Freeganism

Freeganism is the practice of minimising one's adverse impact on the environment, animals, and human lives by limiting participation in the capitalist economy.

Sometimes misunderstood to only apply to food, freeganism is a broad-based lifestyle ethic encompassing food, housing, transportation, clothing, and all other necessities of daily life.

Freegans see capitalism as inextricable from exploitative practices like sweatshop labor, rainforest destruction, animal testing, and factory farming. They are also concerned about the enormous volume of waste generated by a society that produces more than it actually uses.

Freegan practices include, but are not limited to, recovering and using discarded goods (food, clothing, etc.), inhabiting abandonded buildings (see squatting), foraging for and consuming wild plants, trainhopping, hitchhiking, growing gardens in abandoned lots (see guerilla gardening).

Freegans place a high value on community, sharing, and mutual aid. They tend to reject the concept of private property, reflecting a school of thought common to anarchism and popularized by the anarchist Pierre Joseph Proudhon. Freegans see the pressure to maintain employment in order to purchase commodities and pay for necessities like food and shelter as a form of oppression. They view the advertising-driven push to constantly purchase new commodities as a form of manipulation for profit.

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Refuse Recovery

Freegans are probably best known for the practice of refuse recovery, making use of food, books, clothing, furniture, computers, and other items that have been or are about to be thrown away by someone else (e.g., supermarkets). A freegan may obtain the food by asking a retailer for what is to be discarded or by taking it from waste bins, a practice known colloquially as "dumpster diving".

Acting this way, a freegan has no responsibility for the material and energy resources used in the production process, since the goods have already exited the production-consumption cycle where money is used in exchange for goods.

While dumpster diving and other forms of refuse recovery are fairly common, not all dumpster divers identify as freegans. Some participate out of absolute economic necessity, including homeless people. Others do not identify with the anti-capitalist ideology espoused by freegans.

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Freeganism and Food

In many developed countries, the quality demands and hygiene standards of consumers are high enough that many foods stay edible for a period of time after their expiry or "best before" dates. In temperate climates, the best seasons for freeganism are autumn and winter, when waste bins remain close to refrigerator temperatures.

Freeganism in itself does not necessarily mean a person is following a certain kind of dietary behaviour, though it is common that freegans practice vegetarianism or veganism, possibly for practical reasons as well as moral/philosophical ones, as discarded meat becomes inedible faster than vegetable matter.

Freeganism is also often used incorrectly to describe people who will pay for vegan food, but will eat non-vegan food if they can get it for free. Unlike the above, these people do not necessarily eat food that was already thrown away, but rather they eat non-vegan food that is offered to them, or that would otherwise be thrown away. However, they may often have the same motives, or they may simply be acquiescing to their friends', relatives', or coworkers' attempts to feed them non-vegan food. This definition is commonly used, but is not accepted as an accurate definition by freegans. Misconceptions of freeganism stemming from this usage of the term have led to derision of freegans by some vegans.

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See also

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External links