I heard this mentioned a few times here and there, and decided to investigate a bit before shitting on it. First this site;
http://freeganism.info/
Okay, so freegans are vegan dumpster divers who uphold their anti corporate beliefs by removing themselves from the equation food wise, to a lesser extent by buying only organic vegan produce, and to a greater extent by foraging for food the rest of us have thrown out.
Perhaps there is a "Freegan Manifesto" somewhere, lets google that, shall we.. Uh, wow, I was really expecting a manifesto, balls. There is a lot of mentions on a "Why Freegan?" pamphlet, but fuck me if I can find a copy to pasta.
Lets dig some more;
http://freegan.info/
Indeed, .info, a much better site, and something that has some philosophy and propaganda to take a bite out of.
So, onward to the discussion of freeganism, in a moderate and unbiased manner.:hai:
Are these hippie faggot assholes nuts? When did dumpster diving and squatting become anything more than a way to get by when you are licking the ditch financially?I will restrain myself simply to the food aspects, despite what I have to say about hippies squatting in abandoned buildings and shitting in the corner.
1. This is dangerous to your health, and the health of those around you. Once food is removed from the production/sale pipeline and declared waste, the mechanisms that are in place to prevent contamination no longer apply,and things that should never come in contact with each other, like say, raw chicken and apples, are tossed in a bag together and taken to the bin. Cutting the bit of brown off an apple and eating it could kill you if that apple was exposed to salmonella, e coli, or a long list of food loving pathogens. And lets not forget stuff like norwalk virus, once you become a carrier, you can spread it around. Brush that garbage juice stained sleeve on your friends counter and you have just infected his/her kitchen, hope the kids have good immune systems. Acting like a rat means you become a disease vector like a rat.
Actually, that is it, everything else I have to say about the practice should be in a different forum. I hope some other members will add some comments about the food aspects of freeganism.
I will add one more bit though, I have spent enough time shit ass broke to know what it is like to be hungry. I have; eaten beach duck, hopped fences and stole veggies, offered my services as a dishwasher in return for food, eaten toasted walnuts and acorns, eaten a variety of good and bad fish caught by illegal and legal means, dug roots, eaten berries, picked mushrooms, gone around to bakeries at closing and asked for food, and flat out ripped off what I needed when I had the opportunity, but I have never once dumpster dived.
C/O
"If you put yourself so far below the line that you disgust people, no one will listen to you anyway"
"
Comments
Filthy fucking hippys
For a few months I lived in close contact with some self-styled, middle class Anarchists. They taught me a lot, and one of the things was that Freeganism needn't be from a "dumpster". In fact, it can be straight from a door.
At a gig one night we were quite hungry and there was a Chinese place that kept getting prank calls. They ended up giving us free food, and told us where to get fresh dumpster food. We went to a well known Supermarket and managed to get access to their refuse. We used no tools to break in as it was left open, presumably as they know people eat left-overs. Anyway, we found the food they had thrown out that day, dated that day and thrown out. Most of it was fruit and veg but a bit was stuff like bread, damaged tins and lots of deli produce.
Of course, common sense told me not to eat any meat, but we had a pretty good feast that night, for free, and because people for the most part just chucked out food because of ridiculous Health and Safety laws here in the UK.
I do realise however, that by eating food from dumpsters and making a big deal, you are on a reverse-psychology hedonistic trip whereby you try and show the grimmer side of life, but do it in a way that gets a negative reaction so I completely agree with CO on that point.
I can't say I've done it since, but it opened my eyes, not least as many shops pour bleach over their perfectly-edible produce at the end of each day to avoid "losing" profit.
A fucking excellent question. Freeganism is new(ish), and occurs in such small numbers that I don't think any studies have been done. My statements are based on what I know about food pathogens, and I can't back them up with any researched evidence. That a practice leads to logical results is not always the case, granted. But it is still fucking gross.
C/O
This crafty bugger raids the bin, cuts the sandwiches in half again - so they are triangles 1/4 the size of a slice of bread and puts them on the bar so people can eat them for free.
A lot of people go to the bar for the free food and buy drinks. Never heard of anyone being sick from it, although to be fair, it is all packed and no cross contaminated.
I would have to be on the bones of my arse before I went through super market waste however.
People who practice this freeganism are daft tho. Why not guerrilla garden instead - longer time frame perhaps, but fail to plan = plan to fail.
I don't know how fucked the UK is for food safety, but I'd wager at the very least there'd be a higher rate of acquiring parasites through such edibles...
While this is unsafe in some respects, in others it is quite reasonable. Factories overproduce in rediculous numbers, and a large portion is tossed out for not meeting standards or having defects. This could be a defect in the packaging, not the food. Of course, if there were salmonella, this would pose an issue. This is avoided by being intelligent and checking out where you dumpster dive, checking recalls and such.
Food markets often throw out bulk items which are a day or more over the expiration date. This does not make the food bad as the date is a recommended. Vegan food can last a long time. A lot of times, food won't even be found in the dumpsters. Rather, it is put into crates and set to the side, or just outside the back door.
Dumpster diving is all about being smart and knowing what to eat and not to eat. Dissentary is common, however, but not too bad. Check out the Art and Science of Dumpster Diving by John Hoffman.
Being vegan is very debated on being healthy or not. B12 is the only thing found exclusively in meat, so supplaments must be taken for that. The argument for being Vegan is that eating 100% non dairy has less fat and is more efficient. A Vegiterian/Vegan diet does not contain a lot of excess shit in food, making your waste more efficient. It is hard to be perfectly healthy on a Vegan diet, and near impossible. But, it does its part in boycotting the food industry and animal cruelty.
