and fauna. For this desperate act of survival, for the crime of attempting to survive on land that has been designated for the production of a product, they are considered “agricultural pests.” As punishment, they will be hunted ; trapped; poisoned with pesticides and fumigants ; consumed by “biological controls agents”, animals introduced by farmers specifically to prey on “pest” species ; or eliminated through any of a number of other gruesome methods.
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The dirty work of maintaining these lands is handled by some of the most severely exploited workers on the planet. The veganism of grapes, cucumbers, tomatoes, and strawberries does nothing to address the horrible exploitation of the farm workers who sow, till, fertilize, apply pesticides, and harvest crops.

According to the Farm Labor Organizing Committee, conditions for farm workers in the U.S. include: strenuous and often deforming physical labor in hazardous working conditions; average earnings far below poverty; child labor; sub-standard housing; and some of the nation’s poorest health conditions, including elevated rates of infectious and chronic diseases, malnutrition, and infant and maternal mortality.

This is to say nothing of the impacts of the plastic (oil drilling) and cardboard (forest logging) used to package these products and the energy used to produce them, the energy used in the transformation from bean to pup, the impacts of the production of every other pup ingredient, the energy consumption involved in trucking the pups across country in refrigerated trucks, the destruction of rainforest lands (and displacement of their human and animal inhabitants) to strip mine metals to build the truck and drill for oil to fuel it, the exploitation of non-union workers at the point of sale, the energy used in in-store and at-home refrigeration and cooking– all this for a “cruelty-free” product!
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The “cruelty-free” product is, to many manufacturers, nothing more than a marketing ploy. The very term “cruelty-free product” is oxymoronic, because the very notion of production, the idea of taking things in nature and transforming them for mass-consumption within the context of an industrial system, is unavoidably cruel. Its foundation is a view of the natural world as a raw material to be transformed into marketable commodities.

The cruelty-free consumer, is, in her own way, as much a rube as the fashion trend shopper, the fad dieter, and the consumer swayed by sex-filled advertising. Cruelty-free companies, like low-fat diet food makers, market guilt-relief, selling an image and an idea to a target market through emotional manipulation. Yet in obscuring the violent realities inherent in the creation of their products, they are little different than the mega-corporations that often own them.
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So what is the alternative?

Before production, before industry, before agriculture, even before the advent of the ritual hunt, humans provided for themselves through direct communion with nature’s bounty, foraging fruits, nuts, seeds, berries, and roots. The land was not owned and food was not a product. People consumed to meet their needs, with little opportunity for waste or overconsumption. The only “producer” was the Earth itself. Human patterns of consumption were governed within the context of our native ecosystems. Humans existed as equals with other animals and the earth, not as owners, conquerors, “stewards,” or destroyers.

In the context of a civilization that views animals and the earth as raw materials, humanity as a market, and disease and warfare as opportunities for profit, a growing number of people are reconnecting to our species’ forager roots. Some, like naturalist Wildman Steve Brill, are rediscovering and educating others on wild, noncultivated plants as a food source.

Many more have taken into account the tremendous amount of waste generated by mass-production, and survive by consuming the enormous amount of resources discarded every single day. Variously referred to as urban foragers, dumpster divers, scavengers, or freegans, these people are able to live without financially contributing to exploitative systems of production, while at the same time taking a small bite out of the waste stream.

Urban foragers rarely, if ever, need to shop, providing for such basic necessities as food and clothing through the discards of retailers, factories, and individuals. Some, known as “squatters”, even provide for housing through foraging, finding, restoring, and inhabiting abandoned buildings, providing rent-free dwellings. This lifestyle allows the forager to escape the vicious cycle of selling their time to bosses to make money, and then giving the money back to other bosses to purchase consumables that they have been brainwashed into believing that they need and must buy. By escaping this dual slavery, urban foragers become their own masters. They can devote their time to defending the Earth and its inhabitants, rather than mortgaging their lives to the very system responsible for the destruction.
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Despite its noble intentions, foraging is a hard sell on many– it is hard to think of a lifestyle reform movement that causes more turned stomachs and upturned noses among its critics. For all of the ridicule that vegans face from the mainstream public, ultimately they are still playing within the rules. Whether a consumer responds to one marketing pitch or another, they are still buying in, still acting as a cog in the capitalist machine. Foraging is a far more wholesale challenge to the status quo, challenging not only a few specific symptoms of this destructive society, but instead opting out of the entire system. Moreover, foraging embraces a number of deep-seated cultural taboos. In a culture of mass-overproduction, the notion that excess will be reclaimed is a clear and present danger to the success of the market place. To prevent massive numbers of people from realizing that they can obtain the same goods for free that they are forced to spend money on, scarcity must be manufactured to maintain the value of the merchant’s wares. Thus the ideology of consumerism tells us that a thing is only valid if it is purchased in a store, has greater value if it is a heavily advertised good, or carries a designer label, and cannot be trusted if obtained from any other source. . We have been taught that those things considered waste became unfit for consumption the moment they are removed from a store shelf. Reality of course, differs sharply from traditional perceptions. Every single night, restaurants, bakeries, groceries, delis, and cafeterias discard massive amounts of perfectly healthy, clean, fresh food. Those who recover these squandered resources by opening trash bags and gleefully harvesting are frowned upon as vagrants, unclean, mentally ill, and unhealthy. Not only have they made physical contact with, and worse, ingested the trash of others, perceived to be a world of filth and disease, but they have also deliberately assumed the food gathering technique of the poor. This in a society that to no small degree judges people by their money, the status of the career with which they obtain it, and the things they spend it on!

