permaculture

[akiva w <kevinakiva@yahoo.com>]

"Freegans" forage for food in bins

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http://today.reuters.com/news/newsarticle.aspx?type=oddlyEnoughNews&storyid=2006-05-26T143622Z_01_L23490302_RTRUKOC_0_US-BRITAIN-FREEGANS.xml&src=rss&rpc=22
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By Kate Kelland
Fri May 26, 2006 


LONDON (Reuters) - Ross and Ash are about to dig in to
a meal of chicken rogan josh, king prawn makhani and
rice, chicken balti and naan bread followed by
pineapple, strawberries and grapes for dessert.

All of which came out of a bin.

"Everything I eat comes from dumpsters," Ash says.
"For me it's a logical lifestyle choice. It's such a
natural thing to use up that waste."

Some call them "dumpster divers," others brand them
"skip lickers," but Ross Parry and Ash Falkingham like
to count themselves among the Freegans -- a growing
band of foragers who seek to live entirely from the
waste of others.

In this brief trip to a small supermarket skip in
southeast London, they have recovered enough food to
provide themselves -- and several others -- with an
impressive evening meal, as well as bread, muffins and
teabags for the next morning's breakfast.

Freeganism, derived from the words "free" and "vegan,"
is spreading to Britain from the United States, where
one of its founding fathers, Adam Weissman, has set up
a Freegan information Web site to persuade others to
join him.

"TOTAL BOYCOTT"

Weissman describes Freeganism as "a total boycott of
an economic system where the profit motive has
eclipsed ethical considerations."

"Instead of avoiding the purchase of products from one
bad company only to support another, we avoid buying
anything to the greatest degree we are able," he
explains on the site.

Falkingham, a 21-year-old Australian, sees Freeganism
as a way of forcing the world to wake up to what it is
wasting.

"Nine million people die every year of starvation ...
and while that's happening, we are literally
destroying food," he says.

There are no exact figures for how many people are
choosing to live a Freegan lifestyle in Britain.
Despite the name, not all those who opt to live this
way are strictly vegan.

Falkingham and Parry, who is 46, have been roaming
Britain since last October, pursuing their Freegan
lifestyle in cities from Manchester and Leeds in the
north, to Plymouth in the south.

They eat, sleep and live in a beaten-up old van which
is equipped with mattresses, a stove, a sink, carpets
and even a heater all taken from skips or wreckers'
yards.

Falkingham wears a watch recovered from a bin behind a
charity shop, his boots were taken from a retailer's
skip and the pair say they have found computer parts,
furniture and even an MP3 player in dumpsters.

They have no jobs and no money but see very little
need for either.

"When you first start off, you think 'how am I going
to live without a wage?'," says Parry, who has been
living a Freegan lifestyle for more than 20 years.

"But our priority is to work for love to make the
world a better place, and we want to have more time to
do that. The less time we spend chasing a salary, the
more time we have to do what we really believe in."

"There's so much excess in this society that you don't
have to worry about where the next meal is coming
from."

MILLIONS OF TONNES OF WASTED FOOD

According to research, more than 30 percent of the 17
million tonnes of waste that goes to landfill in
Britain is food waste.

Fareshare, a charity which delivers surplus food to
the homeless and other vulnerable people in need, says
around a quarter of that is perfectly good, edible
food.

"Last year we redistributed 2,000 tonnes of food --
that helped provide 3.3 million meals and helped
around 12,000 people -- but that is still just the tip
of the iceberg," Fareshare spokeswoman Maria Kortbech
Olesen told Reuters.

Fareshare, which distributes food given by some of
Britain's biggest food retailers such as Marks and
Spencer and Sainsbury's which would otherwise go to
waste, sympathizes with Freegans, but is concerned at
their sometimes risky methods.

"What they are trying to address is basically the same
thing as we are," says Kortbech Olesen. "There is a
lot of waste and we have to do something about it."

"But you have to be careful. Freegans take food from
bins, and they can never know whether that food is
safe."

Falkingham shrugs off any concern about getting sick.

"I think I have only once been ill from eating food
from bins -- I got diarrhea," he says. "But I like to
push the limits with what I eat."




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