http://campusprogress.org/fieldreport/3028...dumpster-plunge


Taking the (Dumpster) Plunge
“Freegans” can have their trash and eat it, too.
By Megan Peters
June 23, 2008


I should have worn a rubber suit. It would have helped me forget that picking through trash is gross. Even while writing this, I am scratching my neck; I feel a rash coming on. Each bag I touched was wet with something, except the bags in the Modern Skate dumpster where my roommate Jessie and I found two perfectly fine skateboard beds. We snatched those up quickly. All the dumpsters behind food companies, however, were nasty. They offered limp cucumbers and dirty pita bread, smashed Styrofoam and the smell of rancid mayo. There wasn’t day-old bread waiting for me when I opened Panera Bread’s dumpster. Clearly, I was missing something the first night I took a stab at being a freegan.

Freegans are vegans, but stingier and with fewer dietary restrictions. The word “freegan” stems from the combination of “free” and “vegan.” (Veganism, if you don’t know, is a lifestyle that shuns the use of animals for food, clothing, or any other purpose.) Freegans wish to minimize their impact on the environment, so they rummage through dumpsters and trash to find salvageable goods. “Rather than contributing to further waste, freegans attempt to curtail garbage and pollution, reducing the over-all volume in the waste stream,” one freegan website explains.

To freegans, dumpster diving isn’t just about getting free stuff. It’s about boycotting consumer culture and wastefulness. In developing their worldview, freegans rely on studies like the one done by University of Arizona in 2004 which showed that 40 to 50 percent of food ready for harvest never gets eaten and is purged.

Many freegans believe that the profit motive of most companies outshines the ethical considerations that should be taken into account during production, and that this focus often results in human rights violations, environmental destruction, animal abuse, and of course, landfills of wasted material. The problem rests in the system of production, and the freegan’s response is to not support any of it.

Freeganism relies on a whole different system of economics: sharing. Freegans not only search for outcast food—they barter with each other, bum rides, and live together, with the heart of their beliefs pumping for the act of recycling. Freeganism isn’t just about dumpster diving, it’s a whole cooperative lifestyle.

My experiment with freeganism started when I first learned that there are a growing group of people who get food and other items from America’s waste. The idea tickled me, and I wanted to try it myself. Was it really possible to find edible food in containers known for their foul stench? One website called it “urban foraging,” probably to reduce the stigma the phrase “dumpster diving” generates. I wanted to be in the bin and feel the redemption of attaining a free item, even if it had been thrown out.

During my experiment in East Lansing, Michigan, each dumpster bore a distinct scent—distinct enough to bottle and sell behind a glossy Macy’s counter. I would call the dumpster scent of Big Apple Bagels “Giving Garlic.” A local Greek restaurant’s would be “Unpurified Cheese Grease.” Panera’s trash smelled exactly like the store. I’d call that one “Panera Bread.” The scent of any given dumpster clung to me for a few hours. If the dumpster smelled like it was internally rotting, I took it as a cue to find another.

“When you’re looking to get something, you have to worry about the condition of the dumpster,” Brian Bower, a junior majoring in journalism at Michigan State University (MSU), said. Bower lives in a cooperative called Vlach-Bower, one of MSU’s twelve co-op houses that are known to occasionally dive headfirst into East Lansing’s waste. “I would never take dairy products or meat,” he said. “Prepackaged products are the way to go. Bagged bread or chips are great examples.”

Although Bower doesn’t call himself a freegan, he certainly sounds like one. “It is a little confusing,” Bower said. “My main intention is to take something and make it a moral choice. Good stuff is being thrown away simply because the FDA says you can’t sell it.”

My local superstore could have offered a lush dumpster selection when I went on my adventure. Maso Sabotic, a Lake Lansing Meijer supermarket produce employee said he thinks it’s wasteful to throw away produce that still appears fresh. “Every day we throw away so much. For example, a bag of mushrooms: If we look at the expiration date, and it is today, we throw it away even if it still looks good,” he said. Bower said his housemates can find greens, veggies, bread products, juice boxes, and even soap behind superstores like Meijer. The strict hygiene laws preventing these companies from salvaging are feeding small freegan armies.

Bobby Singh, a junior majoring in psychology at MSU, knows his university’s campus dumpsters by heart. Singh is technically unemployed; picking through MSU’s trash and recycling is his job. (Because he lives in Michigan, Singh gets 10 cents for every can or bottle he recycles.)

“You see that trash can over there,” Singh said to me as he pointed to a bin by the university’s library. “There’s probably one Mountain Dew bottle in there. If I walk around the entire campus I can get two bags full.”

The great thing about Singh is his spirit, his freedom in admitting he picks through garbage, and his dedication to the cause. “I’ve gotten looks like I’m homeless before, but I nod them off because I have my iPod with me,” he said.

Living the freegan life is in the realm of possibility for Singh because he seems not to have attachments to material things. “Most people spend their lives maintaining. If I were to lose it all, I would be happy to know I could survive. I could live off the food people waste here,” he said.

But I still may need a little egging on. I arrived at Big Apple Bagels on bike with my eco-friendly grocery purse slung over my left shoulder. I felt nervous as I lifted open the government-provided waste receptacle while constantly checking for onlookers. My roommate and I didn’t find bags of bagels, despite visions of assorted onion, everything, and cinnamon raisin baked goods. Instead, we found mangled bagels smeared with coffee grounds and veggie-flavored cream cheese. I should have jumped in the dumpster and ripped apart the garbage bags to make sure there were no hidden treasures—but, for me at least, that idea takes some getting used to.

Megan Peters is a junior at Michigan State University majoring in English. An earlier version of this article appeared in The Big Green, part of the Campus Publications Network.

thanks for the post...
Many a decent meal can be found in dumpsters...
unfortunately most of the larger grocery chains have now employed trash compactors and locks...
f*ckers.

The author should have chaecked the bags in the bagel dumpster - they almost always have large loads of day-olds. Most of the time, you can talk to the wage slaves (not managers) that work the closing shifts and convince them thaty the good stuff doesn't really need to be bagged with the bad, and it can go next to the dumpster instead of into it.
another good source for that kind of angle is restaurants with unlimited buffets...
I've gotten many meals at the end of pizza hut's lunch buffets. You often will get more than you need, and its always a good idea to remember that their are other hungry people around, and if possible, feed them too.

I worked for a bit as Receiving Manager for Wal*Mart in Butte Montana. As part of my job I held the key to the compactor chute. Teh reason it was locked is because they didn't want anyone crawling in to take food out!

I was talking about locks on the dumpsters, not the compactors... but I guess I should have clarified that, as most wouldn't have the expirience to understand that.

I was too Seuss. Only difference is this dumpster compacted about once a day.