On the other hand, foraging does have common sense appeal to a growing number of people, many who do not fit the stereotype of a young hippie or anarchist often associated with dumpster diving. Ironically, the fact that many have been schooled in the value of material things also leads them to be bothered by seeing these things wasted, regardless of whether they have a fully developed critique of civilization or an animal or earth liberation analysis. Some dumpster dive purely for the joy of unearthing treasures free of charge. Others are motivated to provide for their needs out of economic necessity created by low-paying jobs or job loss. Some can’t stomach the idea of “dumpstered” food, but are more than happy to recover books, clothing, newspapers, magazines, games, and furniture from others’ trash.
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Beyond cult favorites like Robert Hoyt’s folk music album “Dumpster Diving Across America” and the book “The Art and Science of Dumpster Diving,” the mainsteam media has increasingly taken note of this growing trend. two stories on the PBS TV series Life 360 addressed reuse of trash, one of which followed a band of merry dumpster divers from the Activism Center at Wetlands Preserve through the streets of Lower Manhattan, as they raided the trash bags of health food stores, Italian restaurants, bakeries, and sandwich shops (one diver found an expensive boom box in perfect condition). The popular on-line journal Salon.com’s June 10, 2002 issue ran an article “Fine diving” on “Young anarchists with guts of steel raid dumpsters for edible “trash…[to] Divert waste to end wastefulness.” And Ohioans read the article “Dining by Dumpster: Food banished to bins still edible, some say” in the Columbus Dispatch last year.

The term “freegan” has even made its way into dictionaries! Urbandictionary.com defines a freegan as, “Freegan: Somebody who abstains from contributing to the economy and salvages society’s wasted food and resources rather than purchase more themselves. Often pertains to a VEGAN somebody who doesn’t eat/wear animal products) who only makes exceptions when dealing with otherwise wasted items. [Example:] Tom taught me that as a freegan, he would much rather grab bagels out of the dumpster of a bakery instead of purchasing them himself, because he thinks it’s a shame how much good bread places like that waste everyday.”
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While the growth of this movement is encouraging, radical foragers are under no illusion that consuming trash in isolation of other actions will change much of anything. While consumer choices are important, radical foragers ultimately recognize that it is the entire system that must fall, that the powers that be will concede nothing without a fight, and we have an moral imperative not just for abstinence from purchasing, but also for ACTION! Whether they are blockading logging roads with Earth First!, raising consciousness by producing anarchist ‘zines like After The Fall, or sharing the wealth by redistributing free food with Food Not Bombs, foragers view their consumption choices as one element in a lifestyle of resistance to a status quo that enslaves animals, oppresses humans, and destroys our planet.

If you are still unconvinced as to the incredible bounty available from the waste of businesses and individuals, why not untie a few bags in front of your local bagel shop? The cops won’t bother you, provided you don’t make a mess (REMEMBER: Untie, don’t tear bags! Someone else many want to raid the same trash another day, and leaving a mess may motivate a store owner to keep food in a locked dumpster.) You’ll be amazed by the abundance of perfectly edible food you’ll find. Within a week, you may find yourself catering parties with dumpstered food!

Freegan Visions

Civilization and particularly Capitalism have reduced all things to commodities to be bought and sold. Civilization has reduced people, animals, and the Earth to solely economic terms, assessing their value as they relate to profit margins without appreciating their intrinsic and interdependent value beyond monetary worth.

