Freegans: The Refined Art of Dumpster Diving

Knotted and shiny black, slumped into bins or piled in heaps, plastic garbage bags are part of the quotidian landscape of any metropolis. The incomprehensible levels of trash we generate, like greenhouse gas emissions and mercury levels in tuna, are linked to an out-of-whack industrialized food system and to our fraught relationship with food. Combating these negatives are environmentalists, organic food promoters, and other activists who search for alternatives while cultivating a closer relationship with what they eat. One of these groups is the freegans, a subculture of dumpster divers and urban gleaners who sift through the contents of seas of garbage bags. They’re not just combating waste; they’re eating it.

Rather than shopping for locally grown Hudson Valley apples or purchasing environmentally sound cleaning products, freegans aim to not purchase at all. Instead, they find, repurpose, share, and barter to obtain food and other necessities like bedding, clothes, toiletries, and housewares.

Contemporary freegan food scrounging can be linked to the Diggers, an anarchist guerilla street theater group that formed in San Francisco, California, in the mid-1960s. The Diggers took their name from the English Diggers, a 17th-century group that envisioned a society free of private property and commercial exchange. San Francisco’s Diggers, a part of the burgeoning bohemian counterculture, engaged in “street theater, anarcho-direct action, and art happenings,” and set up Free Stores in the park, distributing Free Food to whoever wanted it. The food they cooked, served, ate, and gave away was often pillaged from the trash, harvested from their gardens, or stolen from local stores. Warren Belasco writes that the Diggers made a critical contribution to the growing movement of political activism: “They put food at the center of an activist program based on an emerging ecological consciousness.” Food and food waste are the core catalysts for 21st-century freegan praxis.

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