How you can resist funding the government → other tax resistance strategies → freeganism → dumpster-diving

I pointed out Claire Wolfe’s criticism of “jobs” and of working for a living. Wolfe promises us some follow-up articles exploring what the alternatives are to making a living and paying the bills by holding down a “job,” and I’m very much looking forward to those.

When people hear someone sounding like they believe work and jobs ought to be eradicated like smallpox and polio, they often roll their eyes and explain patiently that you’ve got to work, since “there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.”

Adam Weissman and his friends are trying to prove ’em wrong. Weissman has been living on a diet of free food for nine years now, by dumpster-diving, or as they like to call it: living a “freegan” lifestyle.

They’re not homeless, and they have jobs. They call themselves freegans, and though some fill their fridges with food from garbage bins to save money, many choose not to buy food for philosophical reasons.

“Freegan” comes from the term vegan — a person who does not eat meat or animal products for health or ethical reasons. Freegans take it one step further by eating food thrown away by stores and restaurants, to avoid waste and limit their impact on the environment. They say that by not buying food, they’re boycotting a capitalist consumer society that needlessly slaughters animals and harms the environment by mass-producing nonessential food, much of which ends up in landfills.

“It’s about being aware of the insane waste by our culture of overproduction and overconsumption,” says Weissman, 26, who wears oversized jeans and a baggy T-shirt he “recovered” from the trash. He is a part-time security guard and a full-time freegan. He and his friends salvage “large quantities of unsold items, not half-eaten food off someone’s plate,” Weissman says.…

[Alexis] Cole, who says she is writing a cookbook called The Decadent Dumpster, rides her bike to choice grocery store garbage bins several times a week. On each trip she can count on filling the two baskets on her 21-speed with bags of lettuce and spinach, bread, bananas, apples, kale, bagels and packaged goods. It’s more than enough for her and her two roommates, who, according to Cole, “have never eaten so well.”

And it’s not just food that’s out there for the taking. There’s all sorts of things that slide from the hands of people who don’t want or need ’em to the hands of those who do, without any money changing hands. Join one of the more than 1,500 cities that’s got a Freecycle network to find out how you can get in on the action, or see if your area has something like Craigslist’s Barter/Swap/Free bulletin board.

Myself, I’m still eating food I buy from the store for the most part, but I admire what the “freegans” are doing. The more stuff you can get without spending money for it, the less money you spend; the less money you spend, the less money you have to earn; the less money you have to earn, the less you need a “job” and the less taxes you’ll have to pay. So bully for that.

More grab-bag material:

  • You can now visualize the U.S. war fatality statistics in Iraq in two new ways:
    • Obleek’s Flash animation moves forward in time at a pace of ten days per second , and peppers a map of Iraq with dots, where each one “indicates the geographic location that a coalition military fatality occurred.”
    • A Palm Beach Post map turns this around, and shows where in the United States each of the American fatalities from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan came from (at least those who hailed from the contiguous 48 states).
  • Robert F. Hawes Jr. got my attention with his summary of a Twilight Zone episode:

    revival of the Twilight Zone series featured an episode entitled “Button, button”, based on a short story by Richard Matheson. In the story, a gaunt, black-clad gentleman arrives uninvited at the cramped apartment of a financially destitute couple and presents them with a tempting though somewhat ominous offer. He gives them a simple wooden box with a clear plastic lid overtop a large red button — the type of nondescript contraption teens might build in a high school Woodshop class — and explains their options: 1) Don’t push the button. Nothing happens; the man will come back tomorrow to claim the box. 2) Push the button and get $200,000 — tax free — and someone will die. “Who?” the wife asks. “Someone you don’t know,” the man replies. He then leaves them to think about it. The husband decides it’s unconscionable, but the wife wants to go for it. After all, what is the death of someone they don’t know? People die all the time, don’t they? Maybe a bad person will be the one to die. “And maybe it’ll be someone’s newborn baby,” the husband counters.

