Freegan Hilarious!

Thursday, June 15, 2006

Drop everything you are doing right now, go straight over to the New York Press, and read this freegan article! You can thank me later.

Apparently, dumpster diving has become (or more likely, become known as being) a leftist lifestyle, and its practicioners call themselves "freegans".

Almost every week, [Adam] Weissman organizes an event commonly referred to as "dumpster diving," where he leads an open tour among the various trash heaps and dumpsters of Manhattan to gather discarded food. The activity is part of a larger social movement known as freeganism, which views capitalism as the primary force in destroying the environment and avoids the capitalist structure through such practices as eating discarded food, squatting in abandoned buildings instead of paying rent and refusing to hold a job. Just as vegans are vegetarians who avoid animal products, freegans subsist only on free food found in the garbage as consumer waste. In Manhattan, there is plenty to go around. [bold added]
Normally, I'd make a snarky comment right about now, but not only can you not tell these idiots to eat s--- (being how they're already practically doing that already), you can't do a better job of pointing out the sheer absurdity of their position than they already do!
Weissman assembled those who were still present for a final stop back to Daniel's Bagels. As expected, an enormous bag filled with bagels was waiting on the curb. Weissman grabbed a bagel from the bag and a mushy avocado from his backpack. He began dipping the bagel into the soupy avocado and looked around at the surrounding neighborhood.

When asked whether he viewed living so close to a beacon of unfettered capitalism such as New York as contradictory to his ideals, he quickly denied it.

"This is exactly where we need to be," he said. "If there's any one place on the planet where there's a vital need for people to be suggesting that capitalism is not a sustainable system, where people need to be demonstrating that we can create alternative ways of living to capitalism, then I think New York is that place."

Pausing to dab at the gobs of avocado stuck in his beard he said, "I couldn't think of another place in the world that would be more appropriate to what we're doing." [bold added]
"This is exactly where we need to be?" Well, you've got that right, bud! Might that, perchance, be due to the fact that the whole lot of you would freegan starve unless you hung around the very system you're trying to destroy?

What really blows my mind about the story, though, is that this isn't even the greatest irony. That honor goes to Weissman's hatred of school because "They promote obedience, they promote conformity, they promote the idea of unquestioning acceptance of authority and they promote the idea that we should accept daily boredom and misery and enforced banality as simply the way that life is."

As if picking through garbage and droning on about "resources" on a daily basis isn't banal. As if his political ideals aren't the logical extreme of what he was indoctrinated with while he was in school. As if the only way to be an individual is to act like a hippie, spout socialist nonsense, and sponge off everyone else -- just like all the other "non-conformists". This is one kid who was very unfortunate not to have dropped out at an early age!

Freegan idiots!

And what's worse, they're turning the rest of us into freegans by providing us all with ... free entertainment!

God help us all!

-- CAV

Updates

6-17-06: Corrected remark on Weissman's educational attainment. He did graduate from high school, the poor devil!

10 comments:

Anonymous said...

Oh, this merits an immediate response!

http://z7.invisionfree.com/capitalistparadise/index.php?showtopic=768

Gus Van Horn said...

The last line of that was perfect!

Anonymous said...

A month ago, I posted the following response to a pro-freegan blog entry:

http://tracer.typepad.com/the_tracer/2006/05/freeganism_.html

Freegans decry "consumerism," while being the ultimate consumers. Who and what do they think makes possible all of the things they scavenge for, eat and use?

Lucky for freegans, we do live in a capitalist society, which produces such a surplus of valuable products that stores cannot possibly sell it all — hence why so many things end up in the trash.

In Communist countries such as Cuba, you're lucky if you can find food on a store's shelves, let alone dumpsters filled with recently-expired freebies out back.

If you actually enjoy scrounging through garbage, living off the refuse of others — if you don't find it abjectly humiliating to "squat" in somebody else's building, or hitch rides from strangers capitalistic enough to own cars — maybe freeganism is the lifestyle choice for you. Only don't use phony terms: you're not a "freegan," you're a freeloader, bumming off the very free market system you claim to despise.

Paul Hsieh said...

This was nicely covered by the character of Vincent in the Quentin Tarantino movie "Pulp Fiction".

The language is a little crude, but the analysis is on target:

"No Jules, you're gonna be like
those pieces of shit out there who
beg for change. They walk around
like a bunch of fuckin' zombies,
they sleep in garbage bins, they
eat what I throw away, and dogs
piss on 'em. They got a word for
'em, they're called bums. And
without a job, residence, or legal
tender, that's what you're gonna be
-- a fuckin' bum!"

Gus Van Horn said...

Kevin,

Nice reply, but what brought you to that blog in the first place?

(But I will hand it to The Tracer for having a nice quote for her masthead motto: "Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self."

Paul,

I'd have to say that the language is also on target! What these people are doing -- claiming parasitism as a moral virtue -- is worse than any mere four-letter utterance.

Gus

Anonymous said...

Hahahah this is the funiest thing ever. Geez, I sure hope that Zagats doesn't start catering to these freegan extremists.

"Tony why you eating here? There's a stinking 4 star dumpster down the road. Geez sometimes you make me wonder."

Nikki (www.bookpunks.com) said...

Hahahaha. Oh man. This is hilarious. Can I ask you all something though? Why does this bother you so much? Have you ever actually talked one of these dirty hippies or are you just going to accept the media picture of the thing, file it away under freegan idiotic, and call it a day?

