Throughout my four years in college I
created my own interdisciplinary studies of “slow consumerism.” My studies
sought to reconnect to the production of what I consume by taking hands-on
classes in multiple disciplines involving the basic processes to create apparel items, wood and metal
products, and agricultural production. If overconsumption, and environmental
and social degradation are linked to the alienation from the processes involved
in the production of what we consume, then the sensual reconnection to the production of the material world is
sustainable praxis. In a similar
manner we are systematically alienated from the waste of our consumption. This
research project serves to provide a greater understanding of the unsustainable
nature of waste created by modern society and its linkage to overconsumption.
This paper has been a vehicle to
understand the historical, social, political, and economic contexts in which
the practice of dumpster diving has come to exist. I will begin by recounting my personal experiences of dumpster
diving and personal experience with the illegal character of the practice. In
order to gain a greater perspective on the local practices of dumpster diving,
I have included several interviews with local students at Appalachian State
University and their respective motivations. I outline the use of dumpster diving for political means,
critiquing capitalist over-production of waste, environmental degradation and
social inequality, by the movements of Food Not Bombs, The Diggers, and The
Freegans. I map out a narrative of
the industrialization and the transformation from a closed to an open system of
production. This transformation paved the way for the development of a consumer
society, where new markets and economic growth were ever expanding. The idea of
freedom and happiness in America became associated with the accumulation of
more material wealth due to economic growth. I conclude, by illustrating the
ways in which dumpster diving challenges the paradigm of consumer society
through the transformation of consumption patterns.
Getting
Personal: My life in a Dumpster
On one occasion, while we were in the
midst of collecting food from a dumpster a manager approached us. He scolded us
for having the guts to steal from his establishment and explained that the
legal consequences for dumpster diving is equivalent to stealing from the
store. We had already collected several boxes of berries, apples, and a box of
squashes that were placed in our back seat. He told us that we would have to
put all of the food back inside the dumpster to rot in the landfill or else he
would call the cops. I wished I had known what to say to him to convey the
injustice of throwing perfectly edible food back into the trash. This
experience raised many questions. Why would the manager of this establishment
prefer for edible food to be rotting in a dumpster versus eaten by broke college
students? Why is so much food produced in the first place, if our society is
not appropriately using it?
Throughout my teenage years, I had
heard about dumpster diving and the alternative modes of living that often
accompany the practice. Several of my High School comrades actively
participated in these alternative modes of survival and later went on to travel
the nation via trains and hitch hiking. Due to these affiliations, I have since
had a very idealized and positive view of dumpster diving. However, it was not
until the summer of my sophomore year that I tried dumpster diving for myself.
My summer roommate happened to survive largely off of dumpster food. In general
she was a very communal person, exemplified by her “communal car”. Folks would
convene to prepare feasts after successful runs to the dumpsters and it was not
uncommon to bless the meal by thanking the dumpster. The first time she took
me, I stood outside the dumpster. I was still very weary of the idea of getting
inside a trashcan for both cleanly and legal reasons. Instead, I assisted the divers in transporting the copious
quantities of food from dumpster to vehicle. The Ingles dumpster, where my first experience took place, is a dumpster
renown by Boone residents for the quantity and cleanliness of their dumpster food.
Unlike many dumpsters, produce is thrown out in boxes that are often placed on
top of the more unsanitary trash, such as discarded meat. As I continued to
accompany my roommate on her dumpster quests I became more and more comfortable
with the prospect of retrieving food for myself. For the last two and a half
years dumpster food has supplemented my diet in varying degree.
Getting
down and dirty…in the dumpster
“Dumpster diving” is the practice of
salvaging wasted materials from a dumpster, including food and other goods. This
practice has likely “existed for as long as there have been dumpsters and excessive
waste” (Edwards and Mercer 282). The
word "dumpster" was first used commercially in 1936. The term dumpster diving has unknown
origins. However, John Hoffman, the author of the “art and science of dumpster
diving”, describes that the term exemplifies the ideal body position for one to
salvage materials from a dumpster. However, many people who practice salvaging
items from dumpsters also acquire objects in many other ways. These various
practices are often deemed urban scrounging and include the practice dumpster
diving.
Local Histories of
Dumpster diving
A myriad of people practice urban
scrounging or dumpster diving with varying motivations. In order to gain a
greater perspective of the current local practices of dumpster diving in Boone,
I conducted five interviews with students that dumpster dive on a regular
basis. People identified their motivations for urban scrounging as
environmental, political, economic, biblical, and simply because it is free. As
Ben Gardner, senior appropriate technology major, put it, “It’s simply an
untapped waste stream and a lot of people need food. If it’s getting thrown out
anyway, in most cases ending up at a landfill to sit and rot, what’s the point
of putting it to waste? It just seems silly. So if you’re hungry, why not
dumpster dive?” Several students that I interviewed, who identified as
obtaining a large majority of their diet for free, also clued me in to the
practice of salvaging food on campus and at local businesses in alternative
ways. Some of them would stand by the conveyor belt where students place
unwanted food and simply grab it before it landed in the trash. Currently,
post-consumer waste is not composted and is simply pulped and shipped to the
landfill. In addition, Gardner explained that he sometimes goes to Earth Fare
around closing time to salvage some of the hot bar food that will otherwise be thrown
out.
