Freegans: no such thing as a free lunch?

By JamieOliver.com | June 14, 2011 | In News

Story by Liz Scarff

Under the cover of night, I stealthily lift the lid of the dustbin and shine in my torch. It’s below zero and my hands are shaking as I rummage inside. I’m on the hunt for food. But I’m not homeless and I could certainly afford to go to the shops if I wanted to. So, why am I doing this? Quite simply, I’m living as a freegan. Dining on food from a dustbin may once of been the preserve of tramps but for many it is now becoming a lifestyle choice. Freegan-ism, a combination of the word “free” and “vegan” is a movement whose devotees take responsibility for the impact of their consumer choices and find alternative ways of meeting their everyday needs.

This includes housing, clothing and, most surprisingly, food. An estimated seventeen million tonnes of food are buried in British landfill sites every year, four million tonnes of this food is edible. Sometimes disposal is the cheapest option available to the food industry. The freegan movement is popular in America, particularly in New York, where people regularly meet up to hunt through bins together on ‘trash tours’. The man credited with popularising this movement is 28 year old Adam Weissman, and eco-activist, sometime security guard and founder of the website www.freegan.info. ‘Freegansim is a reaction to the amount of waste,’ he says, ‘but also to the injustices like sweat-shops and the destruction of the rainforests that go into producing the goods in the first place. I realised that as a purchasing consumer I was complicit in that exploitation. By consuming waste I’m not supporting these practices.’

Weissman, who lives in New York, says he has never gone hungry, ‘People assume that food in the bins is spoiled or insanitary but really they are just bags of food. There is so much waste it is easy to do it.’ And it’s not just food, ‘I’ve found designer clothes, stereo systems and computers, VCR’s and TV’s. In our culture we need newer shinier things.’ So just how easy is it to live off discarded food scavenged from bins? And will it catch on in Britain? I meet up with London Freegans Ash Falkingham, 21 and Ross Parry, 46 for a crash course in Freeganism. ”We call it the express lane,’ explains Ash as we stand in a multi-storey car park that accomodates the bins for both Iceland and Tesco in South London. It’s five o’clock and dark enough for us to be fairly inconspicuous. Ash and Ross march confidently over to the Iceland wheelie bins, lift the lid and get stuck into sorting what’s inside.

Clear plastic bags contain frozen meals like Chillie Con Carne and Chicken in Tarragon Sauce. The packaging is still intact and the sell by date is today. Underneath the frozen meals are about ten tubs of Haagan Daaz ice-cream, sell by date today. Nestling at the bottom is a tray of eggs. The ‘best before’ date is next week, they’re intact and the only thing wrong is that one egg is missing, ‘We get a lot of eggs,’ says Ross, ‘Sometimes if one breaks they just chuck out the whole tray.’ After loading the first haul we turn to the Tesco bins. They’re full to the brim with more frozen foods, popadoms, crisps, and a tray of seven jars of Bon Mammon marmalade. One jar has smashed making the others slightly sticky. But even though the sell by date is January 2007 rather than just wipe the jars the whole lot is thrown away.

‘Growing up, we always used to eat things if they were a couple of days past the sell by date,’ explains Ash. ‘We would test it to see if it was off. But many people have a different mentality and believe if it has come from a bin then it’s no good.’ Ash and Ross live entirely from ‘urban foraging’ and say it has never made them ill. They visit markets after closing and the bins of supermarkets and high street stores. A trip to India inspired Ross to adopt the Freegan lifestyle. ‘In India they don’t waste anything. People go through the garbage and re-cycle everything. That’s how they live. In the West everything is going to landfill.’ They forage about once a week and find enough food to last them for the whole week. Ross even manages to maintain his gluten free diet. Any spare food they have is shared among friends. ‘Most of my friends will take Freegan food, even my parents have taken some stuff,’ adds Ash, who wears a perfectly good pair of boots and jumper liberated from a wheelie bin.

Food is usually always in clear plastic bags and the trick is to identify a good bag and then take it away to sort out. ‘The less people see you the less questions are asked and it won’t come to the attention of the manager,’ explains Ash. ‘They know what you are doing but many turn a blind eye.’ Back in their van after sorting the booty we tuck into some chocolate mocha slices while Ross and Ash tell stories of legendary hauls. Like the time a group of freegans found a bin full of two hundred frozen chickens and another with a flat screen TV. Or the two wheelie bins full of bananas and Brussels sprouts they found on Christmas Day. Ash emails me a few days after we meet to tell me he has found a MP3 player, with a slightly damaged screen but usable, in a music shop bin.

Armed with a fistful of Freegan, ‘How to,’ tips, my challenge is to see if I can live as a Freegan for three days in Brighton. Too embarrassed to grub around in bins on my own I’ve roped in my partner Dave.

Monday As we set off to see what Brighton has to offer it’s freezing cold and the wind is biting. Ash warned me that places like Marks and Spencers and Morrisons lock their bins away and after an hour and a half of searching we haven’t found one shop that has accessible bins. Eventually we find a Co-op bin. I open the lid and take a look inside. Bingo! There is a clear plastic bin full of veggies, but it’s right at the bottom. So while Dave holds the bin lid open I jump up, balance on the side and reach in with my hands. A couple of people walk past and give us a pitying look. The sealed bag is full of leeks, potatoes, apples and carrots and there is nothing wrong with them. As we triumphantly bag our booty we discuss the menu potential and decide on leek and potato soup – if only we could find some bread.

