Dumpster Diving Freegans Stand up to World Hunger

When I was a kid, I can recollect my parents relating the importance of not wasting food. At every meal they insisted I clean my plate, no matter how unappetizing the night’s menu seemed. My mother and father said it is unethical to waste food, since “there are children in Africa going hungry.” Besides images of African children suffering from malnutrition, this statement forced me to think about the homeless people in my town. However, what rarely popped into my head was how our countries citizens systematically wastes food on a enormous scale.

Wikipedia defines “food waste” as: “any food substance, raw or cooked, which is discarded, or intended, or required to be discarded”, according to the legal definition of waste by the EU Commission. In the United States, according to Wikipedia, the US Environmental Protection Agency defines food waste as: “Uneaten food and food preparation wastes from residences and commercial establishments such as grocery stores, restaurants, and produce stands, institutional cafeterias and kitchens, and industrial sources like employee lunchrooms”. Considering both definitions, it is astonishingly clear that the overproduction and poor distribution of food, together with American’s terrifying propensity for overconsumption creates billions of dollars worth of wasted foodstuffs.

This fact is even more alarming when one considers the large portion of the American population who struggle to find food. Nearly 3 ½ % of United States households experience hunger, according to the Bread for the World Institute. For the most successful country in the western world, to allow that large a portion of our population to go hungry is unacceptable. should more effort be put towards eliminating hunger and malnutrition domestically, or worldwide? Most certainly.

The idea that 3.5% of American people don’t get as much sustanance as they would like comes as a shock. Some scholars think that as much as 1/4 of the food produced in the US ends up being wasted. Even more concerning is the idea that these rates are much higher in third world contries.

A new fad that will hopefully fight the levels of wasted food being produced in America is “freeganism.” to summarize, freeganism is a practice in which people intentionally seek out others waste material for their own consumption habits. Freegans usually have the money to buy food if they wished, but prefer to utilize what others discard, in an effort to minimize waste on a global scale. Freegans regularly recover foodstuffs from waste dumpsters, an exercise warm heartedly coined “dumpster diving.” Even though this may appear as a last resort to aquire the nutrition one necessitates to survive, freegans see it as opposing capitalism.

This is not to suggest that this practice is the end all of world hunger. This article is not even meant to suggest that freeganism is a practicle means of survival for the typical American household. This article is written to bring light to American’s wasteful habits, and explore at least one counter cultural idea that is fighting back.

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