Appalachian Senior sustainable
development major Laura Rainville explained that in combination with salvaging
food from the dumpster, she also practices what she called “urban foraging.”
She will check the dumpsters outside of large apartment complexes in order to
salvage wasted items beyond food. She informed me that she had found everything
from “couches, kitchen appliances, half-way used bottles of shampoo, half and
half, toilet paper, foot powder, and even beer. What more could a girl want?” Maddie
Baker justifies these practices in a very pragmatic sense: “Why would we buy
things if we can survive off of others’ waste while saving items from decaying
in landfills and polluting our water and air? I would even go so far to say
that it is unjust to buy new things when there are perfectly functional things
to be found in the trash.”
In the fall of 2010, a group of about
ten college students started up a Food Not Bombs chapter here in Boone. We held
weekly community food servings in various places in Boone. In searching for
wasted food to utilize, we faced difficulty in finding stores to donate food . A
few small farms donated vegetables to our organization, but predominately we
collected our food from dumpsters. In our experience the organization served as
a medium to make connections across socioeconomic boundaries through the
practice of sharing food. Our local experiences of Food not Bombs are apart of
a larger network of Food Not Bombs Chapters across the globe. In the following
section, I will explain urban scrounging, as practiced by Food Not Bombs, The
Diggers movement, and the Freegan movement, and their use of salvaged goods for
political means.
Food Not Bombs
Food Not Bombs is one of the most well-known
organizations that advocates for food recovery, either from dumpster diving or
donations, in order to provide community food servings for those in need. Food
Not Bombs was founded in 1980 by a group of eight friends in Boston, including Keith
Mchenry who continues to be an active participant in the organization. One of
the founding beliefs of Food Not Bombs is that food is a right not a privilege.
The organization differs from religious charities because it is strongly
politicized. At every food serving literature is available on content such as
global inequalities, hunger, and food waste. All of the meals are purposely
either vegan or vegetarian to make clear the organization’s stance against
animal cruelty. The organization has also provided food for many international
protests since the 1980’s. According to the Food Not Bombs website, the
organization has provided food for “occupations including Camp Casey outside Bush's ranch in Texas, at a 100
day occupation in Kiev, Ukraine during the Orange Revolution, at a two month
Peace Camp on the west Bank in Palestine and at a 600 day farmer's occupation
in Bosnia and Herzegovina Square in Sarajevo. Volunteers also helped organize
and shared meals at the 1999 WTO protests in Seattle and provide logistical
support for many other anti-globalization actions.”(Foodnotbombs.net)
Food Not Bombs has deep roots in the town of Boone. In 1996 the
first chapter was started by the Rise Up collective. The Rise Up collective was
made up of about eight people who organized around the concept of creating
community in Boone. The group held
Food Not Bombs servings twice a week in rotating locations. One former member
of the Rise Up collective recounted serving food at the trailer park by Walmart.
She told me that the residents were so grateful for the food, that Food Not Bombs’
members would be invited into their homes. In addition, the collective created
a free library and community space, located above where the business Bulldog
currently resides. The library consisted of hundreds of donated books that were
free for the public to rent out. Many of the books were on radical content that
was sparsely to be found at the public library. The collective also produced a
free publication entitled The Fuse, which published community news and
articles. They started the first free bicycle work space in Boone that
continues to this day. Globally, Food Not Bombs has historically worked in
coalition with “really-really free markets” and “bike not bombs”. Placing the
movement in alignment with the activities of the Diggers and the contemporary Freegan
movement.
The Diggers
“The Diggers” was a social movement that
formed in the 1960’s in San Francisco’s infamous Haight-Ashbury district. The groups’ ideology was largely anarcho-pacifistic
and used a variety of methods, including street theater, direct action, and
art, towards the goal of creating a “Free city”. The group emphasized social
and environmental justice as well, putting them in solidarity with the back to
the land and civil rights movements. The group evolved out of the San Francisco
mime troupe, which was a collectively run radical theater company that held
public performances free of charge. The diggers established a variety of free
stores, free medical clinics, free performance art, and free food servings. (Diggers.org)
Warren Belasco recounts a performance of the diggers that took place in October
1966. The diggers arrived in a colorfully clad bus dressed in monk costumes.
The diggers would shout “food as a medium” and begin handing out literature
that they entitled “digger feed”. One digger described the purpose of the feeds
as developing “collective social consciousness and social action”. They would
set up the food outside of the bus and had each participant pass through a
wooden “frame of reference,” to symbolize their intention of transformation
embodied in their action. All of the food was scavenged, gleaned from friends’ farms,
or grown on individual diggers farms. The diggers would portray their
anarchistic idealization of equality with signs as “ if someone asks for a
manager, tell him he’s the manager.” (Belasco 17-19)
The structure of Food Not Bombs has been
very evidently shaped by the digger free food servings that were accompanied by
free literature in an attempt to radicalize the hungry. In addition, “it is
important to acknowledge the way in which Diggers and various other counter-cultural
movements have shaped the contemporary context in which the modern Freegan
movement is unfolding.” (Emery 28)
Freegans
Ideology
The contemporary Freegan movement
began in the mid 1990’s. According
to freegan.info, “Freegans
are people who employ alternative strategies for living based on limited
participation in the conventional economy and minimal consumption of resources.”
