*Freeganism!*

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Who here is Freegan, or has heard of Freeganism?

USA site here: http://freegan.info/
UK site here: http://freegan.org.uk/

What do people think of it?

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Yep, heard of it. Only gets a brief mention in Australia's media on the odd occasion.

Checked the links you provided and must say that I strongly agree with their philosophies. Might try to contact the Australian chapter if there is one.

It seems to be an outgrowth of the hippy movement of the 1960s where people would walk through supermarkets and eat off the shelves and leave empty handed. It is, at best, a marginal effort since if it ever gained massive support the whole supply of "free" goods would disappear.

I just read "Steal this book" circa 1970. It seems nothing changes, nothing stays the same.

Although it seems that some Freegans do that, most of them only take stuff that has been put in dumpsters/skips, or otherwise discarded as rubbish.

I got the impression that although many poor people could benefit from this movement, because of being able to get food for free with support from others, the main aim is to draw attention to the enormous amount of food, ( and other things ), being wasted by big business, while using/recycling what they can.

It seems to be at least partly a consciousness-raising exercise, an attempt to make people aware of just how much perfectly good food is thrown away every day all over the developed world.

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While I agree with everything they wrote, I'm ashamed to say that's not how I live. I think it's something I really should do.

Like I said. its a forty year old movement recast in name, without the violence.

http://tenant.net/Community/steal/steal.html

Fuzzy, freeganism doesn't seem as malicious as the steal stuff movement of the 60s. Basically they take discarded produce, cut out the bad stuff, and then cook soups and such with it. They do have a good point that Western culture wastes plenty of otherwise good food just because some supermarket manager droid thinks it looks icky. That food could be used to feed the needy. It's not as selfish as Hoffman's "stealism". Some Food Not Bombs chapters in the US have been doing freeganism and urban farming for ages. It's just now getting the attention of the mainstream. My sensory issues mean that freeganism would be a tough row to hoe for me. More power to anybody who can tolerate it though. Hoffman's philosophy is largely why we have video cameras in stores-the idea was to stop hippies from eating food off the shelves, out of sight of the clerks, and then leaving. Very few people steal food nowadays, although that may be changing soon. Most of the old layout supermarkets that allowed one to eat food off shelves are long gone. Modern markets are built to make it easy to see. Freegans don't do what Hoffman suggested, they dumpster dive. Theoretically, once a market throws food away it's no longer theirs, and they can't stop a person from taking it.

In a free or semi-free country these weird folk should be let alone as long as they don't interfere with the rest of us.

ruveyn

Actually these folk perform the useful service of re-cycling some of our garbage which we would otherwise have to spend money on to dispose of. Snails keep the bottom of aquariums clean and freegans keep our dumpsters from overflowing. Since these weird folk violate no property rights, there is no reason to stop them from doing what they are doing.

ruveyn

ruveyn

I agree with that.

The hoffman book was at turns informative, two faced, repulsive and educational. There were some good ideas marred by the violence, and he never quite came to understand that he was teaching his "brothers and sisters" to ultimately f**k him over.

Hah, a friend of mine unilaterally coined the term "freegan" years ago after he had to abandon veganism because he could no longer afford it, and had to eat whatever was offered to him for free. I guess the term is just too good to remain a Seattle area in-joke, but I was quite surprised to see that it's become some sort of movement.

I was totally disgusted at my workplace about a month ago when a heaped trailer load of computers and peripherals were taken to the dump/tip/landfill. All were fully functional although some were a little out of date. The organisation needed space for archive storage, and taking them to the dump was the most expedient option. Foraging at dumps is not permitted, so once gone, they were gone.

No effort was made to pass anything on to a recycler or charitable group, or even a school or club that could have made excellent use of the items.

The string pullers of the world seem to be wanting to turn us all into weapons of mass consumption powered by little plastic cards. Even more powerful when they are corporate cards.

That red head in the American site is quite the dish.

I only heard of it the other day in a blog.

The blogger was at an eatery somewhere and the people at a near table left a half eaten scone so he got quite worked up about how to get it without drawing attention to himself. It just seemed weird and unhygenic too. He's employed it's not like he can't afford to buy a scone. I think it probably extends to just freeloaders who eat at others places but never invite people to theirs for food.

Abbie Hoffman was one hell of a character. I saw him on TV a few times before he killed himself, and he seemed to me to be perpetually angry at the world, as well as dirty and unkempt. He may have been slightly on the spectrum-the autism rate in Israel is only slightly greater than the US (Hoffman was of Jewish ancestry). He seems to have acquired the unshakable conviction in the year or so before his death that the system had become too powerful for average people to resist, and faced with giving up his revolutionary ways or giving up his life, he killed himself. William S. Burroughs is another hippie who killed himself rather than assimilate to the Capitalist Borg.

There seems to have been plenty of young people in the 60s who simply could NOT tolerate regular society. I remember when Jerry Garcia died, I lived in SF and rode my bicycle down to Golden Gate Park to see all the hippies. There were people who were still riding around in psychedelic painted old school buses some 25 years after the movement flamed out. They simply could NOT tolerate being "normal". Were they aspies?

Most of the hippies settled down, but some didn't or couldn't, they went into the forest or Alaskan taiga and never emerged, they traveled the country endlessly begging for food. I wonder what their families must have gone through, to have Johnny simply disappear and never be heard from again. Losing your son in Vietnam was one thing, but losing him to the counterculture must have been quite another.

I suppose they felt like the McCandless family did when Chris disappeared. Chris didn't seem to care, but his family sure did. Teens would run away and wander, and never call home. The highways in the US were full of wandering teens in the late 60s. I've seen old wanderers on roads in the mountains, hitching rides. It's too dangerous to pick anybody up nowadays, but I've been tempted.