Armed with a flashlight, backpack, some friends, and the safety of the night, Jo Richard climbs onto the rims of dumpsters and peers in, carefully sorting through bags of garbage to find her prize : food.
Richard, a women studies student at the University of Ottawa, supplements her diet with dumpster dive finds.
Although she doesn’t consider herself to be a freegan, she practices some of their lifestyle ideals by trying to reduce her impact on the world while balancing life as a student.
Freeganism is an anti-consumerist movement, which is a reaction against the waste of useful resources, according to an article by Erin Huffstetler, a freelance writer specializing in frugal living.
Richard shares a communal vegetable garden with friends, composts at home, and is involved with Good Food Box, a service run by the Centretown Community Health Centre that supplies fruits and vegetables at an accessible price.
Similarly, she participates in guerrilla gardening around the city — this means using any open, public space, sometimes with the help of seed bombs, to grow vegetable plants on unused land.
Why waste?
Though freeganism covers a large spectrum of activity and involvement, there’s a definite focus on waste and food accessibility.
“It is really surprising how much perfectly good food is simply thrown out,” says Marcus Niekraszewicz, who volunteers for the Ottawa branch of the Ontario Public Interest Research Group (OPIRG), in an email.
“Often, grocery stores will simply throw out fruits and vegetables with minor imperfections, such as dents or bruises.”.
“Freegans attempt to make use of these otherwise wasted resources to feed themselves and the community.”
A community effort
Niekraszewicz says he first got involved with freeganism through the Garden Spot community kitchen.
Since then, he says he has been active in the freegan movement, and started an Ottawa chapter of Food Not Bombs last year.
“I started dumpster diving with some other Garden Spot regulars, and when I was living downtown we would dive up to once a week. It’s a lot harder to do if you live farther from the downtown core, since there’s less selection of good grocery stores,” Niekraszewicz says.
The best places to gather food are stores that throw out mainly produce or meatless products, Niekraszewicz says, as rotting produce will not damage edible food, but rotting meat will.
But free food isn’t freeganism’s only benefit.
“Freeganism encourages people to not only choose healthier foods to eat, but to learn to cook as well. When you don’t know what your next ‘shopping’ trip might yield, you learn to cook with what’s available. This lets you break out of the pasta-or-stir-fry-every-night box.
A key issue for freegans or dumpster divers in Ontario can be trespassing laws, making it more difficult to access food, Richard says.
“You have to go at night. Technically, it’s trespassing of territory, even if once things are in the dumpster, they’re considered to be free-for-all,” Richard says.
Richard notes that Ottawa isn’t the best city for dumpster diving and has limited resources, so finding a semi-permanent dive spot and keeping it clean is a good way to go.
While Richard gets some of her food from diving, she also buys food and works part-time in retail to help pay for her expenses.
Different cities, different rules
It’s different in New York, N.Y., says Gio Andollo, a 26 year-old New York City resident and freegan.
“Dumpster diving is not considered illegal in New York City but it’s often considered to be illegal in [other cities] because grocery stores keep their garbage locked and you have to trespass, which is illegal.
But here, people just put their food at the side of the road so you just walk down the street and get it.”
“Every grocery store, every bakery, every pharmacy . . . all these people throw out food every night. New York has some law that food [that] is meant to be baked daily can’t be sold the next day, so whatever isn’t sold is thrown out.
So every night you can find a bag full of bagels that were baked that morning . . . free.”
Freeganism came to Andollo easily, and he started at an early age.
“Even in high school I had the world view of not wanting to waste food. When I saw people throwing away food, like a slice of pizza, I would intercept it. In that respect I guess you could say I’ve been a freegan for a very long time.”
Andollo says he lives as sustainably as possible and does his best to stay out of the direct line of consumption. He says he gets his food solely from the waste of grocery stores and independent food retailers in the city.
As for making a living, Andollo busks in the New York subway for donations and spends most of his time volunteering in the community.
Participating citizens
“This is where the line starts to blur. People tend to think that freegans are freeloaders and want to leech off of society. That’s not true. I volunteer a lot . . . making websites, at community centres, at a local bookstore.
We’re adding value to society because our time is free . . . we’re finding a way of contributing that’s not monetary consumption,” Andollo says.
Andollo says he sees freeganism as a lifestyle that varies from person to person, with a belief system that connects everyone.
“The thing that distinguishes it is the world view — the consciousness about waste and the abuse of the ecosystems . . . the awareness, consciousness, and vigilance to minimise their involvement [marks a freegan].
Maybe that’s riding a bicycle instead of a car, dumpster diving, using waste veggie oil, or even squatting,” Andollo says.
Differing ideas
Though Richard says she dumpster dives partially for the financial relief, she believes the food industry is problematic, and says even though the amount of food produced is large, there are too many people who go without it.
“Why [has] food, the ultimate source of nourishment for the human body, become a privilege?“ “Dumpster diving, for me, is a revolt against [the capitalist] system that the food industry has become.”
Richard notes that as a student with hefty tuition bills, free food isn’t something she’s willing to give up and thinks that it’s something every student, regardless of political beliefs, can benefit from.
“We’re put under such a financial pressure from society to pay for university, an apartment, books, transportation, food, clothes, while trying to juggle two jobs and going to school [and] trying to be healthy?
I mean, it seems pretty silly to not want to try getting free food.”
