Freegans: Diving Into the Wealth of Food Waste in America is an undergraduate sociology thesis turned ethnographic book in which the author Alex V. Barnard looks at the growing worldwide freegan movement. The book focuses primarily on freegan.info, a New York City freegan collective which the author was active in for several years. In general the freegan movement is a direct-action oriented movement of people who seek to obtain all types of goods and even services for free instead of purchasing them through capitalist channels; Freegans (the book) focuses primarily on food waste in New York City and freegan.info’s efforts to reclaim it.
Freeganism distinguishes itself from other anti-waste movements through freeganism’s opposition to purchasing goods and services. Freegans avoid purchasing goods as much as possible because freeganism is intended to be anticapitalism. In practice freeganism criticizes capitalism both verbally and materially by withholding potential revenue from the capitalist system, an act which freegan.info members often refer to as “dropping out of capitalism.”
Freegans differ from neoliberal anti-waste advocates. While neoliberals push for consumers to be more ethical and careful about their product choices, freegans assert that civilization's impending economic and ecological crises cannot be prevented by consumers switching to so-called ethical products like recycled paper goods, vegan food, and eco-cars. As such, freegans conclude that consumption-driven sustainability movements and consumer activism (buying the more-ethical “X” product instead of cheaper unethical product “Y”) regularly increase overall waste at retail outlets. For example, some freegan.info members argue that when a store begins to offer vegan-meat alternatives, the store does not stop selling meat or even sell less meat as a result. Instead, the store ends up throwing more meat and meat-alternatives into dumpsters (despite this, most freegan.info members still adhere to vegan diets). Freegan.info thus critiques consumer vegan activism and elucidates the capitalist and classist undertones that activists interject into much modern animal-rights discourse (these classist undertones are found even in anti-capitalist groups such as in official Food Not Bombs literature).
The phrase “there is no ethical consumption under capitalism” is often nihilistically whispered in today’s world in an effort to console ourselves about our inevitable unethical purchases. Is this mantra true? The freegan answer is “maybe.” Freegan.info members have found ways to provide for their basic needs without resorting to capitalist consumption, but they readily point out that the freegan lifestyle is largely dependent on capitalism and its scraps. Still, this way of life seems more ethical to them than directly supporting the system. By living off these scraps, they hope to disarm the powerful myth that capitalist markets are the most efficient way to distribute basic goods.
The book does try to characterize a variety of freegan practices such as squatting, bike repair using found parts, and sewing (patching old and found clothes instead of buying new), but these activities play a supporting role to dumpster diving, the book’s most lucid means of articulating freegan culture and practice. The author’s familiarity with dumpster diving allows him to concisely lay out freegan.info’s general rules and rituals for dumpster diving while also looking at issues that freegan.info has to navigate when redistributing dumpstered goods. These chapters are a valuable resources for anyone who is considering dumpster diving but wishes to do so with a prior knowledge of the practice. Barnard also uses his freegan research to draw broader implications about global food waste; mainly he clearly articulates the difference between neoliberal food-waste and anti-capitalist food-waste rhetoric (namely, neoliberalism tends to blame consumers for food-waste while anti-capitalist approaches to the subject tend to blame food retailers for waste first rather than consumer. The book and freeganism in general offer this closing key insight to contemporary waste discourse: food retailers are far more in control of the food supply chain than consumers are, a thought that if true entirely invalidates the neoliberal conception of the empowered consumer.
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