THE ORIENTATION:
Professor Robin Nagle is situated so she can face all of us with her back against one of the four glass walls that make up the room we’re sitting in, a transparent cube within the otherwise penal-grey concrete basement that serves as host for the orientation before the tour. She begins hesitantly; the freegan tour-guides haven’t arrived yet, and for expedition reasons, she’s worried about the repetition of material. She knows why we’re all here: to dig through some trash.
While she’s explaining all this, I notice that her shirt is telling me to go hug a book.
I’m here, waiting for this tour, with my friend Michelle, and by recommendation of Michelle, who was a student of Prof. Nagle, to perform a fly-on-the-wall journalistic survey of a niche NYC subculture, to really get down and dirty with things one might not want to get down and dirty with, to challenge my own preconceived notions about waste and waste-management, and to give an accurate, semi-gustatory account of this subculture’s day-to-day. I might even eat from the trash.
Michelle informs me that Robin is a big-shot urban anthropologist whose area of study is the type of stuff that we all call “garbage,” and in addition to being a professor at NYU and coordinator of this yearly crash course on freeganism, she’s the resident anthropologist at NYC’s sanitation department—a position, Michelle points out, she created herself.
The short of her introduction is that freeganism is an anti–consumerism philosophy; as a response to feeling complicit in various exploitative industries, they try not to buy anything. Freegans, for example, seek to sustain themselves outside of the food industry, in order to minimize their participation in what they deem an unethical system and calm its dastardly effects on important things like the environment. This includes (but is not limited to) maintaining a sustainable garden, bartering one’s way through a grocery list at a freegan swap-meet, and looking for food in grocery-store trash cans.
Whenever Robin wants to emphasize something she says, she raises her hands, palms up, along her diaphragm—as yoga teachers do when they tell you to breath in—and stands on her tip-toes. The movement kind of gives the impression that whatever she’s talking about is so powerful that its mere utterance can lift her bodily.
I learn that the abundant excess of capitalism isn’t the only thing that irks a freegan. How America deals with excess grinds just about as many gears. Recyclables amongst the trash. Trash amongst the recyclables. Organic waste thrown willy-nilly into whatever receptacle is at hand. the user problem is where it starts, but it’s certainly not where it ends. Robin speaks of the city’s sanitation department; how the system doesn’t properly dispose of the waste it collects. What could be repurposed and put back into circulation is instead sitting in a landfill waiting for its impending decomposition, which, if it’s anything petroleum based, happens at rate so geological that it might still be sitting there next millennium.
Freegans see all this excess, recognize its detrimental effects, and then they take a good, hard look at themselves in the mirror and weigh their personal carbon emissions against eating from the trash.
I think the purpose of this tour is to get us to try to make the same cost assessment, for it doesn’t seem like Robin is out to convert. Instead, she’s just trying to get us to think a little harder than we have been. I get this sense because the orientation isn’t indoctrinating in any way; no one is up here claiming hellfire and damnation awaits peripatetic grocery-store goers. Instead, it is chillingly factual. These freegans seem to understand that they don’t need to use all that much pathos or authoritative condemnation. The numbers really do the work for them.
But a lot of work those numbers have. The psychological leap from trash-as-trash to trash-as-food is a big one. Even now, knowing that we will be rummaging through garbage not thirty minutes old, I’m hesitant, if not outright squeamish. At some point, something has taken root in my brain, deep in the nook that has to do with social conduct and propriety, which makes me see eating out of the trash as perverted or desperate—I reckon that hundreds of years of basic urban management has something to do with this lizard-brain reflex to the act.
The freegans know this, though. Their literature is abundant with euphemisms and ironic self-awareness. The heading of the 5X5 piece of paper, which Robin makes sure to have a dozen of tonight just in case there are any onlookers, asks: “What are these people doing?” And below, by way of introduction, the pamphlet plays a little with freegan nomenclature: Freeganism, or, if you will, “urban foraging” or just plain “salvaging.” It also makes this distinction: “Many dumpster divers are freegans, but not all freegans are dumpster divers.” These little instances of spin are very telling, I think. In contrast to other environmental movements, freeganism is up against a sturdy social commandment, “thou shalt not eat from the trash.”
