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

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.

“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.

Here are a couple of new links for the frugality set:

  • Oolsi: “We believe everything should be free! This site will keep track of websites and tools that share this philosophy and look at freeware in other aspects of life — i.e. saving money, living cheaply, making things yourself, and self learning.”
  • Wendy McElroy’s new discussion forum has a section on economy, business, personal finance, and frugality.

Marcelle Hopkins writes an amusing story about “Really Really Free Markets”:

The police were prepared for the worst. They had received word that anarchists were rallying in downtown Raleigh, N.C., one summer Saturday in . Museums were closed, a Civil War re-enactment was canceled and parking meters were hooded. A helicopter circled overhead while police mounted on horses and bicycles patrolled the empty streets around the Children’s Garden.

“There were 40 fully geared-up riot police waiting in the building next door while we were folk dancing, giving free massages and exchanging old books in the park,” said Liz Seymour, 57, a freelance writer and community activist.

Dubbed the Really Really Free Market by organizers, the event did not turn out to be the sort of anti-globalization protest police had expected. It was, instead, a peaceful gathering of about 200 people who came to give and get free stuff and services. There was an old-time string band playing under a tree, used clothing and knickknacks laid out like pirate’s booty on bed sheets, and a bike-repair workshop to fix flat tires. Everything was free. That’s right, really, really free — no trading or bartering and absolutely no money being exchanged.

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: