Freeganism | EPFL Graph Search

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Freeganism is an ideology of limited participation in the conventional economy and minimal consumption of resources, particularly through recovering wasted goods like food. The word "freegan" is a portmanteau of "free" and "vegan". While vegans avoid buying, consuming, using, and wearing animal products as an act of protest against animal exploitation, freegans—at least in theory—avoid buying anything as an act of protest against the food system in general. Freeganism is often presented as synonymous with "dumpster diving" for discarded food, although freegans are distinguished by their association with an anti-consumerist and anti-capitalist ideology and their engagement in a wider range of alternative living strategies, such as voluntary unemployment, squatting in abandoned buildings, and "guerrilla gardening" in unoccupied city parks. Freegans' goal of reduced participation in capitalism and tactics of recovering wasted goods shares elements with the Diggers, an anarchist street theater group based in Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco in the 1960s that organized free housing and clinics and gave away rescued food. The word "freegan" itself was allegedly invented in 1994 by Keith McHenry, the co-founder of Food Not Bombs—an anarchist group that distributes free vegetarian meals as a protest against militarism and as a way of providing "solidarity not charity"—to refer to non-vegans who never pay for animal products. McHenry's account is consistent with other published accounts of freeganism that show the word as beginning to be used in the mid-1990s by participants in the antiglobalization and radical environmental movements. The pamphlet "Why Freegan?"—written by former Against Me! drummer Warren Oakes in Gainesville, Florida, in 1999—defines freeganism as "an anti-consumeristic ethic about eating" and goes on to describe practices including dumpster diving, plate scraping, wild foraging, gardening, theft, employee scams, and barter as alternatives to paying for food.

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Related concepts (5)

Anti-consumerism

Anti-consumerism is a sociopolitical ideology that is opposed to consumerism, the continual buying and consuming of material possessions. Anti-consumerism is concerned with the private actions of business corporations in pursuit of financial and economic goals at the expense of the public welfare, especially in matters of environmental protection, social stratification, and ethics in the governing of a society.

Gleaning

Gleaning is the act of collecting leftover crops from farmers' fields after they have been commercially harvested or on fields where it is not economically profitable to harvest. It is a practice described in the Hebrew Bible that became a legally enforced entitlement of the poor in a number of Christian kingdoms. Modern day "dumpster diving", when done for food or culinary ingredients, is seen as a similar form of food recovery. Gleaning is also still used to provide nutritious harvested foods for those in need.

Food Not Bombs

Food Not Bombs (FNB) is a loose-knit group of independent collectives, sharing free vegan and vegetarian food with others. The group believes that corporate and government priorities are skewed to allow hunger to persist in the midst of abundance. To demonstrate this, FNB serves surplus food gathered from grocery stores, bakeries and markets which would otherwise go to waste, or occasionally has already been thrown away. The group exhibits a form of franchise activism.