How you can resist funding the government → other tax resistance strategies → freeganism → gleaning

An anthropology student at U.C. Santa Barbara spent ten weeks “living off the land” in a town near the campus. He ate figs, apples, pomegranates, passion fruit, guavas, persimmons, blackberrys, citrus fruits, and arugula from front yards and urban landscaping, and gathered fish, octopus, scallops, lobster, and seaweed from the ocean.

He gives a mixed-review to his experiment in the urban hunter-gatherer lifestyle. On the one hand, “I really was eating the best stuff on Earth, and I was thriving on it.” On the other hand, “even now I don’t believe what I did was very constructive.” He found the experiment kind of anti-social in that he did most of his eating alone, and eating is often a very social activity. Also, he found that pickings were getting much slimmer as Winter approached.

I mention this experiment mostly because I think it’s neat and I’m glad that the student, Alastair Bland, gave it a try and shared with us us the experience he had. But I mention it also because it’s a good example of creative thinking about frugal living.

There’s so much surplus and so much waste around that some folks do pretty well for themselves just by scavenging. When I was looking for housing a while back (before I decided to stay with my current home) I interviewed at a semi-communal home in Berkeley that supplemented its meals substantially by dumpster diving for food that was no longer sellable as merchandise but was more than edible as food. And I remember also a woman I saw in the neighborhood where I used to live who went from cafe to cafe quietly bussing tables — and eating the leftovers people left behind. The staff at the cafes didn’t mind — she was helping them do their jobs and she didn’t cause any trouble. The customers probably didn’t even notice her.

Myself, I’m not doing anything so creative or taboo. I’m just buying food and cooking it and eating it the good, old-fashioned, boring way. But I admire folks who’ve figured out how to harvest the unclaimed surplus.

I’m currently spending about $400 per month on food and drinks. That’s about $13 and change per day, and my second largest expense after a combined rent & utilities category. While I do sometimes fondly look back on the days when I was casually enjoying the many restaurants of San Francisco, and half the time $13 wouldn’t even cover the drinks I’d have with dinner, I’m not exactly roughing it nowadays.

A typical dinner for me now is a hot pork sausage cooked on the backyard grill, served with thinly-sliced onions sauteed with chopped bell pepper in butter, maybe some rice or steamed veggies on the side, and a glass of Guinness. If that’s roughing it, life’s easier than advertised. But I get the sausages pretty cheap at an inexpensive meat market, buy the veggies at farmers markets, and even pick up the Guinness in bulk for less than a buck a bottle, so it comes out pretty cheap for all of its deliciousness. The whole meal ends up costing less than barleywine at the Toronado.

“Freegans” and other gleaners and urban foragers have a lot to work with. According to a decade-long study by University of Arizona anthropologist Timothy Jones, some 40–50% of the edible food produced in the United States never gets eaten — a figure that includes everything from food left to rot in the fields where it grows, to food spoiled in transport, to the last couple of inches of milk in the carton in your fridge that’s gone sour.

According to Jones, the average household wastes 14% of the food it buys, meaning that over the course of a year the typical family of four spends about $600 on food that it throws away without eating.

Those of you Los Angelenos who are thinking of going freegan may like this:

Fallen Fruit is a website run by people who encourage you to grow fruit on the perimeter of your property and allow others to harvest it. They also have maps of Los Angeles neighborhoods that are bearing lots of free fruit.

Sarah Rich writes in the Oct/Nov issue of ReadyMade: “CalArts professors Dave Burns, Matias Viegener, and Austin Young are accidental farmers. After discovering an arcane Los Angeles city law that makes any fruit overhanging on sidewalks public property, the trio founded Fallen Fruit, a mapping project that promotes access to the city’s free and forgotten oranges, bananas, and apricots.”

Where I live, there are plenty of grapefruits, figs, persimmons, and guavas. I also have some olive trees, but I bit into an olive and it burned like acid.

Now’s about the right time to go olive picking, but don’t eat ’em raw. You’ve got to cure ’em in rock salt or a lye bath. I salted some olives last year — ones from trees that I’d found in a road median in Oakland — and they turned out pretty well. Anybody know of any olive trees on public property in San Francisco?

Today is the 150^th anniversary of the birth of Pavel Nikolayevich Milyukov, who drafted the Vyborg Manifesto in which the exiled Russian Duma urged Russians to refuse to pay any more taxes to the Czar.

In other news… Boing Boing shares a short video documentary about urban foragers in Chicago and the sorts of wildish plants they find growing where the asphalt has yet to reach.

And Charles Hugh Smith suggests “voluntary poverty” as a hot upcoming trend. By this he means merely deciding to work less and earn less — not actual poverty poverty.

And Don Bacon continues his series on the coming Democrat-led beefing-up of the U.S. military, this time looking at how counter-recruitment might interfere with these plans.