Parents slap out of their children’s hands the food they pick up off the floor; we look at those who get their next meal from the trash bin with pity and a little bit of disgust. Even the word “leftovers,” in some colloquial circles, has an unsavory definition when used to describe past sexual partners.
Freeganism has to contend with this and the stigma that comes along with trying to reform it; spin is a way to ease that process along. It associates freeganism with concepts we’ve all accepted are okay and not weird (eg: “salvaging”) or which imbue it with an air of artisanal sophistication (eg: “urban foraging”).[1] With a change in presentation, the idea of freeganism becomes more palatable to the uninitiated.
A woman wearing a worn pair of Nikes, a white bucket hat, and a moss green t-shirt tucked into purple, capris sweatpants comes in rolling a metal-framed cart with a nylon-cinch bag.
She’s freegan #1, MJ, and she’s here to further initiate us.
From her nylon treasure chest, MJ hauls an impressive bounty gathered from a previous dive. Out comes a box of raisin bran, a couple packets of Lipton green tea, trail-mix, Oreos, fig newtons (unopened but mushy), those Pepperidge Farm cookies with chess pieces stamped into them (surprisingly intact), and an open box of tampons. Everything goes on the center table.
She reads off the expiration dates of a couple of the big-ticket items (namely, the Oreos, which I had always assumed stayed fresh, for all intents and purposes, forever), and a few students go a little bug-eyed. But she reassures us: Expiration dates are arbitrary. In fact, the reason why everything on the table was once, at one point or another, in the trash is itself arbitrary. Stores go into conniptions over small details like torn edges and past expiration dates.
MJ re-cinches her bag and takes over the orientation. We learn that for the eager public, there are consolidated freegan tours frequently available; they happen after every monthly meeting at the St. Grace church over on 4th avenue. (I’m sure our minds collectively reel thinking about the refreshment tables at these things.) And if those aren’t enough to satiate one’s new freegan appetite, more tours are held after every major US holiday and during the move-out week of various universities in Manhattan.
Move-out week is a veritable treasure trove, she tells us; it’s amazing what some kids will throw away. If one wants a new TV or is looking to furnish an apartment, swing by any NYU freshman dorm the third week of May. There will be, on the street corner, a literal hill of furniture and appliances.
An interesting aside: It’s when confronted with situations of grotesque overabundance, like that which happens during move-out week, MJ says, that she’s often thrown into quite the ethical quandary. The real burden of freeganism is the constant accumulation of stuff, which, if one is a staunch anti-consumerist, presents itself as a bit of an existential paradox: To take or not to take. If one takes and doesn’t use, then one has to keep, or else one throws away and contributes to the very excess that’s the raison d’etre of the freeganism movement. If one doesn’t take, however, the excess remains, and then one isn’t being a very good freegan, is one. (MJ says she has struggles particularly with the first part of this conundrum, and Michelle points out how ironic it is that she’s driven by the same impulse to accumulate that us regular old consumers are driven by when we see the words “HALF OFF” or “BUY 1 GET 1 FREE” in bright red letters.)
Luckily for our freegan friends, there are measures in place to prevent such an identity crisis/hoarding scenario. If a freegan happens to have too much, she can pop on over to a really, really free market (their words) and hand it off to someone in need. Or, if you’re MJ, throw what you have to a bunch of college students around dinner time.
From the corner, a guy who I thought was just an older-looking student, but who turns out to be another freegan, pipes up. He says that if your abundance includes organic waste, the NYC sanitation department has effective, environmentally keen methods of disposal. We all nod our heads in approval until Robin, with a degree of ferocity that makes us all stop nodding and start exchanging somewhat incredulous glances with each other, shuts him down. She repeats, sternly this time: The system isn’t effective. We all believe her.
THE TOUR:
Orientation ends; the night begins. We split into two groups. One takes the East-West beat south of 14th street, and the other, the one right on 14th street. Michelle and I join the uptown group, and we’re joined by Robin and a third freegan, Helen, who looks to be the oldest of the bunch, probably just breaching her 70s. She’s wearing a blue Patagonia fleece and brown Columbia hiking boots; her glasses are made of thin silver wire and her hair is no-nonsense short and the same color as her glasses. Helen is a quiet one. But while stuck in the elevator on our way to the first floor, Michelle, who is easy to talk to because unlike most people, she takes a genuine interest in what you have to say, gets her to crack.