Freegans’ limit their participation in the conventional economy by a variety of
methods. This includes occupying unused building for housing and community
spaces, making products themselves, guerilla gardening and utilizing and
repairing wasted materials. The most common practice of Freeganism is the
practice of urban scrounging
Urban Scrounging practiced by Freegans
is distinct because it is done as a form of civil disobedience. Jeff Shantz
coins this phenomenon as “propaganda of the deed”. Mercer and Edwards describe Freegan Urban as a “symbolic,
political act against capitalist overproduction and waste…” (Emery 29). Joan
Gross describes the Freegan movement as “an offshoot of the anti-globalization
and environmental movements”. (Gross, 69). Implicit in Freegan ideology is the
understanding that global capitalism functions on the exploitation of the
earth, animals and humans. As the term “Freegan” combines the words “free” and “vegan”, Freegans avoid all
animal products in order to boycott the unfair treatment of animals. This also
encompasses the understanding of the poor living conditions of animals in
concentrated feedlots and slaughterhouses, the environmental costs of meat, and
the poor treatment of workers within meat production and slaughter facilities.
Freeganism
in Practice
Freegan groups operate in Austrailia, New York,
Oregon, Clairemont, Los Angeles, Seattle, and Texas. (Emery 35) However, the
forms of Freegan groups are diverse and are shaped by the particular context
and place in which they operate. The Freegan group that operates in New York
City is unique in that the city has curbside trash pickup, which makes the
practice of picking through trash legal. Unlike dumpsters in many other cities
that are deemed private property, the location of trash on public property has
implications for the tactics employed by NYC Freegans.
The organization offers public “trash tours”,
which are used as an educational tool to enlighten the general public on the
abundance of food that is wasted in our current food system. The tours
generally stop at three to four locations and participants collect food that is
used for their weekly community meals and excess food is offered to
individuals. Throughout the tours Freegan members give speeches that help
participants make sense of the excessive food waste through the lens of Freegan
ideology: salvaging food from the trash does not solely translate into a
rejection of consumerism. However, the speeches are tailored to be digestible
to a wide audience. For instance, rather than blatantly articulating
anti-capitalist rhetoric the speeches focus on a critique of the food system
and consumer society. They avoid affiliating the group with anti-capitalism, as
this is a pejorative term in American society. (Barnard 435) The group tours
offer the advantage of causing a spectacle, as twenty people digging through
the trash is rather uncommon in Manhattan.
The
Ugly Truths of Consumer Culture: American Waste
These social movements have played a large role
in the popularization and politicization of dumpster diving in the United
States. They illustrate the
placement of urban scrounging at the intersection of social, economic, legal,
ethical and environmental issues. Implicit in Food Not Bombs, The Diggers, and
the contemporary Freegan movement is a critique of global capitalist production
of excessive waste, inequality, environmental destruction, industrialization of
food, and identities as expressions of mass consumerism. I will discuss these
issues in detail in the following section. The practice of dumpster diving
unearths the contents of our waste receptacles as well as our cultural values.
It puts into question the neat dualities of what is just and unjust, “commodity
versus trash, public versus private space, and possessions versus dispossesions”
(Ferrel 185).
Food
Waste
At the most fundamental level, urban scrounging is
only possible with the over production of edible food waste and the disposal of
functioning or fixable products. According to the Environmental Protection
Agency, in the United States almost 33 million tons of food was thrown away in 2010, which is 100 billion pounds. This also
means that 3000 pounds of food is wasted per second. According to Jonathan
Bloom, from farm to fork, "Almost
half of the food in the United States goes to waste." Twelve percent of
the food that we throw away as a nation was still edible at the time of discard.
