Photo by Caitlin Crews

Revolutionary Dining
From Garbage to Gourmet?
A Journalistic Essay on Freeganism's Prospects for Saving the World

By Carl Hurvich

“My husband can never know I do this. It would be over if he did,” explained a college professor wheeling a laundry cart, asking me not to reveal her name or where she taught.

“What, your marriage would be over?” I asked, attempting to temper my incredulity. “Yes, he’s conservative,” she replied as if that settled any doubt as to the gravity of her offense in his eyes. Her voice had traces of guilt and giddiness, seemingly in response to both her husband’s views and her clandestine flouting of them. Her husband, had he discovered her, would be hard-pressed to say what exactly she was doing, aside from standing behind a group of people sorting through piles of food outside a supermarket, and occasionally accepting a package of bread or piece of produce handed to her fresh from the trash.

“I mean, they are just going to throw it away,” she shrugged as put the sorted items in her cart. We were on the East Side of Manhattan, participating in a “trash tour,” a weekly gathering in which a group of self-identified “Freegans” scour the city for usable food items disposed by grocers and retailers. The regular participants in this tour do not share a uniform lifestyle or ideology. One fresh-faced young man told me he never paid for food, while a professionally dressed woman (seemingly in her 40s who also asked not be named) was mainly averse to purchasing spices. Like most movements, it has its vanguard of front-liners and a coterie of less committed admirers. The incognito professor showed little enthusiasm for a more outspoken diatribe on the revolution to end the age of consumer culture, yet she and the young man both shared a sense of alarm at the prospect of needlessly discarded doughnuts.

Yet the most committed adherents of Freeganism are not only attempting to make a statement but also spearhead a revolutionary transformation of the world order. This became clear to me during the course of a conversation with Alex, who had given an impassioned speech at the beginning of the tour. In that oration, he encapsulated the Freegans’ mission as the refusal to buy into a country that had become morally bankrupt. When we spoke later, he conveyed an acute sensitivity to the plight of the laborers who cultivate fruits and vegetables: How, he asked, could the value of their toil be reflected in the price of the banana he was holding in his hand? The fact that no one paid for this particular banana certainly underscored his point.

Whether or not rescuing said banana is an effective response to such a dilemma, I was led to wonder how many people ask themselves that question in the produce aisle. Of course, many consumers look for labels that assure them their food is raised according to fair labor practices, yet how often do most of us question what this means? When I asked him about the goals of the movement, I was regaled with an extended disquisition centered on the etymology of the word “ecology” (which he correctly attributed to the ancient Greek word for “home”).

Ecology for him ought not be merely the study of biological diversity as the “ology” implies, but a means of freeing humans from the fetters that prevent us from living in symbiosis with the world. To help bring about the change in consciousness required for such a transformation, he enlisted the ideas of Jacques Derrida and Judith Butler, theorists whose work attempts to tear down dangerous binaries in gender and subjectivity. According to Alex, I was (hopefully) witnessing the first steps on a long path that would somehow lead to an ecosystem that truly functioned as a giant house, providing shelter to all worldly inhabitants without walls or doors.

While we were talking, packaged meats were removed from trash bags and formed into a pile. I suddenly found myself imagining the Freegans wading through oceans of lemonade, diligently filling reusable plastic jugs. A similar vision was originally described in the 1830s by the French utopian Charles Fourier. Fourier refashioned what one historian described as the “fertile debris” of the French Revolution into a uniquely Romantic vision of a new world. He described the food left rotting in Paris due to price fluctuations while peasants struggled to avoid starvation. He did not predict the inevitable seizure of power by the proletariat as Marx would after him, but instead imagined that new social structures could end all vice and inequality.

Commerce, scarcity, and competition were endemic to “civilization.” But this was merely one stage of humanity that had the potential to evolve into an age of total “harmony” and cooperation. Fourier has often been the subject of bemused derision for his fantastical visions. Few would dispute that there is infinitely more cause to fear the sea will drown in garbage then to hope it will turn into a soft drink.

