Stealing from the poor.
Are we stealing from the poor?
Did we steal? Are we all just filthy thieves?
Are they the rightful owners of all dumpster goodies?
But maybe that’s why we all need Food Not Bombs in our lives.
And this beautiful rant from diver Laurence Ashmore from his dumpster diving blog:
10.04.2008: here’s an email i received a few weeks ago (it was posted via the comments form so i feel justified in publishing it here):
The only problem I find with “freegans” is that you are taking from those who are truly in need. There are people who have no other choice but to go to a dumpster. they don’t even have money to shop at the goodwill. Its like sometime I take clothing to the goodwill and then sometime I put in a dumpster because I know there is someone who needs it. but now we have those who can afford to buy and have decided to take from the truly poor because its in style. You aren’t doing anything but taking from the poor and sick who are out there and have nothing but a dumpster to go to. They don’t have anything else. They don’t have a home to take the “dumpster food” to and wash and cook and make a great gourmet meal. They eat the food right then and there.
then let them eat cake!!
joking aside, she raises some good points, so i figured i’d try and put together some kind of reply. and it’s difficult, because obviously i can afford food (quite blatantly, if i can afford a website etc). this is also why i don’t like the word “freegan”, it implicitly includes a choice and it’s inherently middle class. and yes, i’m just a self-hating middle classer.
but anyway given that the statement is true, that by taking food from a dumpster we’re directly depriving homeless people, there’s a few defensive arguements i can come up with, of varying quality and conviction.
the first, and possibly only solid defense, is participation in Food Not Bombs. this point is self-evident and is well documented elswhere, so i’ll leave it at that for now.
looking at the bigger picture, what we’re driving at is how wasteful and unsustainable our society is. argueably, supermarket food wastage is one of the least important aspects of this, but it is the tastiest. and also the easiest to highlight in a way that everyone understands – free food. the freegan/dumpster diving contradiction is that its ultimate (succesful) conclusion is that food waste becomes zero. attaining the goal (destruction of the food industry) disables the process and is hence an altruistic goal. so in that sense, yes we’re destroying a source of food for homeless people (and ourselves), but we’re also trying to establish a society that actually gives a shit about such things and can sustain everybody.
taking a more mathematical angle, you need to balance the loss to homeless people with the losses to the rest of the world caused by participation in the food industry. without significant research this argument is going nowhere, and due to the small scale of freeganism and the large scale of the food industry, it’d probably go nowhere anyway. but i still think it needs consideration, especially if the actual impact of freeganism on the homeless isn’t as significant as stated. this is a possibility.
are we really taking food that would otherwise be eaten by someone who needed it more than us? it seems valid enough, but i just don’t think it’s true. whenever we dive we take only a fraction of what is available (excluding that cheese the other day, our bad) and we distribute when and where possible. but that’s beside the point, we go at all times of the day and night and we’ve never not been able to find food at our regular locations. it works both ways, if other people were eating from the same sources then at times they’d be nothing for us. but that’s just not the case. there’s enough for everybody, as proven by the contents of the dumpster.
the dumpster never lies etc. let them eat cake, and whatever else we can find.
of course, what we should be doing is growing our own food. and we do, a little. but nevermind.
maybe now is a good time for some panels from an uncle scrooge comicbook entitled “how to make it rich”:
any ideas for a better monologue?
