Freegans dumpster dived for ‘ugly,’ rejected produce
Now Whole Foods is embracing the freegan ethic
What do Lululemon-clad yoga moms who shop at Whole Foods share with dumpster-diving, anti-capitalist freegans?
A selection of imperfect produce, for starters.
Whole Foods — purveyor of famously unblemished, gem-like fruits and vegetables — recently said it would sell cosmetically flawed produce at some of its Northern California stores, starting next month. The announcement came shortly after the Pennsylvania-based Giant Eagle chain unveiled a similar effort through its “Produce With Personality” program.
Now that two of the country’s biggest chains are hopping aboard the “ugly produce” movement, it’s probably safe to say it’s officially caught on. And for freegans — a loosely knit group of activists and idealists best known for subsisting off discarded food from trash cans — it is, perhaps, a vindicating trend.
Freeganism’s punk rock ethos has pushed its way into the produce aisle, helping make waste the food issue du jour.
Freeganism started as a response to the massive amounts of food that rich countries were throwing away — the perfectly good, “ugly” produce being rejected by both retailers and consumers. The pamphlet, “Why Freegan?,” a guiding document for the movement published in 2000, defines it like this: “Freeganism is essentially an anti-consumeristic ethic about eating.”
It wasn’t the first such ethic, though. Freegans takes some cues from the Diggers, a 1960s street theater group in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury neighborhood that advocated for a society in which all things were shared and free. The group distributed discarded food and “surplus energy” in city parks and at “Free Stores.” A decade-plus later, in Boston, the group Food Not Bombs coalesced around the same notions, distributing discarded food to the homeless. (The group now has chapters around the world.)
It was a Food Not Bombs leader, in fact, who came up with the term freegan in 1994, according to Alex V. Barnard, a University of California, Berkeley, PhD candidate whose book, Freegans: Diving into the Wealth of Food Waste in America, was just published this week.
“It started off as a joke,” Barnard said. “It was just a term that was kind of thrown around — until you had this movement.”
The movement, Barnard explained, began to gain steam about 10 years ago when a slew of stories in the media covered freegan “trash tours” in New York City — events organized through the website freegan.info. At these tours, freegans scoured dumpsters, finding old oil paintings, appliances and blackened bananas.
“Food Not Bombs was dumpster diving, but they weren’t doing it publicly,” Barnard said. Freegans, on the other hand, had turned dumpster diving into a spectacle, a public event that attracted lots of attention. “Every week, at least three media outlets were coming to these trash tours,” Barnard explained.
The stories hit a nerve, and soon freeganism was expanding beyond its food-centric mission into a broadly anti-consumerist ideology that incorporated bits of environmentalism, anti-globalism, and even anarchical sentiments. (That’s why we heard a lot about freegans during the rise of the Occupy movement.) Its adherents, largely organized through websites and social media, tried to live by a basic tenet: Don’t participate in capitalism.
“A huge part of their message was: This is perfectly good food, but in a capitalist system this ugly produce doesn’t get eaten,” Barnard said. But the media takeaway was reduced to a kind of snickering eye roll. “They had a very hard time getting away from this perception that these are the people eating garbage, when they don’t need to be eating garbage.”
Now the message seems to have taken hold, triggering a series of actions, initiatives and legislation addressing food waste around the globe.
In 2012, the US Environmental Protection Agency launched its Food Recovery Challenge, enlisting major supermarket chains, including SuperValu, to cut food waste. Last year the European Commission set a goal of halving food waste by 2030, and France passed a law requiring chains to donate food rather than throw it away. The US Congress last fall passed a bill giving tax breaks to food producers who donate to food banks. The French chain Intermarche launched its “Inglorious Fruits and Vegetables” campaign in 2014, prompting other stores to follow. Last month, a Danish grocery store that sells expired food and imperfect produce opened its doors.
And now Whole Foods — the elite grocery store that trades in perfection — is joining the bunch.
“The freegans were the only ones talking about food waste, then all of sudden you had these stories, and then you see this blossom of interest,” Barnard said. “I certainly think there’s a connection.”
Barnard noted that Tristram Stuart — whose 2009 book Waste: Uncovering the Global Food Scandal helped light the food waste fire — got his start dumpster diving. “If you ask him, he’ll say that the spectacle of non-poor people eating from dumpsters … made people realize these are luxury products being thrown out,” Barnard said.
Indeed, Whole Foods dumpsters have become a favorite target for freegans. “Whole Foods is the worst offender,” Barnard said, noting that the store’s shoppers pay a premium for perfect produce — a premium that means the store tosses out more than most. “There’s no question that the better the store, the better the dumpster diving.”
Which means there’s a potential bit of irony here. As Whole Foods begins to sell more ugly produce rather than throw it away, its dumpsters may no longer be the treasure troves of organic, high-end produce they once were.
Eventually, if you want a bruised mango or a scarred blood orange, you may actually have to go into the store and pay for it.