A subversive peek inside a Budgens bin reveals a loaf ripe for picking – snag is it’s right outside the train station and it’s rush hour. We’re too embarrassed to grab it so head of to the more secluded Iceland round the corner. We’re starting to warm to this free food lark and score ourselves a loaf of white Kingsmill bread. The packaging is perfect and the sell by date today – bonus. Any qualms I had about eating food from a bin start to fade when I inspect the veggies closer at home. The leeks are firm and the bread still soft. After scrubbing all the veggies we cook up a delicious hearty soup, which James, my flatmate, politely declines. Desert is baked Freegan apples with cinnamon, almonds and sultanas. Delicious.

Tuesday I don’t feel ill – a good start – so we both tuck into our Freegan breakfast of avocados given to me by Ash and Ross (from the express lane market bin check-out in Wood Green) and the remains of the bread from last night. We decide to visit a different Co-op and again find lots of vegetables – potatoes, salad, cauliflower, spring greens, peppers and a melon – thrown out in clear plastic bags. The sell by date of some of the produce, like the ripe melon, is today and the salad is on the turn but if it were in your fridge you’d eat it. Other sell by dates, like the spring greens, are not for another week. I don’t understand why they’d be thrown out. Food waste costs Britain around 18billion annually, which is especially disturbing when you consider that four million people in Britain can’t afford a healthy diet.

After a lunch of left over leek and potato soup, subsequent searches at bakeries and patisseries prove fruitless. I even feel quite cheated when I spot someone else making off with a clear bag of what looks like frozen foods and yogurts from a Budgens bin but we found enough food this morning for dinner and breakfast. We’ve decided that using a few herbs, spices and other store cupboard ingredients like noodles is permissible. On the menu tonight is a spicy noodle soup with green peppers, carrots from yesterdays foraging, noodles and some tender steamed cabbage on the side. For desert we plump for another baked apple.

Wednesday The only downside to being a freegan is that you can’t plan what you are going to eat. Today, after a breakfast of melon, we head off to check the bins in the vegetable market, which are malodorous, compared with supermarket refuse. I procure my first Freegan lamp and inspired by Ash’s MP3 discovery Dave wants to check the back of some electrical shops. For dinner tonight we have sausages, greens, swede, fennel cooked with lemon and roasted onion. Although three days is a pretty short time to live as a Freegan I have got a better sense of how much food is condemned to landfill when it could be put to much better use. I’m tempted to continue with my Freegan lifestyle because the food we found was packaged in clear plastic bags and after a good wash was really no different to buying it in the shop. Except of course it was free!

No such thing as a free lunch?

By Daniela Relph BBC News Freeganism is a lifestyle choice They eat food they find in bins and are driven by conscience, not financial need. Meet the freegans. There's no such thing as a free lunch, so the saying goes, but freegans beg to differ. They only eat food they can scavenge for free from supermarket dustbins. Most is only just past its sell-by date, some is still within it but the packaging has been damaged. The freegan philosophy of "ethical eating" is a reaction against a wasteful society and a way of highlighting how supermarkets dump tonnes of food every year that is still edible. Boycott They argue capitalism and mass production exploit workers, animals and the environment. For the most extreme proponents, freeganism - the name combines free and vegan - is a total boycott of the economic system. The "urban foragers" do not like to reveal the exact location in which they operate so as not to alert store managers to their after-hours work. In America they call it "dumpster diving" and when the shops shut, that's what they do. Freegans Paul and Bob operate in a suburb of Manchester and have a network of bins that provided rich pickings. All food is washed before eating For them it is a lifestyle choice. They have money and could buy food if they wanted, but as a protest against supermarket waste they choose to live a freegan life. "There's so much waste it's just unbelievable," says Bob. "While that continues I can't see my freegan lifestyle changing." On a night out with them, the pair delve deep into their first bin of the night to see what they can salvage. It's a good start - yoghurts, a cauliflower, eggs, mushrooms and some ready meals. Raiding a second bin they discover it's full of bread, loaf after loaf and many of them still in date. But the haul is nothing compared to their best-ever bin raid a few months ago. Barbed wire "We got 75 bottles of beer, 100 frozen chickens and all sorts of things like that," says Paul. "We found so much food we went out and bought ourselves a big deep freeze and filled it with chickens, meat and all that." To get from bin raid to bin raid they use a converted post office van. It's where they store all their food and also where they now live - a mobile home in the truest sense. Not every raid delivers. One major supermarket chain has secured its bins behind fencing and barbed wire, an effective way of keeping the freegans out. Often food is within its sell-by date E ach item raided from a bin is washed and the packing wiped over with disinfectant. Then it's opened up and cooked even if its past its sell by date. Seafood is banned if not in date but they'll give everything else a try and are rarely ill. Many supermarkets now give their leftover food to charity and while waste has been cut, a lot of food is still thrown out. So what do they think of freegans? "As a responsible fresh grocery retailer we cannot condone this behaviour," says a spokesman for Somerfield. "We have reduced our wastage levels by improved processes and by giving our stores the opportunity to markdown products earlier to ensure that they are sold within their use by dates." But it's not just supermarkets who are to blame. Figures from the Waste Resources Action Programme - which works with businesses and consumers to cut waste - claim households in Britain are among the most wasteful in the world. Each year 6.7 million tonnes of food is thrown out. Half is perfectly edible and in a lifetime its estimated that each of us wastes up to £24,000 worth of food. It's figures like these that are the reason Paul and Bob live life the freegan way.