Gus, freegans are practically eating sh@t already? If you looked in a dumpster behind your average supermarket, you'd realize it's far from the case. On a daily basis I find perfect fruits and vegetables, half of them vacuum-packaged. Not rotten. Not moldy. Not even expired. I find boxes and boxes of cheeses, yogurts, puddings—you name it, I've found it. There is often gross stuff in there. But more often it looks as good as the stuff that is sitting on the grocery store shelves for sale.

Kevin, of course freegans get to have it easy because of capitalism's excesses. But the dumpsters full perfectly edible food came first. I eat the food I find there for two reasons. The first is that thinking about how much human energy goes into planting, growing, picking, storing, packaging, transporting, and marketing things that end up in the trash, not when they are no longer consumable, but when they are no longer profitable to return or when there isn't any more room on the shelves, that makes me ragingly angry. When I have a job I like to know my work is useful. Imagine knowing what you spent eight hours a day making was simply being discarded in the trash?

Taking the food out of the trash solves nothing. As, perhaps it was Gus, said, it is a bandaid on a symptom of another problem. But at least if I take it out of the trash and eat it, all that energy and work hasn't been for nothing at all. The second reason I eat dumpstered food is that I could not afford to eat this healthily if I didn't take food out of the trash. Because I make less money than you do, do I deserve to have to eat cheap, unhealthy meals? I didn't realize the size of my income determined my worth. I think access to healthy food is a human right. Do you disagree?

And what is it exactly that communism has to do with all of this?

Also Kevin, why should squatting in someone else's house be humiliating? I can understand it sounding like something you yourself might not what to do, but humiliating? I find it humiliating that some of my neighbors are so concerned with private property that they would go so far as to criminalize the use of it by people who need it. I find seeing empty houses and dumpsters full of perfectly good food several blocks from the homeless and the poor embarrassing. Enough food is being produced to take care of everyone in the country, but we have selected a system that only takes care of the people who collect the most small green pieces of paper. Are we insane, or are we just a society that has no true regard for human life, no matter how often we claim to?

It would be fantastic if supermarkets stopped wasting so much. Freegans would all go back to doing whatever they did before they discovered dumpster diving. We are not "parasites" as you call us, for parasites' sake. We are simply gathering and using what other people are throwing away because, really, is there some good reason not to? If I had an apple tree in my backyard, I would eat the apples I found there. I don't have an apple tree, but I have a dumpster nearby and as long as it continues to be filled with enough food to cook for over thirty people each week, I will continue to collect it, eat it, and hand it out. I can understand the desire not to dumpster dive yourself, but to actively oppose it? That is a position that I would really appreciate having someone explain to me.

Gus Van Horn said...

Just a few points:

(1) "Why does this bother you so much? ... or are you just going to accept the media picture of the thing, file it away under freegan [sic] idiotic, and call it a day?"

So long as you do not violate anyone's property rights when you wallow in the trash, I don't particularly care what you do with your time and your life, although I think you are wasting both by doing so.


The philosophic trend, which makes people like you possible bothers me, though.

(2) "I think access to healthy food is a human right. Do you disagree?

"And what is it exactly that communism has to do with all of this? "

Yes. There is no such thing as a "right" to free food at the expense of the efforts of others.

And as to what this has to do with communism, although I didn't bring this up, I think you just answered your own question. For corroboration, consider the anticapitalist rhetoric from all parties in this movement.

(3) "When I have a job I like to know my work is useful. Imagine knowing what you spent eight hours a day making was simply being discarded in the trash?"

Your payment IS the measure of what your employer found useful.

Also, although this is really beside the point, MOST of what gets produced does get used. That's how so many "wasteful" enterprises stay in business.

(4) "I can understand the desire not to dumpster dive yourself, but to actively oppose it? That is a position that I would really appreciate having someone explain to me."

Politically, I don't oppose it, but see (1) above.

Morally, I oppose what you are doing, which is wasting your time and degrading yourself -- a human being -- in the name of saving a few scraps of garbage

Mycroftxxx said...

Here via google - responding to the OP's latest comment:

Morally, I oppose what you are doing, which is wasting your time and degrading yourself -- a human being -- in the name of saving a few scraps of garbage

This bit confuses me. While I fail to see any political genius at work in the freegan movement, I am not sure how exactly it would be considered humiliating from a logical standpoint. There is an emotional response that some people have to subsisting on the waste of others - but it's just that, an emotional response. It's generally no more dangerous to pick up th leavings from a supermarket or a bagel shop than it is to buy food from a farmer's market. There is a greater possibility of contamination from genuinely unusable items, but not _that_ much greater.

Now, as for philosophical concerns, Freegans _are_ members of the capitalist society that surrounds them whether they like it or not. Self-employment as a scavenger for food and discarded consumer items is no different from scavenging for anything else. I do applaud those who integrate a form of charitable giving into their scavenging to feed larger groups of people than themselves, but what they have found for themselves is a job, no matter how they dress it up. The real proof comes from the consequences of this movement: it's getting harder for those who genuinely have no real place in "the market" to acquire things. As dumpster-diving and other reuse-oriented styles of acquisition (like thrift-store perusal) become more popular, the genuinely poor are having to compete with these folks for scarcer pickings. From the freegan's own point of view (which could be said to endorse an economy of "need" rather than supply and demand) hipsters who are actually capable of being members of the overmarket are taking thing from those who can't. If you want to smack about freegans, aim your sights at the ones who are capable of doing and being more than freeloaders and who are taking bagels (and tables, and chairs, and cloting) out of the hands of the real poor.

Gus Van Horn said...

"If you want to smack about freegans, aim your sights at the ones who are capable of doing and being more than freeloaders and who are taking bagels (and tables, and chairs, and cloting) out of the hands of the real poor."

This is a free country, and I oppose altruism and collectivism. I'll aim at whomever I damn well please.