Revision as of 21:14, 23 July 2017

How it relates to veganism, how pragmatic it can be when done right, how the end goal should be bringing awareness to end food waste, but also how it can be a vital toolkit in cheaply running new projects, supporting the homeless and domestic animals which are obligate carnivores. --NonZeroSum (talk) 06:29, 15 July 2017 (CEST)

Wiki quoting

Hard to do much better than the wiki definition, history and policy impact. And if we could wouldn't we want to change the Wikipedia definition also? In such a circumstance is it ok to copy verbatim or should we keep in quote and reference form?

• Introduction - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freeganism
• History - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freeganism#History
• Impacts - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freeganism#Impacts

Not sure if this is how other small mediawiki operations do it, but seems we can copy verbatim without quote-marking:[1]

As of July 15, 2009 Wikipedia has moved to a dual-licensing system that supersedes the previous GFDL only licensing. In short, this means that text licensed under the GFDL only can no longer be imported to Wikipedia, retroactive to 1 November 2008. Additionally, Wikipedia text might or might not now be exportable under the GFDL depending on whether or not any content was added and not removed since July 15 2009. See Wikipedia:Licensing update for further information.

Verbatim copying under the GFDL is one of the ways to reuse Wikipedia articles and other material. You may only use this approach for pages that do not incorporate text that is exclusively available under CC-BY-SA or a CC-BY-SA-compatible license. See Re-use of text under the GNU Free Documentation License.

For the purposes of this discussion, Wikipedia is considered to be a Collection of Documents. (An alternative interpretation could be that Wikipedia is a single Document, which invalidates the discussion on this page.)

--NonZeroSum (talk) 18:42, 18 July 2017 (CEST)

Page Layout Ideas?

Keep going with facts & information, activism and alternative perspectives? --NonZeroSum (talk) 06:29, 15 July 2017 (CEST),

Sounds like a good general guideline.--BrimstoneSaladWiki (talk) 02:01, 16 July 2017 (CEST)

To Draw from

Forum Threads

Hyperlinks [2]

• How Much Food Can You Find In A Dumpster? (Vegan Gains)
• Vegan makes profit from roadkill
• Is it okay to eat meat that you did not buy?
• Part Vegan Part Freegan? The concept of use?
• Eggs and Veganism
• Backyard rescue hens
• Veganism and Dumpster Diving
• FREEGAN VEGAN BEEGAN’S!?

--NonZeroSum (talk) 18:42, 18 July 2017 (CEST)

External sources

Need to change the titles of everything quoted and give them a how it relates to veganism focus to give us enough room to change without copying. I'll probably reach out to trashwiki and say they have permission to use material from this page if we can borrow back from them, as 99.99% is going to be from the same angle, just be interesting to see what they come up with and where they diverge on the anti-consumerist stuff. --NonZeroSum

It's not practical to vary copyright and permissions on a page-by-page basis. It's best to just keep their stuff minimal and in quotes if it isn't public domain, and possibly link to it as a reference for further reading.--BrimstoneSaladWiki (talk) 22:33, 22 July 2017 (CEST)

Don't think I've quoted them at all, they're pages are pretty chaotic, I just thought about updating some of their sections with what I'd written, and asking if their stuff is public domain. It would be interesting to see what they left the same and where they diverged and the discussion that could be gained from that. --NonZeroSum (talk) 08:52, 23 July 2017 (CEST)

Wikipedia [3]

Very thorough, we can probably reference to their history overview. --NonZeroSum (talk) 06:29, 15 July 2017 (CEST)

Trashwiki [4]

This site is the go to that every freegan uses for maps and information on big cities when they don't know their way around or have someone to show them. Helplful 'last checked' dates also. Interesting recorded Freegan News and Events also.[5] --NonZeroSum (talk) 06:29, 15 July 2017 (CEST)

The Ultimate Guide To Dumpster Diving [6]

As it says in the title, think this is a great go to article, just a few naturalistic fallacies didn't want to copy over, the rest in the process of rereading and drawing from in my own terminology.

Food Waste & Freeganism (Unnatural Vegan)

The first of UV's videos on food waste and the second half of this one can probably be termed moving towards zero waste not freeganism, but it's all good listening. An introduction as to how it relates to veganism and use of the term.

Still be useful as I said in the beginning to get an educational video out there on how these networks of self-supporting freegans can reduce the need to consume on things like cat food, can organize to efficiently feed people on the cheap in the street and advocate for change in industry practices and the law through documenting, media and petitioning industry, councils and politicians.