(Bloom xii)
Food Waste and Poverty
The
statistics of hunger in America put into conversation with statistics of food
waste is particularly baffling. According to the United States Department of
Agriculture (USDA), “14.5
percent of households were food insecure at least some time during 2010.” The
USDA defines food insecurity as people that are unable to “access
nutritious and adequate amounts of food necessary for a healthy life.” In 2010, 5.4 percent of households were
described as very food insecure, meaning they had very little access to food. According to
feedingamerica.org, “In the United States, more than
one out of six children lives in a household with food insecurity, which means
they do not always know where they will find their next meal.” However,
researchers at the National Institute of Health have reported that forty three
million people could be fed well with merely a quarter of the food wasted
annually. Bloom calculated that if all the food wasted was utilized it could
feed 430 million people. (Bloom 47)
Food Waste: Environmental Impact
Not only is food waste in
the face of hungry humans an unjust phenomenon, an abundance of food waste is deteriorating
to the environment. Food waste is one of the most harmful of all wastes due to
methane gas that is released as food decomposes. Methane gas has eight times
the warming capacity as carbon dioxide. The concentrated nature of food
disposal through the use of landfills contributes greatly to climate change. The
proliferation of food waste is also significant because of the wasted resources
throughout its production. To waste food is wasting the human labor required to
produce food. It is a waste of water that is required for the production of
food. It is a waste of energy as well. Bloom details that if you factor in the
use of energy required in both the production and distribution of food in
America it accounts for 17% of America’s energy usage. (Bloom 16-20).
History of Waste
However,
we have not always been a culture so heavily imbued with waste. The waste
production in 19th century America differed markedly from today. The
kitchen trashcan was not in existence. Reusing and recycling was a way of life.
According to Elizabeth Royte, “ Food scraps went to farm animals. Individually
packaged consumer goods were rare and expensive. Tin cans were saved for
storage or scoops, jars for preserving food. Old clothes were prepared, made
over into new clothes, or used for quilting, mattress stuffing, rugs or rags.
Plastic was unknown.” (qtd in emery 68).
Before this time, trash in urban areas was simply
thrown onto the street and waste was an integral part of urban dwellers
physical environment. Poor children could make a living by scavenging for
discarded materials on the street and sell the items to a local rag picker.
This facilitated the “exchange of unwanted material from the consumer back to
the manufacturer: people from the middle and lower classes exchanged used rags,
bones, bottles, paper, and iron tea kettles or buttons, which pickers then sold
back to manufacturers, who used these raw materials to manufacture their goods”.
(Emery 67). The utilization of garbage was indicative of social class and
carries social stigma to this day. (Royte 22).
Municipal
trash collections came into being
in the 1880’s. Waste shifted from being an every day part of human’s
environment, to being shipped off to landfills. Before the organization of
municipal trash, waste would clutter urban streets reminding consumers of the
waste of his/her consumption. With this shift, consumers were alienated from
their trash, which made their accumulation of it far more convenient. According
to Susan Strasser, “toward the end of nineteenth century, disposal became
separate from production and Americans’ relationship to waste was fundamentally
transformed. Trash and trash making became integral to the economy in a wholly
new way: the growth of markets for new products came to depend in part on the
continuous disposal of old things “(qtd in emery 69).
The
amount of trash produced rose significantly at the beginning of the twentieth
century due to “population growth, greater consumption and more efficient
[trash] collection” (Melosi 115). The production system switched from a closed
system of production, where the materials used to produce new commodities came
directly from recycling old materials, to an open system of production. This
system functioned more linearly; where the waste of consumer items was
infrequently utilized and instead was dealt with by incinerator and eventually
the modern day landfill. Unlike a closed system of production, which resembles
sustainable ecosystems, open systems of production return waste to the earth
not to nourish but to degrade it. (Strasser 15)
During both of the world wars there was a revived
interest in reverting to a frugal way of life. With posters such as “food is
ammunition-don’t waste it”, “food will win the war”, “wheat is needed for the
allies”, and even “don’t waste food while others starve”. (Bloom 79-81)The
Great Depression being sandwiched between the two world wars further engrained
the practice of frugality as a way of life, exemplified by the commonly eaten
soup made by mixing ketchup with boiling water. In this time period waste was
considered unpatriotic. Food was rationed during World War II, and American’s
further learned how to “make due with less” (Bloom 79). Scrounging for scrap
metal during the Second World War was highly encouraged. This demonstrates the
legal and moral ambiguity that the practice of scrounging waste has embodied
throughout history.
The esoteric knowledge of thrift was
predominantly lost in the latter part of the twentieth century, only to be re-appropriated
in glimpses and on the margins of society. Postwar America stimulated the ever-growing culture of
consumption and simultaneously a culture of waste. With the advent of chemical
fertilizers and pesticides the industrial food system was able to produce more
food than ever before. Yields increased and farmers were encouraged with
subsidies to maximize production. Due to increase of supply, the price of food
was lowered significantly. In 1957 food was 22% cheaper than the former decade.
(Bloom 80)
Smaller farms were put out of business due to the
economic pressure to increase production size. From 1935 to 1997 the number of
farms in the United States shrunk by 70%. This drastic decrease in the amount
of citizens growing their own food has resulted in a general lack of knowledge
of food and alienation from the sources of where food comes from. Alice Water,
an elementary garden facilitator, described the decrease in wastefulness that
occurs with small children if they actively participate in growing or cooking
their own food. (Bloom 64)
Food as a commodity creates a distorted
relationship to food. Consumers
judge the quality of produce upon its appearance not taste. There is an
expectation for perfect and uniform produce, however life forms do not
reproduce in this mechanistic manner organically. Consumers often adhere
rigidly by use-by dates because they have lost the knowledge to know whether a
food is edible or not. Due to governmental subsidies of the industrial
food system and overproduction of food, the price of industrial food is not a
fair representation of the social and environmental cost of its production.