Now, i checked thoroughly at these donuts, and the owner only threw out donuts that were "old", and no trash were in them. However, the owner doesn't claim the donuts are "old" the FDA forces them to throw out food when it reaches a certain time, starting when they hit the shelves. So just because the government(FDA) believes that it needs to be thrown out, it does not mean it's spoiled. I mean seriously, they are in a protective bag!!:p Just because it's in the garbage does not mean it's "dirty" however yes, bacteria does accumulate in dumpsters due to favorable conditions.
But in all seriousness though, WHO CARES if you are ingesting some foreign microorganisms? It helps support a healthy immune system. People who sanitize their shit ever since day one will have a hard time trying to recover from illnesses because they haven't developed immune systems when they are younger!! So..it's ok to eat dirt when you are young, or to leave food out or eat food from garbages; as long as you know what you are doing of course.
To an extent. Ingesting botulinum is never good for you
Well, if it is food covered in juiced from pork gone bad and a can of cheap lager then no its not good to eat it. Bacteria are fine with a strong constitution. It is the poisons they create once they have reached a certain level that no man can fight.
You get enough botulism toxin in you and you are fucked. The bacteria that produces it - Clostridium botulinum - would be pretty harmless in comparison if it did not produce the toxin.
My keywords were: If you know what you are doing. and yes..i do know that bacteria excrete biproducts that can be "poisonous" to the body, and i do know the type of bacteria that emits that kind of neurotoxin, but it's common sense here that can save your life
....like a tied bag of 5-to-7-day-old donuts thrown in a dumpster.
You are making the assumption that the layman has common sence here. I would trust some one reading this to take more care in selecting wild growing fungi than eating shit out of a bin.
Things properly sealed and decontaminted if needed before opening are fine as I said, but think on this - you go to a dinner party and are tucking in, when in the main course you ask:
'This is very exceptional food, from where did you source the ingredients?'
Or something to this effect.
Consider the two answers:
1. I picked some ceps from the woods this morning and shot a few pidgeons this afternoon...
2. I looked in the bins of a place that sells mostly crap food
And if you are that hungry, in westernised civilisation, you will find free food easily if you can be humble. Gurdwaras are one of my favourite places to eat free.
If you hang out with the decent homeless, some one will be along to feed you.
If you want to avoid taking it directly from the trash, you should go in and see if you can make an agreement which the people who work there. I went into a donut store, close to evening and to see if there was some type of discount for the remaining donuts. The people working there at the time tend to be younger, maybe students, and they said to come back just before closing time and get the donuts for free as they were going to throw them away anyway, so I go back a few hours later, and they gave me five full boxes, which was a little over sixty donuts, most of which I gave away. These donuts were only about a day old, and were still decent.
I think a lot of store owners would unfortunately deny you whether they were feeling generous or not due to liability concerns. Even if they gave you food out of the goodness of their hearts, due to the fucked up liability laws in many countries, and the attendant lawyers, if you got sick you could still theoretically sue them. I would try for a little, nudge nudge, wink wink, arrangement where the shopkeeper could deny ever having contact with you directly, but told you when the goods would be available. These liability laws are one of the reasons so much food is thrown out.
Regarding Lethargicas comments, yes indeed, there are some very common bacteria capable of producing neurotoxins, notably Botulinum and Staphylococcus, fortunately the first only occurs in anaerobic environments, and is usually a result of poor canning practices. Staphylococcus toxin is much more common, and if you ever had food poisoning where the symptoms started quite soon after ingesting the suspect food, it was likely due to Staph toxin. Because it is the toxin that gets you, not the organism itself, it comes on sooner as there is no need for the bacteria to breed in your body.
Exposure to microbes does indeed help produce immunity, but as most viral and bacterial strains constantly mutate, occasional exposure might help, but will not prevent infection. The best defense against some is keeping a healthy batch of your own intestinal bacteria around, for others it is best to avoid the risk factors all together. And yes, if I ever have kids they can roll around in the dirt and wash their hands at gunpoint just like I did.
So all in all, using food resources that would otherwise be thrown out, so long as you can avoid any chance of contamination, good idea.
Pulling food that has risk of contamination out of dumpsters, bad idea.
C/O
"you gonna eat that?"
Thanks man, even though its related I think this should get its own thread.
They get pallets of stuff and put it into boxes, it could be something like christmas hampers, those boxes with different chocolate bars that you get at easter or something like gift bags if we are sponsering some event like a marathon.
When they are re-packing these, something like coffee will come on a pallet with 40 boxes on it, each box might have 12 jars of coffee in it, if any of those jars are broken then that whole box must go in the bin.
Its a waste but the cost of a few jars of coffee is nothing compaired to the cost of paying somebody who could cut their finger on that glass and the money lost from bad publicity.
Its the same with our wearhouses, if a pallet of proxucts gets damaged it often gets scrapped rather than our consumer eating damaged goods.
The good side is that often they bag up the slightly damaged stuff and flog it too us, we can get a bag of stuff with a store value of about £ 40 for only £5.
It's rare for me to spend money on food, even at grocery stores you can just grab some stuff and walk out, it's not like the workers actually care.
I don't encourage anybody else to live this sort of lifestyle though because it only makes it harder for me. competition and all. I don't like freegans because they ruin it for people who are just stingy as hell and don't like paying for stuff.
you have to be a really crazy person to get food from restaurant dumpsters. Anybody with a shred of sanity goes to grocers, bakeries, and shops.
I would be inclined to agree; I worked in a kitchen and we didn't throw things out unless there was NO WAY we could serve it lol...