Michelle asks Helen about the politics of diving with other freegans. Once everything is out of the trash and the banana-waiver has taken survey, who decides who gets what? Is it a free-for-all? First come first serve? Helen tells us that most often freegans dive with people they’re friendly with, so before they start opening bags, everyone has an idea of what everyone else is looking for. If there are vegans[2] in the group, then they get priority when it comes to vegan food. And if someone has expressed an interest in a good loaf of rye bread, for example, it’s theirs if one is found.
Helen, however, does not like to dive in groups. I get the sense that she’s a bit of a lone wolf. Determined and efficient, group-dives tend to slow her down. Plus, she doesn’t get everything she wants. She’d rather not share. To me, the idea of tearing into a trash bag on the side of 14th street all by my lonesome signals desperation/instability, and for that reason, I wouldn’t be caught dead doing it. That being said, I admire her steely self-assurance.
We charge out of the dorm en masse, but as soon as tennis shoes make contact with pavement and we have to start contending with the many normal people out on a Thursday night, we splinter into pockets two to six people large. Each pocket flows amorphously between passerby and trash-bin, narrowing and widening when appropriate, trying to follow the other amorphous blobs so as to not lose the leader.
The planned route is in the shape of an L. We’ll head north on 1st avenue, up to 14th, then we’ll make our way west to 8th avenue. It’s a long walk, but it will supposedly be a fruitful one. 14th street is a busy street with many stores and restaurants, so our freegan leaders are confident that our harvest will be a good one.
The first place we hit is Le Pain Quotidien, and it’s a dud.
They’re not closed yet, so they haven’t taken the trash out to the street. Michelle prophesizes that we won’t find anything; I’m inclined to believe her.
MJ and Helen are disappointed, and they tell us as much. MJ seems the type to express the full breadth of whatever she’s feeling at that particular moment to whomever she’s around. It’s not quite theatrical, but it’s close. She drags her feet in a mock temper-tantrum.
Grab-and-go shops like Le Pain Quotidien are prime diving locales. Why they are prime locales is because a lot of the food is packaged in neat, plastic containers that prevent cross-contamination and keep the food (more-or-less) fresh. Le Pain Quotidien’s salads are also about $12.50, so I bet it feels real good to find a couple just lying there free for the taking. Plus if found, there’s the added organizational thrill of being able to then properly deposit the plastic container in the appropriate receptacle. Even I know Le Pain Quotidien is doing the environment dirty by tossing their grab-and-gos in with the regular trash.
A couple blocks over, we go to Duane Reade. As far as locales go, this one is pretty nonthreatening. Produce is almost nonexistent, there’s absolutely no meat, and most, if not everything, comes prepackaged.
The garbage bags are haphazardly thrown on top of each other to create a pile that reaches mid thigh. The bags themselves are translucent, but this ends up being more frustrating than helpful. They show only outlines, so one will see a figure that suggests a medium sized plastic container or a bag of something soft like bread (both of which warrant tearing full steam ahead) but after getting in there, the treasure ends up being either the remnants of someone’s lunch or else covered in soggy coffee grounds.
We form a half circle around the trash pile and watch MJ and she inspects the first garbage bag. She lifts it by the knot with one hand and feels up its bottom with the other. Content, she sets it down, unties the knot, and thoughtfully digs in; there’s a golden rule in freeganism: leave the trash cleaner than you found it.
She pulls out mostly, well, garbage. But she’s not deterred. Rifling through receipts and business documents, she finds a whole mess of different Haribo and non-Haribo gummies.
I was under the assumption that gummies were of fallout shelter–grade durability, and from the crowd’s reaction, it seems everyone else was too. Hands raise and excited whispers pass around the circle. Watching the tour-goers makes me remember something MJ said earlier in the night about everyone’s particular “breaking point.” Even the most adamant hardliner, at some point or another during the tour, finds something amongst the coffee grounds that seems acceptable to eat according to their own personal code of propriety; at which point, they reach down into the garbage and mutter some concession like “Oh, who would throw out a perfectly good Honeybun? This isn’t trash.” I look forward to finding my own breaking point. So far, gummy bears aren’t it.