Cheap prices make food waste a petty matter.
In addition, waste is also encouraged by the
nature of the market. For business owners to ensure economic growth it is
necessary to create new markets. Laurie Essig notes, “Without waste, consumer capitalism cannot charge
for the luxury of the flawless tomato or the freshly baked bagel.” In other
words, waste is necessary in order to create new markets. In an economic system
that measures solely profits, economic growth and the consumerism it encourages
has evolved to be signified as America’s national identity.
Consumerism
as America’s national Identity:
According to Emily
Rosenberg, “The first half of the twentieth century, the idea of “America” for
many people around the world, came to be identified with the social imaginary
of a mass consumer society”. According to Jeff Ferrell, “more than any other
engine, corporate hyperconsumption drives contemporary US society, along the
way constructing a seductive if sad sort of store-bought commonality among its
members. As disturbing, the proliferate waste produced by this endless hyperconsumptive
panic seems less an unfortunate by-product than a component essential to its
continuation.” (Ferrell 5). The economy has grown by seven trillion per decade
since 1950. Food waste has doubled since 1974 per capita (Bloom xxi).
As Ferrel eloquently articulates, in modern America
many people constitute their identities with what clothing and products that
they purchase. Jeff Ferrel further articulates his vision of the failings of
economic development in enhancing well-being and describes the phenomenon as ”a sort of existential vacancy- a
personal void, a material longing promoted by the same corporate advertisers
whose products promise its resolution. But in the same way that consumer culture
empties individuals of their identity, it fills their trash bins and dumpsters
with its waste.” (Ferrel 162).
Consumerism equals Happiness:
The ability to accumulate material wealth has
come to signify the idea of “happiness” and freedom in 21st century
American society. Gustav Speth notes American’s
blind faith in the idea that economic growth will ensure well-being. Speth
notes the ambiguity of the phrase “a right to the pursuit of happiness” as used
in the declaration of independence. One could interpret the concept of
happiness as the well-being of a society as a whole. However, it could also be
interpreted as the well-being of one individual. Speth describes how the term
began signifying the latter as the newly formed society practiced a capitalist
economy. The right to happiness has come to signify the right to increasing
amounts of material wealth.
Max Weber argues that, “Material
goods have gained an increasing and finally an inexorable power over the lives
of men as at no previous period in history”. Darrin Mcmahon notes the
importance of the conception of happiness as material wealth, for it provides a
reason for the everyday American to devote the majority of his time to work.
Like a never-ending cycle, the modern American works in order to get more money
to buy more things only to have to work more. He references a number of studies
that have measured well-being of differing nations in relation to their
economic development. One of the overarching findings of the research studies
that he references is that subjective well-being does not increase at the same
rate as material wealth. He cites a study that noted that after the end of the Second
World War, when economic growth “skyrocketed” “life satisfaction” actually
leveled out and in some instances declined. A number of studies found that
life-satisfaction plateaus at a “moderate level of income”. This suggests that
an overabundance of material wealth certainly does not lead to
life-satisfaction and can actually lead to psychological and physical sickness.
(Speth 126-133)
Speth references social scientists Ed Diener and Martin Seligman, who
conducted extensive studies on the factors that most greatly effect well-being.
They found that relationships were very fundamental for an individuals’ well-being.
“The need to belong, to have close and long-term social relations is a
fundamental human need.”(Speth 135)
The individualism inherent in seeking surplus capital, not only has lead
us to vast inequalities, but also deprives humans of the fundamental need to
connect to others in meaningful ways.
Reimagining
the American Paradigm
Urban Scroungers transgress consumerism
in American Society. By radically
altering their consumption patterns, they redefine what it means to live well. Urban scroungers do not seek well being from the accumulation of
excessive material goods or wealth. Mimicking the frugality of generations
before, they reinvent individual
and community values. The social movements that have
popularized dumpster diving, create alternative cultures and economies the
challenge the paradigm of individualism, social relations organized around the
proliferation of surplus value, and the fast pace of modern society. The
practice also raises many contentious questions of morality and the logic that
informs its legal status.
