The Art of Eating In - Cathy Erway [41]
“Seriously, that’s just not for me. You can do it, though.”
All this fuss over looking for usable objects in the trash, I thought. That was essentially what trash diving meant. It’s also a practice that’s done in the name of social critique along with reclaiming goods for personal use. For many, it’s less about actually needing the goods for pure survival than about the ideology of reusing and repurposing instead of buying. And I was very intrigued by it that winter of 2007. I can’t remember when I’d first heard murmurs of the terms trash diving or freegans, people who consumed thrown-out or otherwise free goods. But I had friends and friends of friends who were involved to some extent in this lifestyle, as well as in related ideas like communal habitats, bike repair, and basically salvaging whatever refuse they could from what they felt was an overly materialistic culture to make art, clothes, food, or shelter or to fulfill other needs.
Freeganism popped up sometime in the mid-1990s, the coinage a play on free and vegan. Yet even though vegan culture has close ties to freeganism, the two are not mutually exclusive, and freegans are not always vegans. The first waves rose within radical activist groups such as Food Not Bombs, which served free vegetarian food, often dug up from the trash, to those in need. The anarchist street theater group of the 1960s Haight-Ashbury scene called the Diggers also touched on what would become freegan ideals by giving away salvaged food. I had little knowledge of all the history and tenets of freeganism at first, but I was intrigued by tales of large feasts cooked and shared by these friends-of-friends freegans, which were supposedly all made from food found in the Dumpsters behind supermarkets. A gold mine in disguise? I wondered. Was creating a banquet based around thrown-out produce and packaged goods sort of like the food version of making art only from found materials?
For some reason, I wasn’t averse to the thought of foraging through trash bins for food. I couldn’t put my finger on why this was. My parents had raised me to eat bread no matter if it was stale, and to drink milk a few days past the store’s sell-by date so long as it didn’t reek. As long as the food found in the trash wasn’t creeping with mold and rot, so what? I reasoned. I imagined lifting a Dumpster bin and uncovering a cache of things like unopened packages of cookies. It seemed a heck of a lot more appetizing than the crumbly, half-stale things on the top of my fridge. It wasn’t until I received such strong reactions against it from my friends that I decided I might actually be meant for this habit—or at the very least, that I should check out a trash tour and see for myself what this whole freegan thing was.
I went to the website freegan.info and signed up for the New York City-based events and discussion e-mail lists. Immediately, I began receiving a daily string of e-mails as the group organized meetings and shared news; their messages ranged from the chatty to the philosophical. One day it might be a call for volunteers to sit at a table at an activist convention. A typical e-mail might provide a link to a news article somehow related to trash diving.
The website freegan.info was founded in 1998 by Adam Weissman, a New York City-based freegan. Begun as the offshoot of a grassroots activist collective called the Wetlands Preserve, the site now serves as a network for freegans around the world, posting activities and news for each city’s local chapter. On the site one can also read manifestos, press clippings, and histories on the