Dumpster Diving College Students
If you have too much self-respect (or maybe just enough) to no longer traipse around the nice neighborhoods begging for free candy, then you’re probably hitting the lean month of the college term: any extra cash you may have had at the beginning of the term is gone, and any holiday which might involve your family or friends feeding you is a month or more away. How to survive until Turkey Day? If you’re brave, want to save the planet, and you aren’t a germaphobe like me, then Freeganism is your path to three squares a day, my friend. That’s right, the hip kids of today have made dumpster-diving the super-cool new trend. According to their site:
Freegans are people who employ alternative strategies for living based on limited participation in the conventional economy and minimal consumption of resources. Freegans embrace community, generosity, social concern, freedom, cooperation, and sharing in opposition to a society based on materialism, moral apathy, competition, conformity, and greed.
Sadly, it’s not as new-school as they imagine it to be. My raised-in-a-commune-by-intellectual-hippies husband went to Guilford College (which I hear is a very good private school) and he, along with his super smart liberal artsy housemates, dove in the supermarket dumpsters for the majority of their food.
And this will kill it for the hipsters: my mother, who went to college around about 1969, and who is absolutely not a hippie in any way, shape or form, had to resort to diving for her dinner because her extremely financially secure parents disowned her for a while (they found out she was riding around on a motorcycle). So my mom lived in a closet (which she paid rent for) and foraged for food every week behind the supermarket. If you met my mom, this information would shock and amaze you: she does not strike you as the refuse-eating type.
The Freegans are doing it for the eats as well as the political statement it makes. I think it’s great. I, however, am not nearly ready to face my microbiological demons. I fear the microscopic germapalooza that is gargbage. Yeesh. I have the heebie jeebies just thinking about it. But, yea Freegans! I’m sure their immune systems could kick my immune system’s ass. I’ll do my part to save the planet by not wasting, how’s that?
Dumpster Directory:Freegan.info’s Guide to Recovering Discarded Waste in Your Community
Posted by Alexa Harrington