LEGAL ISSUES:
As noted previously, the role of scrounging in
America has taken on various connotations in the history of our nation. The
shifting moral character and legal ambiguity of the practice is true today as
well. In 1988 the US supreme court ruled that curbside trash, which sits on the
margins of private property, “therefore is subject to police search without
warrant, basing its ruling in part by the notion that curbside trash is already
‘readily accessible to animals, children, scavengers, snoops, and other members
of the public.” (Ferrel, 11) The Supreme Court makes it very clear that it is
legal for police officers to search through others trash without permission,
and yet this same practice is criminalized in many places when conducted by
everyday citizens. More cities nationally have outlawed the practice on various
grounds. Some cities have outlawed scrounging, claiming that the content of
dumpster’s belong to the city or that dumpsters are private property. Ferrell
describes urban scrounging as existing “somewhere along the boundaries that
separate the private domain of the home from the public spaces of social life,
the private property of the individual or business or from the shared resources
of the community. “ (Ferrell 24)
These laws have impacted the operations of the
social movements discussed previously. For example, Food Not Bombs operations have
been made difficult by recent policies. According to Food Not Bombs blog,
chapters in “England, California, Texas, Pennsylvania, South
Carolina, and Florida” have all faced arrest for sharing food to the hungry. I was fortunate enough to meet Keith Mchenry,
a founding member of Food Not Bombs. He explained to me the legal consequences he
has faced for reallocating wasted food to those in need; throughout his career
he has been arrested over one hundred times for serving food to those in need
and exercising his right to free speech. He explained that virtually every
police station across the country is equipped with literature on the subversive
nature of Food not Bombs as an organization. The
ambiguity and even contradictory legal status of dumpster diving depending on
state laws, brings to light social and individual differentiation of justice.
One such example of the culturally constructed manner
of legality, is the practice of gleaning. A rural predecessor to dumpster
diving, gleaning is the
practice of salvaging the remaining food after a crop has been harvested.
According to Agnes Varda, the practice of gleaning has likely been around as
long as agriculture itself. As mentioned in the old testament, “Now when you
reap the harvest of your land, you shall not reap to the very corners of your
field, nor shall you gather the gleanings of your harvest. Nor shall you glean your
vinyard, nor shall you gather the fallen fruit of your vineyard; you shall
leave them for the needy and for the stranger” Leviticus 19:9-10. Several
European countries have historically protected the rights of gleaners on
private farmland in accordance with the bible. The practice of gleaning is
taboo in the United States due to its correlation with trespassing on private
property, which is particularly ironic due to the prevalence of Christianity in
the United States. (The Gleaners and I)
As is
argued by Food Not Bombs and The Freegans, urban scrounging plays a role in
diverting waste from causing environmental degradation. If we have a moral
obligation to protect the future of the planet, than dumpster diving is not
only a political act: it is a moral one. However, in many instances it is in
the best interest of local business owners to enforce laws banning the practice
of dumpster diving because they are potentially losing their markets. If all
wastes were magically put to use, markets would be drastically minimized.
Therefore, the market, largely informs the moral issues that shape the legal
status of urban scrounging. As an economic system that externalizes
environmental and social costs, the justice system as currently practiced in
the United States is designed to protect economic growth. This places the
practice of urban scrounging on the margins of society.
Marginalism
and Solidarity
Not only is urban scrounging marginal due to its
legal status. It is also marginal because of its explicit defiance to the ideas
of success and happiness in American society. Historically, scrounging through
trash has been indicative of low-social class and in many instances this is
true today. The American perception of urban scrounging “stirs sentiments, not
of systematic crisis or inequity, but rather personal failure or individual
pathology.” (Shantz 122) However, as the Diggers, Freegans, and Food Not Bombs
members’ indicate, many people have marginalized themselves intentionally. “Working with little more than abandoned shopping
carts and their own ingenuity, urban scroungers create a complex culture of
scavenging, interrupting the inexorable material flow from shopping mall to
landfill, and undertaking to redeem contemporary U.S society from the wreckage
of its own failed arrangements". (Ferrell, 28).
The marginal nature of urban scroungers’ creates a
sense of solidarity amongst those that practice it. Across political, religious
and socioeconomic boundaries, urban scroungers find connections through the
practice of utilizing others waste. The urban scroungers examined in the social
movements of Food Not Bombs, The Diggers, and the Freegan movement find fulfillment in sharing, community and political activism. According
to Francis Moore Lappe, the same neurons light up in our brain when we
cooperate as when we eat chocolate.
The social movements of Food not Bombs, The
Diggers, and Freeganism all operate under the founding principle of sharing
found items in order to create community. Using free food as a medium, they
seek to enlighten the general public on the ugly truths of consumer society. As
a tangible example, food waste speaks volumes. However, they also operate in a very contentious
reality. Urban scroungers are depended upon consumer culture’s production of
excessive waste. This is very paradoxical for those who dumpster dive as a
political critique of the current system. However,
urban scroungers not only critique the status quo of society and the economy, they
live the change they want to see in the world. “Dumpster divers are the most logical subset of the
anti-globalization activists because they live in a way that does not create
any demand for goods and therefore their lives do nothing to propagate the very
system they are protesting.” (Essig)
Gift Economy
These social movements operate under the vision of
a gift economy that emphasizes a different type of growth than measured by the
Gross Domestic Product. Charles Eisenstein claims that, “Community
is woven from gifts. Unlike today's market system, whose built-in scarcity
compels competition in which more for me is less for you, in a gift economy the
opposite holds.” (Yesmagazine.org). Organizing social relations around gift
giving, creates egalitarianism amongst its members. Anthropologist professor of Yale notes that cultures operating under
gift economies “would have found the very premise that the point of an economic
transaction- at least one with someone who was not your enemy- was to seek the
greatest profit deeply offensive.” (Shantz 117) Individuals do not
strive to accumulate surplus, rather surplus is given to the community. The
good of the whole is emphasized over the good of a few.
