The United States is a land of over-consumption. After many periods of living abroad, I have returned home to find my worst reverse culture shock hits when I first visit the grocery store. The amount of food on the shelves is intimidating, overwhelming, and excessive. While living abroad, I loved the culture of buying only a canvas bag’s worth of food and opting for regular-sized container quantities. In the States, people fill checkout lines with overflowing carts of food and family-sized boxes of cereal. It is not surprising that all this food is not consumed; in America, over 100 billion pounds of food are lost to waste by retailers, consumers and restaurants. The average four-person family in the States discards $590 of food each year before it has reached its expiration date (soundvision). While I work to counter this amount of lost waste by still filling just my canvas bag at the store, there are others both in the States and abroad fighting the consumer/waste results of the capitalist system another way: freeganism.

Freegans do what many call dumpster diving; they await the hours when grocery stores and everyday families bring out their goods to discard, sorting through this waste for items still good to eat. People are “going freegan” across the globe: there are movements in Sweden, Brazil, South Korea, England and even Estonia (nytimes.com). Their whole lifestyle is, in a sense, recycled. Most don second-hand clothes and decorate their homes with furniture and TVs others have thrown away. There is even a site where freegans (and non-freegans) can exchange books (bookcrossing.com). Freeganism is meant to challenge the out-of-control consumer culture many of us live in. The mission statement on the central website of freegans declares:

Freeganism is a total boycott of an economic system where the profit motive has eclipsed ethical considerations and where massively complex systems of productions ensure that all the products we buy will have detrimental impacts most of which we may never even consider. Thus, instead of avoiding the purchase of products from one bad company only to support another, we avoid buying anything to the greatest degree we are able. The word freegan is compounded from "free" and "vegan". Vegans are people who avoid products from animal sources or products tested on animals in an effort to avoid harming animals. Freegans take this a step further by recognizing that in a complex, industrial, mass-production economy driven by profit, abuses of humans, animals, and the earth abound at all levels of production (from acquisition to raw materials to production to transportation) and in just about every product we buy. Sweatshop labor, rainforest destruction, global warming, displacement of indigenous communities, air and water pollution, eradication of wildlife on farmland as "pests", the violent overthrow of popularly elected governments to maintain puppet dictators compliant to big business interests, open-pit strip mining, oil drilling in environmentally sensitive areas, union busting, child slavery, and payoffs to repressive regimes are just some of the many impacts of the seemingly innocuous consumer products we consume every day. - freegan.info

I have gone dumpster diving a few times, and I can assure you the process takes a great deal of time and effort. The result, though, is a feeling of fulfillment in literally reducing human waste while walking away with perfectly good produce, bread, and even coffee tables and iPods. Consumption is clearly an issue on any environmentalists mind. We wonder, what food is the best way to consume? Is veganism the clearest path to green eating or can we just eat local and in season? We are also divided on the popularity of green consumerism. Is it okay that driving a Prius is “cool”? Is it a good thing that buying green is in style? Because many of us live in a capitalist, consumer-based society, it seems the momentum of “green is in” is a necessary step that must somehow be combined with reducing consumption habits more generally (i.e. driving less, buying less, using less electricity), and yet there is always debate on if or how this synthesis is possible. On the surface, freeganism seems to be an extreme renouncement of consumption, and thus adamantly opposed to green’s status as “in.” At the same time, freegans still rely on the culture of over-consumption to survive. There is also a large possibility that much of the wasted food they consume is not local, instead sustaining freight industries that expend huge amounts of energy to transport food. Would it be better for them to support CSA models and consume only what they needed? In light of these contradictions, I’m curious what the ideal freegan would look like? If the over-consumption freegans protest was reduced, how then, would they live? While without a doubt I commend those involved in the freegan movement, I wonder how they respond to this complex paradox of relying on current consumption models to protest them? Despite freeganism’s potential contradictions, the movement’s statement is certainly a loud and powerful notice to readers to look at our own consumption patterns. How can we change to contribute less to the billions of pounds of food wasted worldwide?