If you are looking for day-old donuts or loaves of bread whose date has expired, you might want to try the dumpster behind your local grocery store. They’re still edible even if there’re a little stale. Pop them in the microwave for about ten seconds, and they’ll taste as fresh as they day they were made. Freegans are leading the way to minimalist consumption by plundering dumpsters looking for culinary treasures that will release them from the rich fat-cats who they claim rule the world and subjugate all of us to corporate slavery.
The word “Freegan” is an amalgamation of the words “free” and “vegan.” A Vegan (vee-gan) is someone who will not eat animal products or purchase goods that used animals in testing to bring the product to market. A Freegan is a vegetarian with an anti-capitalistic attitude. Freegans don’t use or possess money. They do not work because work is too “dehumanizing.” How do Vegans live in a world where it takes money to make the world go ’round? They dumpster dive. For those of you not familiar with this modern-day way to shop, it’s as simple as it sounds. You dive into dumpsters looking for edible food that has been thrown out by restaurants and grocery stores. I’ll let a Freegan explain the philosophy:
Freegans widely vary in their concern for health—some freegans gorge themselves on dumpstered donuts and some are still totally vegan, but get all their food for free. Most fall in the happy medium who would rather eat a loaf of bread with whey in it than make a $2 donation to the corporate death machine. Some freegans eat “edgy” food (on the edge of edibility), and some don’t take chances. Some folks are even “meagan”—they eat meat if they get it for free. The best and easiest way to get the most food is to head to your local grocery store, produce store, bagel and donut shop, bakery, K-mart (expired shelf goodies), and open up the dumpster and take a look. Don’t be afraid to climb in and dig around! Have fun, go with your friends! If you just find a big, scary compactor behind the store (a bunch of big supermarkets have these) you can’t get in, but you can fight back. Start a local DLF (Dumpster Liberation Front!) and stick it to those compactors: superglue them so they don’t work or hit them with a bat or pee on them or pain them up; have fun—compactors are the enemy. P.S. Food is not the only thing in dumpsters! Happy scavenging![1]
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As you’ve already figured out, Freegans are hypocrites. Let’s suppose that the capitalists got together and decided not to be capitalists for about a month or two. (A similar theme is outlined in Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged.) The fat-cat capitalists would shut their stores and close their restaurants and take extended vacations. The Freegans would starve to death. The scraps they dive into dumpsters to feast on are made possible by the capitalistic system that keeps billions of people alive around the world and dumpsters full.
Freegans are upset with capitalism because people living on the edge of starvation suffer while Americans have so much food that tons of it are thrown away each day. Capitalism is the solution, not the problem. Most of these nations are poor because their governments espouse the philosophy of the Freegans—kill the goose that lays the golden eggs.
Endnotes:
[1] “Why Freegan”: www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/Lobby/3609/lib_whyfreegan.html