An informal gift economy is very conducive to urban
scrounging in general. In the practice of urban Scrounging it is very common to
find large quantities of one type of item. Supermarkets often throw out large
quantities of one type of food because of the arrival of new stock or if one
item parishes that is packaged with many others. If one bottle of tomato sauce
is broken in a case, it is common for grocery stores to throw out the entire
case. Individuals would have little need to hoard the entire case for
themselves. To maximize the utility of found objects, the practice of sharing and
trading is quite common. Scrounging transgresses the conception of items for
the market value and enables items to be conceived of for their use-value.
Slow Consumerism:
Urban Scrounging is a practice of slow
consumerism. The slow food movement seeks to ensure food that is grown
sustainably, for both the earth and humans. Urban scroungers have similarly
embodied these values with practices of mutual aid and circumventing waste from
contributing to environmental degradation. The slow food movement seeks
connections to the farmers who grow our food in order to ensure sustainability.
In a similar vain, urban scroungers viscerally experience Americas
overproduction of waste and embody values of equality and caring for the environment
essential to the philosophy of sustainability.
Urban Scrounging also transforms one’s temporality. The twenty first century is often noted
for its quickening of pace. Advances in technology have allowed for fast
travel, fast information, and fast food. Unlike the convenience of buying
grocery items from a store, there is unpredictability and patience required in
the practice of Urban Scrounging. There is no longer a need for the instant
gratification that is necessary in a fast paced framework of time. When
scrounging for subsistence, there is no need to rush. In fact, when searching
for waste in places other than the dumpster, it is much more efficient to walk
on foot than drive in a car. Ferrel claims that urban scrounging “subverts the
temporal foundations of consumer culture.” (Ferrell 192)
Conclusions
The individual actions of urban
scroungers play an important role in the ecology of human society. Like fungi,
urban scroungers transform the waste of another into their subsistence.
Although the amount of waste recovered is minimal, their actions embody the
frugality necessary for a sustainable future. The current practices of American
consumerism have great environmental costs. Urban scroungers alternative lifestyles
deeply challenge the materialism, anthropomorphism, and individualism of modern
society. Urban scrounging
re-imagines cultural-values of morality and justice, transforms individual
consumption patterns, reorganizes social relations, and restructures
individuals temporality. The
values embodied within the actions of mutual aid, slow consumerism, and
resourcefulness that form the backbone of the complex culture of urban
scroungers are essential to ensuring a sustainable future.
Bibliography Page
Barnard, Alex. "'Waving the banana' at capitalism:
Political theater and social movement strategy among New York's 'freegan'
dumpster divers." Ethnography 12 (2011): 420-44. Print.
Baker, Maddie. Personal Interview. March 22, 2012
Belasco, Warren J. Appetite for change: How the counterculture
took on the food industry. Cornell University Press: Ithaca and London.
1989. Print
Bloom, Jonathan. American Wasteland: How America Throws Away
Nearly Half of Its Food (and What We Can Do about It). Cambridge, MA: Da
Capo, 2010. Print.
Briddle, David. "Dumpster Diving: For Profit and
Passion." In Business 21.3 (1999). Environment Complete.
Web. 3 Mar. 2012.
Douglas, Mary. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts
of Pollution and Taboo.Routledge: Kentucky.1984. Claremont University
Consortium: Web. 12
November 2011.
Edwards, Ferne, and David Mercer. "Gleaning from Gluttony:
An Austrailian Youth Subculture Confronts the Ethics of Waste." Austrailian
Geographer 38.3 (2007): 279-96. Web.
Eikenberry, Nicole and Cherry Smith. “Attitudes, beliefs, and
prevalence of dumpster diving as a means to obtain food by Midwestern,
low-income, urban dwellers.” Agriculture and Human Values. 22 (3003):
187-202. Web.
Eisenstein,
Charles. “To Build Community, an
economy of Gifts.” http://www.yesmagazine.org/happiness/to-build-community-an-economy-of-gifts
Ernst, Kelly. “A Revolution We Create Daily: Freegan
Alternatives to Capitalist
Consumption in New York City.” Sociological Abstracts. Web. 10
October 2011.
Essig, Laurie. 2002. “Fine diving.” Salon.com. www.salon.com/mwt/feature/2002/06/10/edible-trash. Web.
Feedingamerica.org. 2012. April 28, 2012
Food Security
in the United States. Nord, Mark
and Alisha Coleman Jensen. September
7, 2011. April 27,2012.
Ferrell, Jeff. Empire of Scrounge: Inside the Urban
Underground of Dumpster Diving,Trash Picking and Street Scavenging. New
York University Press: New York. 2006. Print.
Gardner, Ben. Personal interview. April 1, 2012.