    In the end of the story, after much deliberation, the wife decides that they’re owed this and pushes the button. Nothing happens immediately. Then, later in the day, the gaunt, black-clad gentleman returns with a briefcase full of cash. He gives the couple their money and takes his box back. The wife asks what will happen now and the man replies: “The button box will be reset and the same offer will be made to someone else… someone who doesn’t know you.”

  • Those of you who have been intrigued by my mentions of freeganism and its potential for a lifestyle of radical frugality may be interested in the Dumpster World discussion board, where dumpster divers from all over the place share their wisdom. It’s not all “do you think this meat is still good?” — there is a lot of discussion of restoring and repairing discarded furniture and appliances and other such topics as well.
  • How’s our great national flashback coming along? Read the transcript of the President assuring the world “We will not be defeated. We will not grow tired. We will not withdraw.”
  • David Morris at Alternet reviews some of the history behind (Economic) Independence Day. Apparently Gandhi wasn’t the first one to try swadeshi in a campaign to break free from the British Empire:

    Before we declared our political independence we declared our economic independence. All things English were placed on the blacklist. Frugality came into fashion. Out of the First Continental Congress in New York came the embryonic nation’s first Chamber of Commerce. Given the current policies of the Chamber, it might be useful this July 4th to recall its first campaign slogan, “Save your money and you can save your country.”

    Bostonian Sam Adams, the fiery leader of the movement, knew that frugality was not enough. To become truly independent, America had to produce at home what was previously imported from England.

    Members of Boston’s Whig Party demonstrated their patriotism by nursing tea leaves and mulberry trees in their gardens. New England farmers were exhorted to convert their oak plains into sheep pastures and produce enough wool to clothe every American. Colonists were urged to abstain from eating lamb or mutton in order to encourage American woolen manufactures.

    In less than a year the boycott had so disrupted Transatlantic trade that thousands of British workers lost their jobs.

  • And, going back a bit more into American history, Murray Rothbard makes a very interesting investigation of Pennsylvania’s Anarchist Experiment —  when the Pennsylvania colony was “in a de facto condition of individual anarchism, and seemed none the worse for the experience.”

The Sunday Times (and the Drudge Report) have discovered freeganism:

The anti-capitalist freegans — the name combines “free” and “vegan” — are so appalled by the waste of the consumer society that they try to live on the leftovers, scavenging for food in supermarket dustbins.…

A study by the US Department of Agriculture estimated that the US wastes about 43 billion kilograms of food a year. That is about 27 per cent of US production, but the true figure is as much as 50 per cent, according to ten years of research by Timothy Jones at the University of Arizona.

…Adam Weissman, a freegan activist and sometime security guard in New Jersey, says freeganism grew out of the radical “yippie” movement but also has affinities with the hobos of the Great Depression who travelled around the country by stealing rides on the railways.

“I have pity for people who have not figured out this lifestyle,” he said. “I am able to take long vacations from work, I have all kinds of consumer goods, and I eat a really healthy diet of really wonderful food: white asparagus and cactus fruit, three different kinds of mushrooms and four different kinds of pre-cut salad. And I’m just thinking of what is in my refrigerator right now.

“Essentially, the sky’s the limit. We found flat-screen TVs, working boom-boxes and stereos. I have put together most of my wardrobe. Last year’s designer clothing in perfect shape is discarded because it’s no longer fashionable, so I wear a lot of designer labels.”

Freegans often go “dumpster diving” in packs, delving into skips at supermarkets and restaurants.

Their website lists “favourite foraging sites”, such as the vegan restaurant in Greenwich Village, New York, that throws out a “whole bag of stir-fried Asian food after 10 every night” or the Cincinnati bakery that dumps bagels and French bread. Often the best shops throw out the most food to keep their offerings fresh.