Our civilization is in a collective state of denial to the unavoidable reality that it is dooming itself and much of the rest of life on the planet. We laud mass over-consumption as “economic growth” and the destruction of wilderness as “progress”. As we come closer and closer to reaching the carrying capacity of this planet, our assumption that the Earth has unlimited resources and can take unlimited pollution is choking the life out of everything. Already millions of humans die of starvation. Already countless animals die as a result of the destruction of their native ecosystems — forests cleared for timber or cattle-grazing land, mighty rivers dammed, fertile plains turned to deserts through punishing agriculture. Already people set the Earth and her inhabitants of all species ablaze as oil barons and their pawns in government seek to expand their hegemony through imperialist wars.
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Already animals are treated as machines in factory farms — not chickens, but “egg-laying units”. They are statistics on a balance sheet viewed little differently than the workers who handle them, usually poor people who enjoy a species privilege allowing them to not be the slaves, but, lacking class and often race and gender privileges they are nonetheless subjected to miserable conditions, poor wages, long hours, sexual harassment, and weak job security. The most miserably exploited of workers are the poor people of color, reviled and scorned by the white working class who enjoy one degree more privilege than they and who are fed a diet of right-wing propaganda by their masters, taught to not question the master, but to blame immigrant workers and mothers of color for their economic hardship and the emptiness of their lives.
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It is that very emptiness that the charlatans called televangelists and pornographers and marketing executives and military recruiters and racist and anti-gay hate mongers seek to exploit, offering sex and control and power and toys and rage and someone to blame. But their remedy is like sugar candy — it may look good on the surface, it may taste sweet, but it offers no real fulfillment. With this emptiness, shared even by those at the upper strata of political and economic power, is the emptiness of an animal far from home, separated from family and community, detached from a history of eons as beings who lived as kin with all life, as part of an ancient and eternal tapestry of life. We hear faintly the call of that which we were part of, of that which we were, and maybe can be again. But rather than answering it, we seek to silence it, drugged or boob-tubed into a stupor, perverting our interactions with the wild as dominance rituals like hunting, trapping, and fishing, and relishing and suspiciously guarding our own privilege and status by applying the boot fiercely to the next one down — the Irish cop who brutalizes Latino youth, the son of a Holocaust survivor who orders the bombing of a Palestinian home, the immigrant worker who finds entertainment in cockfighting.

Freegans say enough of this. We want no part. We reject it all — the drive for status, the lust for wealth, the sense of power and accomplishment from the purchase of needless commodities. We provide for our needs without feeding the monster. In a system inextricable from oppression, our jobs will ultimately harm others, the money we spend will be cycled into an economy that harms others. This is inevitable because it is this cutting of corners, the lack of consideration for others, this margin sliced out of equal sharing to provide for need that defines profit and that fuels this economic system.
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We view the commodities being marketed to us and see them for what they are — misery and suffering with a clean coat of paint. In the most seemingly innocuous things we see dark and unspoken and unremembered truths. A pair of leather Nike shoes is a terrified cow, nostrils filled with the acrid stench of blood, dying helpless in the knowledge that she is next. It is a terrified teenage sweatshop worker who knows that standing up for basic dignity, challenging the toil and cruelty and starvation will mean being fired into an even greater starvation and hardship.

We look askance even at those products sold to us as “socially responsible”. While others look at a tofu hot dog and view it as “guilt-free” because it does not contain the flesh of animals, we recognize that a product is not made profitable from only one form of oppression. Capitalism NEVER considers the impact of its heavy hand; conservative in the cutting of economic cost, the corporation NEVER seeks to reign in its social and ecological cost — unless there’s money in it. And so, the freegan goes further than the vegan, noticing the plastic the tofu hot dogs are wrapped in, and thinking of fish and birds asphyxiating in slicks of oil in seas turned black with spilled crude. The freegan sees the card stock wrapper of the tofu hot dog and things of the serene forest that stood, home to multitudes of living beings, erased from the future through economically efficient “liquidation logging”. The freegan looks at the white color of the card stock and thinks of the millions of tons of carcinogenic organochlorides invading waterways, contaminating living flesh after their chlorine component has served its function as bleach. The freegan remembers the deer shot, and the insect poisoned for having the audacity to eat crops growing on lands that used to be their habitat, crops that will be transformed into the product’s “natural ingredients”. The freegan remembers the snake and worm and vole crushed by the machinery that makes industrial agriculture efficient and profitable. The freegan remembers the fish choking to death in deoxygenated water in a lake where nitrogen fertilizer runoff from the farm has caused an algal bloom. The freegan remembers the farm worker, underpaid and overworked, sending funds home to a country impoverished through imperialism by a government serving the interests of the wealthy corporate elite who guard their earnings as they consider acquiring a mid-sized company making tofu hot dogs. The freegan remembers the forest that once stood on lands now controlled to only grow soybeans to feed our suffering animal slaves.
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And the freegan knows this system cannot be shaken at its roots if we spend our dollars in one store or another, buy one product or the next, or vote for one corporate-backed political candidate over the other.