Perhaps then it is the Freegans’ genius to find the refreshment in a decidedly un-utopian ocean of East Side refuse. Gathering a meal out of the garbage is a material transformation and metaphorical transgression; challenging the boundaries that separate the products for sale inside a store from the trash outside of it. The Freegans certainly do not claim that rescuing food alone is sufficient to effect the transformation they seek. But how has food come to play so important a role in their far-reaching agenda?

Ecology has become a core concern of virtually all progressives, but this was by no means always the case. In fact, it was Fourier who inspired the formation of several communities in 19th-century America whose ideals of self-sufficiency, cooperation, and harmony foreshadowed contemporary concern with sustainability, fair trade, and green living. Unlike the communitarians to the West, New York activists have more often engaged in a distinctively human-centered and even cerebral attempt to reform the political and economic order. Immigrants from Eastern Europe and migrants from the American South formed reading groups, newspapers, and eventually labor Unions.

In the early decades of the last century, radical New Yorkers were likely to debate the importance of ethnic versus international worker solidarity or weight the relative merits of socialism, anarchism, and communism. Above all, these were movements of workers and intellectuals who embraced the potential of industry to give them a fair piece of the proverbial pie.

It was only in the 1960s that environmentalism becomes a widespread concern among the American populace. Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring convinced people across the political spectrum of the need to address the damaging effects of human control over the natural environment. This increasing awareness was undoubtedly one of the reasons behind a new wave of communes formed in 1960.
Communes allowed disaffected Baby Boomers to experience greater connections with the natural world as well as to experience, in rural retreats, freedom from many social norms.

Some New Yorkers responded by embracing communal living in their own way, such as through radical psychoanalytic cooperatives of liberation. Although sophisticated Marxist analysis of mass culture flourished in the Big Apple’s radical enclaves, such scrutiny was not extended to the sources of material sustenance. Bertolt Brecht’s analysis associated his contempt for the shallow satiation afforded by popular art with the “culinary.” This was the dominant attitude among New York artists in an era when aesthetic affiliation was taken as a statement of political intention.

A small fringe in a vast city, the Freegans are drawing on a host of radical traditions and refashioning them in their own way. Where previous generations hoped to transform mass consciousness by reshaping culture, they begin with an almost existential freedom of negation, refusing to participate in “system” they seek to transcend. Yet they do so while living off the leftovers of an aggressively capitalistic metropolis.

During the feast the next day, approximately 15 people gathered to reap the bounty of the previous nights’ tour. The meal consisted of greens, broccoli rabe, and a large salad as well as a soupy bean stew and mixed-fruit smoothie for dessert. The vegetables were all generously and skillfully spiced, although I instinctively paused at every slight hint of bitterness or roughness to decide if what I was eating was, in fact, trash.

Nevertheless, the most interesting part of the meal was not the food but the articulate and informed discussions. In contrast to the more idealistic (and jargon-filled) thoughts I encountered the night before, the feast featured people in a more utilitarian mode, puzzling over the basis of ethical obligation toward animals, the faulty foundations for rights, and the neglected benefits of life in tribal societies. The group seemed to agree that rights can never be a series of freedoms granted by a government but must be a series of rational ethical imperatives that apply to “everyone.”

I left the meal feeling full of ideas and lacking in protein. As an ecological strategy, Freeganism is no more or less “sustainable” than the methods of production on which it is dependent. Its impact on the economy it seeks to boycott is no doubt minuscule, and its political prospects seem limited to say the least. It is true that many revolutions began with food riots, but those riots were brought on by the scarcity crises that the Freegan’s boycotts could only serve to mitigate (as they limit their consumption and hence increase the supply of food).

But in the end, when people are possessed by such a firm sense of moral principles and their possibility for realization in the world, they can only do their best to convince themselves they are working to achieve them. Eating, the activity in which humans connect to nonhuman substance, has taken on unprecedented ethical significance. In their approach to food, more New Yorkers are seeking to satisfy their cravings and soothe their consciences at the same time. Yet how to achieve this balance and what the hidden costs of giving in entirely to either urge are far from clear.