Giddens, Anthony. Modernity and self-identity: Self and
Society in the Late Modern Age. Stanford University Press: Stanford,
California. 1991. Google Books.Web. 19 November 2011.
Graeber, David. “The new Anarchists,” Toward an Anthropological
theory of value. New York: Palgrave. 2002. New Left Review 13: 61-73.
Graeber, David. “Fragments of an anarchist anthropology”. Toward
an Anthropological theory of value. New York: Palgrave. 2004. Chicago: Prickly
Paradigm.
Hancock, Michelle. "Buying out of Consumerism: Freeganism
Ain't for Sissies." Canadian Journal of Health & Nutrition (2009): 72-75.
Web.
Hoffman, John, and Ace Backwords. The Art & Science of
Dumpster Diving. Port Townsend, WA: Loompanics Unlimited, 1993. Print.
Jordan, John. “The art of necessity: the subversive imagination
of anti-road protest and reclaim the streets.” In George Mckay, ed. DIY
Culture: Party and protest in nineties Britain. (1998). London: Verso, 129-151.
Lappe, Francis Moore. Getting
a Grip: Clarity, Creativity, and Courgae in a World Gone Mad. Small Planet
Media: October, 2007
Leonard, Annie. The Story of Stuff: How Our Obsession With
Stuff is Trashing the
Planet, Our Communities, and Our Health – and a Vision for
Change. Free Press:
New York. 2010. Print.
Mansvelt, Juliana. Geographies of Consumption. The
Cromwell Press, Ltd: London. 2005. Print.
Medina, Martin. The World’s Scavengers: Salvaging for
Sustainable Consumption and Production. Alta Mira Press: Lanham.
2007. Print.
Melucci, Alberto. Challenging Codes: Collective Action in the
Information Age.
Cambridge University Press: New York. 1996. Print.
O’Brien, Martin. “Rubbish Values: Reflections on the Political
Economy of Waste”.Taylor and Francis Online, 23 September 2009. Science as
Culture, Volume 8,Number 3, 1999. 269 -295. 18 November 2011. Web.
Persson, Henrik. "Life from a Freegan Perspective." E:
The Environmental
Magazine 22.4 (2011): 17-18. GreenFILE. EBSCO. Web. 2 Oct. 2011.
Popson, Colleen P. “The Truth is in Our Trash”. Archaeology.
Volume 55,
Number 1, January/February 2002. Web. 30 October 2011.
“Princeton University Dumpster Divers”. Online Posting. YouTube,
29 February 2009.
Web. 3 October 2011.
Pritchett, Laura, ed. Going Green: True Tales from Gleaners,
Scavengers, and
Dumpster Divers. University of
Oklahoma Press: Norman. 2009. Print.
Rainville, Laura. Personal Interview. March 22, 2012.
Reno, Joshua. “Your Trash Is Someone's Treasure: The Politics of
Value at a
Michigan Landfill”. Journal of Material Culture, 14(1), pp.
29-46. 2009.
Goldsmiths Research Online. Web. 19 November 2011.
Royte, Elizabeth. Garbage Land: On the Secret Trail of Trash.
New York: Little,
Brown and Company. 2005. Print.
Shantz, Jeff. Active Anarchy: Political Practice in Contemporary
Movements. Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2011. Print.
Shantz, Jeff. Living Anarchy: Theory and Practice in
Anarchist Movements. Bethesda: Academica, 2009. Print.
Slocum, Rachel. "Whiteness, space and alternative food
practice." 30 April 2007.
Geoforum 38.3. Web. 23 October 2011. 520-533.
Speth, James Gustave. The
Bridge at the edge of the world: Capitalism, the environment, and crossing from
crisis to sustainability. Yale University Press: March 28, 2008
Stewart, Tristam. Waste: Uncovering the Global Food Scandal.
W.W. Norton &
Company: New York. 2009.
Strasser, Susan. Waste and Want: A Social History of Trash.
New York: Henry Holt and Company. 1999. Print.
Strategies for sustainable for living beyond capitalism.
freegan.info. 2008. April 1, 2012
“The Story of Food Not Bombs”. FoodNotBombs.net. Food Not Bombs,
n.d. Web. 4
Subways, Suzy. “Not on the guest list or the news casts:
Resistance at the republicrats’ conventions,” (1996). Love and Rage 7, 5-11.
“Waste and Recycling: Data, Maps and Graphs”. Zero Waste America,
n.d. Web. 4 November 2011. http://www.zerowasteamerica.org/Statistics.htm
Films:
The Gleaners and I. Dir. Agnes Varda. Perf. Agnes
Varda, Bodan Litnanski, and Francois Wertheimer. Cine Tamaris, 2000. DVD.
Dive. Dir.
Jeremy Seifert. Perf. Jeremy Seifert. DVD.
No Impact Man. Dir. Laura Gabbert,
Justin Schein. Perf. Colin Beavan
and Michelle Conlin. Eden Wurmfield Films, 2009. DVD.