“The foraging itself is not that time-consuming,” Madeline Nelson, a former corporate communications officer at a national bookshop chain in New York, said. “I tend to go out twice a week, and I would probably go grocery shopping twice a week anyway.”

The Washington Post discovers dumpster diving:

The Environmental Protection Agency estimates that 96 billion pounds of food are thrown away each year, making up 12 percent of the trash produced in the United States. Because of federal and state regulations for restaurants and grocery stores, expiration dates often come before the food actually spoils. Much of it ends up in bags separate from the rest of a store’s garbage, providing easy access for divers.

Some news-in-brief:

  • The New York Times today notes that there seems to be an uptick in the number of expatriate Americans who are renouncing their citizenship in order to stop being on the hook for taxes to the U.S. — “the only developed country that taxes its citizens while they live overseas.”
  • Foreign Policy In Focus looks at how the U.S. defense budget could be cut by $62 billion in waste and pork without putting a dent in the ability of our nation to slaughter as many foreigners as is our wont.
  • The Alameda Times-Star reports on upscale Berkeley dumpster-diving: “I’m not hungry,” Cynthia Powell said. “I do it because it’s good food, it’s free and it’s conservation.”

Man oh man, we have been on a free spree around the house lately! Over the past several weeks, we’ve scored a handsome ceiling-mounted hanging pot rack, a large-sized Foreman Grill, and a spare back door (so I could install a cat door and keep the landlord happy) all for free thanks to members of a local “Freecycle” mailing list.

If you haven’t looked into “Freecycle” yet, you might want to take a peek.

Freecycling is a pretty moderate step on the freegan living plan. Some people push things a little further. Reporter Becca Tucker decided to give “dumpster diving” a try for the sake of journalism, and filed a fascinating report for a Manhattan weekly newspaper. Excerpts:

According to Madeline Nelson, who looks like your favorite librarian and dumpster dives for most of her food, dumpstering once a week can fulfill about 85 percent of your grocery needs. Twice-weekly dives can cover 90 to 95 percent. She didn’t need to come out to the trash tour, because a friend recently stayed at her apartment, and as a thank-you gift he dumpster dove her fridge stock-full.

For self-identifying freegans, embarrassment is not an issue. “I’m not so much bound by the illusions of our culture,” says Adam Weissman, 29, who does activist work twelve to sixteen hours a day for no pay and lives on $20 a week.

“Being bound by the cultural norm of whether someone’s going to think it’s icky or weird for me to be going through the trash is far less compelling than my sense of embarrassment or horror that I would feel for being part of the problem, by basically pumping more fuel into the economy in the form of capital, in the form of money.

“So it’s not that I’m in any way not cognizant of the fact that what we’re doing is socially deviant. It’s quite deliberate.”

When I started this experiment I had little interest in the politics of waste. I simply wanted to see whether a person could actually eat for free in a city where a sandwich costs $7. How freeing that would be, in a way. How strange an inversion of everything that drives us to go to work every day. We have to earn, we think, because we have to eat.

But after awhile, my exuberance at opening a bag to find it full of still-warm chocolate munchkins, or a hundred fat New York-quality bagels, or fifty plastic containers of organic lettuce from Mexico, or ten wrapped and ready-to-eat sandwiches, or two dozen firm, colorful peppers, was nudged out by dismay.

…now that I’ve had to throw away good food I’ve foraged from the trash to make room in the fridge for even better food, now that I’ve passed up wrapped cinnamon buns not because they’re stale, but because there are fifty of them, it’s started to sink in.

This happens every night all over the city, and to varying degrees, in every city across the country. All the energy that went into growing, producing, packaging, shipping, refrigerating, and dumping all this food is worth less than what it would cost a store to run out of something and fail to make a sale. So they deliberately overstock. And while the food and packaging gets dumped in landfills, people are going hungry just blocks away.

It’s depressing. It’s shameful.

It’s delicious.

Some bits and pieces from here and there: