If a person chooses to live an ethical lifestyle it’s not enough to be vegan, they need to absent themselves from capitalism. The Times looks inside the freegan movement, perhaps best know for its advocacy of food scavenging from dumpsters. But it's much more than scoring free food, it's an attempt to remove as much as oneself from the system as possible. "[F]reegans...believe that the production and transport of every product contributes to economic and social injustice."

Comments

[Ben]

I see nothing wrong with retrieving things from the garbage if they have value. But taking up dumpster diving as a cause? That is just weird.

[Frankenstein]

The truth of the matter is that the freegans are simply opportunistic parasites. They exist on the discards of a system they despise, but it's that very system's inefficiencies that make their choice of lifestyle possible. If there was no capitalist system, then freeganism would be impossible.

The dominant mode of production for the freegans seems to be scavenging, which is simply unsustainable without some larger to system to scavenge from. Freeganism is, itself, unsustainable and economically unproductive (though it probably does increase the overall efficiency of the system by reducing waste).

A charitable simile from the animal kingdom is that freegans are very much like pilot fish. A less charitable comparison would be to compare freegans to buzzards.

[Nick]

While it's true that freegans couldn't exist without without the very capitalist society that they scorn, I think that is missing the point. Their lifestyle depends on the existence of capitalism, but by not participating in the consumerism themselves, they are refusing to support the system. I don't see anything inconsistent in that position.

[Frankenstein]

They're still participating in the system, but as second-level consumers, not as primary consumers. They're just a little further down the food chain.

Moreover, doesn't it strike you as a bit odd that, at the same time they are decrying capitalism as an unsustainable system, they are, in fact, benefiting from that very system by feeding off of its excess?

[Yuri K.]

Ah, but you're forgetting about the power mof making an ironic statement. They're not actually dependant on all that dumpster crap, they wear it as a symbol of protest.

Or they're just moochers. Probably both.

[Kim]

I wonder how they feel about getting antibiotics from the nearest public hospital when they get God-knows-what dumpstercoli. Something tells me that they're probably okay with receiving lifesaving public aid.