For many, though, Haribo is it. Packages of gummies fill the pockets of happy students. One girl eagerly takes two. And when she’s stuffing the first into her houndstooth blazer, I notice that she seems a little out of place. Most people on this tour are bookish, alt, or a combination of the two. This girl looks conventionally fashionable and non-confrontational; she brought along a linen-lined, wicker tote-bag. Bubbly and very gung-ho about being here, Tote-Bag dances back to her friend waving one of the packages of gummies in the air.
The next stop isn’t what I think about when I think about freeganism. It’s Party City. To the best of my knowledge, Party City doesn’t sell food. But I guess freeganism covers the whole gambit of consumable items. Both MJ and Helen are excited to dive, especially because the late-shift is just bringing out the trash and that means it’s—relatively—fresh.
I, on the other hand, am a little embarrassed to dive as the late-shift is bringing out the trash. So I try to disassociate. And it turns out, taking a few steps back from the group and acting like a casual onlooker puts me at a good vantage to watch the Party City employees watch us: they glance our way with about as much indifference as one would expect from the 10:00 pm shift at a discount costume store in NYC. It occurs to me that we might not be the weirdest thing they’ve seen today.
Party City garbage is pretty lackluster. It doesn’t live up to its namesake. We find Hallmark Easter cards two weeks after Easter, shiny foil balloons, and not much else. The cards come in a pack of about ten, and MJ holds them up above her head so everyone can have a good look while she explains how to transfigure them to work for any holiday: A blank piece of scrap paper, glue, and a little creativity can turn a sentimental aphorism with a cheesiness factor on the scale of Limburger into an ornate piece of cardstock fit for an anniversary.
Some people take; most don’t. Some change their minds and give the cards back. I can only assume that those who gave them back probably realized that the amount of effort one needs to exert in order to make a Peanuts-themed Easter card presentable in a non-ironic way to anyone over the age of six far exceeds what it takes to just go out and buy nice cardstock. However, there is something to be said about the meaningfulness of that effort. If someone gifted me a MacGyvered birthday card, I would think I would recognize and appreciate the time put into it—or, at the very least, find it amusingly endearing.
On the other hand, those who declined the cards could also be seriously wary about gifting someone something that they dug out of the trash. It certainly puts into question the sincerity of the gifter, which would go against the whole purpose of card-giving in the first place.
Robin seems super jazzed about the balloons. Though I can’t say I share her enthusiasm. They’re all Ms—as in, balloons shaped like the letter ‘M’. There are no other letters. (There are many motifs tonight. One of them, which I’m sure has been picked up on, is the confounding mystery behind why stores choose to throw some things out.) As I look around, I see I’m not the only one arching an eyebrow. No one’s sold on their supposed versatility. But nevertheless, Robin turns the M ninety degrees, then one-hundred and eighty, and tells us that what we really have here are three letters—which is enough to throw a really enthusiastic and self-centered party.[3]
The audience isn’t buying it;defeated, the balloon impotently sags in Robin’s hands.
The reader might be interested to know that Whole Foods is a no-go. According to Robin, the grocery-chain is quite anal about not leaving its waste on the street. They keep to a strict timetable: Ten minutes before closing, garbage trucks back into the unloading zone and are filled with the day’s trash. It never touches the sidewalk. I assume there are legal reasons for this.
So instead of diving at what must be the freegan Big Rock Candy Mountain, we head a block over to Elm Wellness, a homeopathic/health food joint that looks promising.
I think I hear MJ squeal in delight.
The trash pile is three bags wide, seven long, and comes up to my hip.
Everyone has high hopes for this dive. I look at Michelle and do a thing with my eyebrows that says, “not bad.”
Tote-Bag gets real close to the store’s window and cups her hands around the sides of her face to shield her eyes. Pruriently, she gazes at the Edenic produce. I watch Helen as she bounces on the balls of her feet like a boxer before a match.
Scaffolding and traffic cones to either side of Elm Wellness give us a buffer, so we spill into the street, completely surrounding the booty. The air feels electric. I think I might reach my breaking point.
Robin: “Alright team. This is it.”
She starts unraveling the knot on the first trash bag. She doesn’t even feel it up; she’s sure there’s something good in there.
