photo credit: sciondriver

Imagine this scenario:

You are at the grocery store picking up something for dinner. Suddenly a store clerk comes along, empties the shelves of their food, and tosses the packages into the trash. Then proceeds to refill the shelves with new boxes and cans. You look over to see a huge garbage can filled with boxes, bags, and wrapped packages of food, food that is now going to rot in a dump somewhere.

What would you do?

If you are a Freegan you would gather all that food up and take it home to eat. It sounds disgusting to most, but there are some brave souls willing to dig out the slightly damaged packages and eat the food they find. In a country where so many go hungry, Freegans in the US reduce the amount of edible waste we create every day.

I found a documentary on Freeganism shared over at Wasted Food. The documentary is called Dive, and is about ordinary people working to reduce our culture of over-consumption and waste.

For me, an important first step to really caring about the issue of food waste was hopping in a dumpster, bringing home the food, and eating it. Eating trash is a subversive act. It goes against a culture of over-consumption and gratuitous wastefulness. Experience that initial rush, shame, fear, and exhilaration of “stealing” trash and eating it will change you in good ways.

I don’t know if I’m brave enough to eat food from a dumpster yet. I’ll pulled other things, clothes from behind the thrift shop and books with covers ripped off from behind the book stores. But food crosses a huge cultural line for me, one that eating trash will make you sick. Or could kill you. Logically I know that you can avoid this. Only get food that looks healthy, that is still in it’s packaging, and cook it completely. Yet there’s still something about know it was in a dumpster that bothers me. And I suppose the same thing bothers many others as well.

Yet the idea is still very attractive to me. Especially the idea of reducing waste. But would I feed my kids this? I just don’t know.