A night with the freegans
mashable.com
mashable.com
It's a social thing really. Food Not Bombs would gather food from dumpsters (more excess food than half-eaten rolls), then eat communal meals in parks along with any hungry or homeless people. Fancy restaurants throw away unused food, people are hungry and don't have much money for food, FNB puts it together for free meals once a week.
I know Food Not Bombs was doing this in Florida and had trouble with the police. It was a real all-American conflaton - hungry people lining up for free food, even if it came from dumpsters, police cars rolling up with night sticks and guns to stop this, anal-retentive upper middle class white liberals pontificating about the feeding, the discarded food from the upscale restaurants going to waste amidst the police breaking up the food lines. As American as apple pie.
In either case, when you are hungry, bad food is still better than no food. (unless it is so bad, that that you puke from it, but poor people usually have a strong stomach. They have to have)
There is still a remote chance you qualify FYI:
https://www.fns.usda.gov/snap/eligibility/citizen/non-citize...
It's more messed-up because I'm currently on house arrest and so I can't even go to a food bank to get food. I have to rely on the kindness of strangers who pass through the building I live at - occasionally one of them will drop off some food randomly. I'm pretty much down to some packets of stuffing and cans of sliced potatoes right now, but I don't mind. Before I started my last business I was down to zero and was finding canned food in Dumpsters, which while it isn't great, will mean you don't die!
SNAP doesn't have time limits like that.
I think you're thinking of TANF which does have time limits.
> process is demeaning
Absolutely. Still, over 10% of people in USA receive SNAP (including myself) and it's why poor people don't literally starve here anymore.
>I think you're thinking of TANF which does have time limits.
No, actually, I am talking about SNAP specifically, the only program I have personal experience with, as well as know people who have also experienced it.
If you are in any way "on the grid", SNAP will make you do a mountain of work collecting all your paperwork proof that you actually qualify for it.
If you have not given up yet, you MAY get the benefits. In order to claim them, you will have to carefully look for which stores support them (by far not all) and then carefully select the products you're buying, and then argue with the cashier or manager (or put the product back) if it has not been correctly entered into the POS system as eligible.
THEN, a year later, you will have to go through a detailed re-certification process, which requires scheduling an appointment for a phone call, making that phone call at a certain time, holding on the phone for an hour before being hung up on, re-scheduling that appointment, and so on, until eventually you MAY then be required to receive a mailing at an address that you have to respond to.
Then, and only then, you may receive your benefits for another year.
If you cannot list at least 5-10 ways a person must be hugely privileged in order to receive these very basic 200 dollars worth of food credits per month in the text below, please consider yourself extremely privileged to not realize this.
Because it requires the ability to be patient and polite to often rude and impatient handlers (a HUGE privilege), having a phone you can call from for an hour, having an address, being able to deal with all this paperwork, and being able to stick with a long and complicated process, one which is more involved and time-consuming than everything which was required of me to operate a single-person contractor business, something I also had experience with just a few years prior.
Think about that. You have to do more legwork and paperwork in order to receive "basic" benefits to feed yourself than to operate a business. In a country which is overflowing with food resources (double-digit percent of food thrown in the trash every day).
> THEN, a year later, you will have to go through a detailed re-certification process, which requires scheduling an appointment for a phone call, making that phone call at a certain time, holding on the phone for an hour before being hung up on, re-scheduling that appointment, and so on, until eventually you MAY then be required to receive a mailing at an address that you have to respond to.
Sounds like the kind of shit they do for sure.
However, it's not the same thing as a time limit.
And how is requiring a process designed to induce "breakage", to use marketing term, not the same thing as a time limit?
I'm not defending the churning tactics in any way, they're very morally wrong.
I actually have not eaten from a dumpster in months.
But most dumpster food is quite safe, because it is still in packaging, or it is of the non-risky variety.
We did occasionally dumpster also though, but Food Not Bombs groups have a loose guideline of serving vegan food, which is much less likely to go bad after a few hours of not being refrigerated (though the veganism is part of the ethics also)
I basically wait for food to "manifest" for me to eat, and do not eat until it happens.
To "fuel" this manifesting, I practice karma yoga.
I developed this practice based on reading various teachings, finding parallels between them, and then poking about and experimenting until I found what works.
Sort of like how I learned computers...
I prayed. I typically pray in 3 parts: gratitude-forgiveness-requests, and this time was no exception. It went something like this: Thank you for [... some gratitudes ...]. Please forgive me for [... some regrettable things I've done ...]. Please help me find a banana or two to eat.
Before I pray, I typically focus on my breathing, in traditional "breath meditation" fashion. This was the beginning and the foundation of all these practices, and I started practicing breath meditation several years ago.
After prayer, I listened carefully, and I followed what one may describe as physical intuition to a place where someone had left behind the bottom of a banana nut muffin. Not quite a banana, but it did the trick.
Physical intuition is subtle, it is like when you go for a walk without a purpose, going whichever way feels most natural.
In this case, of course, I went out of my way for food, but I also went for a walk, I meditated along the way, etc. I'm not an absolutist by any means.
How did you get into this lifestyle?
For a while, I thought I could do both, but I realized eventually that I only have so much "programming juice" to work with, and after a day of doing software dev for advertising and investment banks and other such stuff, there was almost none left for me to do my own thing.
Clothes: Either hand-me-downs or from the free pile in Salvation Army.
Soap, toothpaste, etc: I don't use most of this stuff.