And lo and behold: ginger. Roots and roots of it.
Branches the length of my forearm are thrown like bouquets into the crowd. Aromatic shrapnel fly this way and that. Tote-Bag uses her wicker basket as a counter-weight so she can lean far to the side and catch a big sucker with her outstretched hand. I dip out of the feeding frenzy so as to not lose a limb. Michelle, fierce and unyielding, manages to snag a sizable branch, hiding it in her bag before someone has the chance to steal it from her.
The commotion causes a few passersby to stop and peak over our heads to see what all the fuss is about.
A couple, who look as though they would earnestly tell you that they’re Citizens of the World, shrug and join in. More trash bags are opened and more goodies are found. We now have: ready-to-eat couscous, a few sacks of potatoes, a couple loaves of bread, carrots (in bag), celery (out of bag), cans of chickpeas, and pre-washed arugula.
Robin holds her arms out over the food, and for a moment, I think she’s going to bless it. MJ is off to the side talking to someone about the freegan literature she just gave them. Helen is dragging a bag away from the group so she can rummage through it by herself.
With my hands in my pockets, I kick over a package of arugula to reveal its dark, wet, mushy underside. One of the Citizens of the World makes a face at a bag of potatoes and throws it back into the trash, muttering an expletive as he walks away with his girlfriend.
A skinny guy with over-the-ear headphones walks into the group and watches Robin brush coffee grounds off a loaf of bread. A hoodied student turns to him and asks if he’s part of the tour; by way of response, he stares at her blankly, pivots on his heel, and then walks off in the direction he came.
Tote-Bag’s tote-bag is full of potatoes. As she hefts it onto her shoulder, she explains to her friend that fingerlings like these are best when they’re tossed with a few sprigs of rosemary and a generous slosh of olive oil then roasted whole.
The site has been mined; the tour-goers are now drained. But still, there is a brief debate as to whether or not we should continue on—Helen isn’t quite content with what she’s found. MJ and Robin take a poll, and a consensus is quickly formed: Let’s leave on a high note.
Robin pulls everyone from the sidewalk towards the re-tied garbage bags for a short post-pillage analysis. She wants to talk about the themes of the night. We are here, she says, to reevaluate a system we take for granted. Reform radiates out from the few who take action, and even if it’s just for one night, she tells us, we took action.
Robin passes the proverbial talking stick to MJ, who tells us that she’s not much of a talker and that she’ll keep it short but that she’s very happy we all came and gave freeganism a shot. For her, freeganism just means encouraging others to live more simply and less wastefully. And though her transition was an easy one, as she was never much of a consumer at heart, she realizes that everyone has to find their own special definition of freeganism, to find what’s comfortable for them.
As she continues, throwing around words and phrases like “community,” “harmony,” and “seeing a wider picture of ourselves,” it’s easy for one’s eyes to start to glaze over from what, for a brief, knee-jerk moment, might seem like an indulgence in over-sincerity, cliche, and a flower-child notion of togetherness; but what’s even easier than that—after spending a normal day defending oneself from a multi-angled bombardment of hyperbolic advertisements and contrived consumer-language—is to forget that these are actually valuable ideas that are given as sincere advice from an earnest person, and they warrant some attention, consideration, and an attempt at implementation.
The tour officially ends, and I walk
away empty handed; Michelle, with almost a pound of ginger and a package of
couscous. Fully aware of the irony, she tells me that it’s really a shame;
she’s going away on vacation for a few weeks, and the food is going to go bad
before she can use it all. She’ll have to throw it out.
[1] More word associations: There are only two words in the disappointingly sparse freegan vernacular that may need defining. One is the verb/noun “dive,”which refers to the act of looking through trash to find something to eat; ie dumpster dive. The other is banana-waiver/banana-waiving, which is hands down the single best new term of the night. After a dive, it’s tradition for one person to survey the haul and talk about the food/miscellanea and why it’s there. This is called banana-waving, and the person doing the talking, the banana-waiver.
[2] I just assumed that all freegans are vegan because… well because the two words rhyme. But this is not the case. Although freegans do tend to be vegan because their diet generally doesn’t run the risk of salmonella poisoning.
[3] WEEE, ME
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