No, the infection runs too deep; the sickness is as old as civilization itself — as old as the first group of men who chose to assert dominance and power and violent control through the ritual of the hunt, as old as the control and domination and shaping of lives through husbandry and agriculture, as old as the idea that anything on this Earth can be owned by one rather than shared by many, as old as the idea that living beings and sections of the Earth can be owned at all.

We want no part of this civilization other than to take part in its destruction, to tear down the barbed wire of its laws, the stone edifices of its economic precepts, and to break the chains of its ideologies.

We harken back to older ways, ways where people lived as foragers off the bounty of the Earth; as participants, not masters in the continuum of life. We remember our nomadic foraging ancestors. Living in the cities and suburbs that have replaced the wild, we, too, forage, recovering the massive quantities of usable goods wasted by a profligate society that values artifice and image over substance and value, a culture that views the massive over-production of waste as merely another opportunity for profit through the garbage disposal business.

So the freegan rescues Capitalism’s castoffs from the jaws of the garbage truck compactor: defying Capitalism’s definitions of what is valuable and what is worthless and refusing to let price tags and shelving displays fool her into overlooking the castoff bounty. While the freegan can enjoy the liberty of indulgence in these goods, she is also mindful to never be too charmed by their allure. She knows the history of what she consumes and always remembers the ravages of the culture that produced them. The freegan is mindful to avoid developing a lust for commodities-acquisition even though the goods are salvaged and therefore do not support the destruction behind the market.
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As freegans we liberate not only goods but also the moments of our lives. Hours not spent carrying out the hollow directives of bosses are instead spent free for we need not make money to acquire goods that we won’t buy. Our time is instead spent directly acquiring the things we need, enjoying our time, or working to create a better world.

We believe ultimately that our consumption practices, while important and even revolutionary if practiced en masse, must only be one small thread as we weave the fabric of a new society and mend the garment of the old.

We envision and strive to create a world where humanity recognizes that all sentient beings have the right to live their lives on their own terms in appropriate ecosystems. We work to create a world where we, as people, recognize our kinship and solidarity with all life. We recognize that the Earth is a home we share with a complex web of life and it must be respected and allowed to work in the benefit of all of its inhabitants. We envision a world where people reject the arbitrary boundaries that have been used as justifications for oppressions. Regardless of our species, race, gender, sexual orientation, age, or any other constructed boundary, we are all one.
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We believe another world is possible because another world is necessary — because too much suffering has transpired for too long, and more awaits unless we change course. While we may not know the specific series of steps that can create this kind of change, we seek still to live consistent with our beliefs of minimizing harm to others while seeking to help, heal, and enrich lives wherever we can.
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In truth, freeganism is seeing beauty and value in that which is ignored, seeing horror behind the lies of the powerful, and seeing an enduring vision of hope for a world alive, flourishing, and free.

Free the trash!

Waste Not Want Not - A Freegan Documentary

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by Ed Rosie ...... PLEASE BE PATIENT, THIS IS A BIG FILE SO LOADING MAY TAKE A COUPLE OF MINUTES DEPENDING ON YOUR INTERNET CONNECTION. This is a documentary that I produced for my BSc Broadcast Degree. It is about Freegans and how they exploit the massive amounts of perfectly edible food that we throw away everyday. I hope you enjoy it.

Meet the Freegans - short Documentary

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Directed by Travis Shields. Winner of a 2009 Telly Award and the 2008 International Documentary Challenge “Best Use of Political/Social Issue” award. Judge’s Award Winner at the 36th Northwest Film and Video Festival.
Spotlighting the freegan movement in Portland Oregon, Meet the Freegans aired on Oregon Public Broadcasting’s series Oregon Lens and has screened locally at Portland’s Hollywood Theater, at the 2008 Dokufest in Kosovo, 2008 Hot Docs in Toronto, and at the 2009 Big Sky Documentary Film Festival.
Meet the Freegans “Dumpster diving for the socially conscious. Who knew?” – Kenneth Turan, L.A. Times film critic.

Freeganism Documentary - 'The Bin Raiders'

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Student documentary on the practice of freeganism