Travel: I do pay for changing places occasionally. Most of the time I look/wait/pray for someone driving the same way I'm going and riding with them. If it's a bus or a train, it is paid for by people who support my work. (I write foss.) I don't use airplanes anymore.
Food: Various sources. On this one, I am a bit of a spiritualist, so I generally wait for acceptable food to appear before me or be given to me and only then eat it. (If someone offers to buy me something, I generally refuse.) I believe in the benefit of fasting, so I fast until acceptable food appears, but I rarely fast unintentionally. You may not realize how much abundance we live in, but by some estimates 40-50% of food produced for our society is discarded in the trash (many "composting bins" are complete bullshit and go directly into the same trash pipeline as the regular trash). So finding some extra food without pulling it out of the supply chain via payment is not that hard.
If you want a good primer on this stuff, look for a book called "The Man Who Gave Up Money", it does a pretty good job of explaining. A free copy should not be too difficult to find online.
Also, do you manage to be sufficiently independent from others, or is it not a goal au all?
None of us are completely independent, we all rely on other humans, animals, plants, and the eco-system to exist. I don't think, practically speaking, there is much of a difference between doing this with currency or without.
That is a great insight! We are all connected. Very countercultural.
I imagine it's quite easy to find like minded people though.
Time is not money, it is infinitely more valuable.
Actually, I've yet to have a serious freegan partner, most are pretty normal.
Indeed, but some are more independent than others. And for some reasons (I suspect some childhood sh*t) I take great pride in depending on no one. As much as I find your life style fascinating and appealing (I met a few people living your way years ago, two of them also unsurprisingly in the free-software world), I'm also very much attracted by the opposite lifestyle in this regard and have been contemplating recently living on my own on a sail ship away from shore.
> I don't think, practically speaking, there is much of a difference between doing this with currency or without.
I don't know. I view currency as something that has been invented to separate exchange of services and goods from richer, more complex and also more troublesome relationships. Indeed we all depends on each others but the economy based on money limits this to the bare minimum. We don't need to be good pals with my baker so that I get some bread in the morning, and indeed that would even be illegal for him to refuses to sell any bread to me if he doesn't like me.
Whereas in your case, if someone does not like you for any reason it can cause real problems, so I guess you have to be nicer, sometime hide your thoughts, etc... So you have more freedom with regard to the tyranny of money and commercial relationships, which is a big plus, but you have less freedom from the tyranny of others judgments. Not being a homo œconomicus is great, but having to play the social ape game is not so much.
Sorry to be verbose, this topic is important to me ATM. Back to more basic questions:
How do you find places where you could stay in exchange for being helpful? I'm assuming you live in the US, where this endeavor is not particularly encouraged. Are there websites to help facilitate this kind of non-commercial exchanges? Or do you rely on your pre-existing network of acquaintances?
Also, have you considered doing an AMA? :)
It's true, I am nice, but I don't see any downsides to that. Everyone has a level of truth they can handle, and we manage that in all our interactions.
I find my accommodations by praying and keeping my eyes and heart open. I do live in North America. I'm working on the websites. My network helped in the beginning, and it is expanding.
Thanks for answering, and please consider this AMA :)
(edit: phrasal verbs are hard)
I feel like you might survive without toothpaste if you never eat sugar. I have a harder time imagining doing without that.
For teeth, I mostly just use my own saliva and brush them very thoroughly and regularly.
Your answer sounds evasive. It's like your answer to the question "So how do you eat?" is "I don't, basically."
Did I have the wrong definitions in my head?
Vegan: Don't consume or benefit from any animal products if you can help it. (This entails not buying animal products for yourself)
Freegan: Don't pay for any animal products, but consume them if they're free.
Ethically there's some crossover, freegans are anti-waste, largely for environmental reasons, and vegans are anti-cruelty, but also often opting out of animal consumption for environmental reasons.
Many freegans (who are otherwise vegan) would consider eating food which would be wasted (even if it involves animal products) to be OK from the vegan perspective because you're not supporting the exploitation of animals as long as you don't pay for it, and it's better for the environment to reduce waste. In fact, buying new things when there is so much waste (arguably unnecessarily) supports a whole supply chain in which there are inevitably human and animal casualties along the way.
A lot of it is about animals for me as well, because no mass-produced food is really clean of animal suffering.
Even if you buy organic soybeans, if they're coming from the supermarket, and you're paying a dollar for the bag, that dollar is sending a clear and unmistakable signal to the supply chain: "please replace this bag of soybeans".
From there, a whole chain of events unfolds... a bag is pulled from the case, a case is pulled from the pallet, a pallet is pulled from the warehouse (on a diesel truck), and so on. There's lots of diesel and machinery involved, and all the way at the other side, there is land being cleared from animal use, probably with some animals dying as a result, in order to grow some more soybeans.
Sure, a good portion of this is unavoidable. Our entire existence has a baseline of suffering which we cannot get rid of completely. But if I can reduce my contribution to it when it's totally unnecessary (because there are 50 bags of organic soybeans in the dumpster, for example, or there are are many soybean servings left over at the cafeteria after it closes) then I'd rather do that.
One thing they could do is collect the trash
I wish everyone could react to things the way millennials tend to.
The author tells you how old they are in the first sentence.
I feel it funny that this is the takeaway the author got. Certainly, if it's fresh, finish them. Also try to store it correctly to last, and if necessary, freeze them and they'll still be good in soup or mushed. But dispose of food that you aren't realistically going to use, or cannot use (or ask others if they want them?) And if you're full, it's better to put it back in the fridge/freezer or dispose of it than develop an eating disorder.