Stealing

Freeganism started out as anti-consumerist ethic sees stealing as hurting the bottom line of all companies, creating irregular demand and no profit, as well as taking free animal products from strangers as some kind of gift economy that is commendable, so it is something we have to fight for the definition over, or use freegan-vegan instead. --NonZeroSum

The "stealing is OK" mantra seems to be dying, probably because it's illegal and people don't want to promote that in the mainstream, but it's also ethically inconsistent (it hurts retail stores and consumers: the stores which have to restock benefiting the companies making that product because the retail store has to pay for spillage, and the consumers because most of the cost gets passed on to them as markup), I think it's worth fighting over for simplicity's sake, and making arguments against those practices as fake freeganism in the article. We could have different articles on freeganism, zero-waste, and minimalism--BrimstoneSaladWiki (talk) 22:33, 22 July 2017 (CEST)

Hmm I just think it would be historically inaccurate to call theft fake freeganism, the founding propaganda 'Why freegan?' including theft and employee scams, also the freegan movement ethic that it's better to steal from a multi-national franchises than a small independent to survive and the desire to see them rid of out of communities by putting pressure on them so they aren't financially viable - [7]

It might be appropriate to call taking food offered to you fake freeganism because of a misguided understanding of it being a free-diet like vegetarian to free..g..an, but IMO the theft thing will just have to be dissuaded in the criticism section. --NonZeroSum (talk) 03:28, 23 July 2017 (CEST)

Stealing animal products still triggers the demand from the supplier that salvaging from a dumpster does not. This makes it fake freeganism; you're driving demand none-the-less. I could understand stealing non-animal products as an act of assault against a corporation just as would be any form of property damage. I don't agree with it for a number of reasons both in principle and in terms of logistics, but I can see why those anti-capitalist freegans would see it as preferable to purchasing. That doesn't reduce or negate the harm to animals from animal products, though, thus fake freegan (unless the stolen items are legitimately vegan, which is something we could address in the criticism section). (Also, no need to post wiki content on the forum now, I don't want Google's cache to get confused once this is live which we should probably do pretty soon) --BrimstoneSaladWiki (talk) 07:28, 23 July 2017 (CEST)

No problem, I already conceded we can probably call using any animal products from exploitation that aren't waste - not vegan, hence not freegan and a confused simple face understanding of the word freegan like free-diet-etarian.

I didn't think about the google catch thing, but I won't for every page just wanted to share to UV's patreon without giving the wiki address away, and get people on the forum more involved. I don't mind when the wiki goes up, I haven't done as much as I'd have liked because I was annoyed by the lack of transparency and working together that would have solved problems sooner. So killed the enthusiasm to commit, but will just carry on writing articles that interest me and expanding my reading through discussion. --NonZeroSum (talk) 08:31, 23 July 2017 (CEST)

I'm just worried about spammers from public posting, I think sharing on Patreon groups is fine as long as you ask people not to share the link where spammers can find it. I'll leave it up to your discretion where would be safe to share the link. Spam can be a serious problem on wikis and make them unusable fast https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Combating_spam I know from dealing with the forum that manual intervention doesn't cut it. I will go ahead and post a link on the forum in text people can type in and spammers probably won't get. I'm not sure how many more people will join in since only a few users expressed interest. We'll wait on a clickable link. I don't know what you mean about transparency.--BrimstoneSaladWiki (talk) 23:14, 23 July 2017 (CEST)

Wikipedia on Freeganism

Introduction [8]

Freeganism is a practice and ideology of limited participation in the conventional economy and minimal consumption of resources, particularly through recovering wasted goods like food.[9] The word "freegan" is a portmanteau of "free" and "vegan".[10] While vegans might avoid buying animal products as an act of protest against animal exploitation, freegans—at least in theory—avoid buying anything as an act of protest against the food system in general.

Freeganism is often presented as synonymous with "dumpster diving" for discarded food, although freegans are distinguished by their association with an anti-consumerist and anti-capitalist ideology and their engagement in a wider range of alternative living strategies, such as voluntary unemployment, squatting abandoned buildings, and "guerilla gardening" in unoccupied city parks.[11]

History [12]

Freegans' goal of reduced participation in capitalism and tactics of recovering wasted goods shares elements with the Diggers, an anarchist street theater group based in Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco in the 1960s that organized free housing and clinics and gave away rescued food.[13] The word "freegan" itself was allegedly invented in 1994 by Keith McHenry, the co-founder of Food Not Bombs—an anarchist group that distributes free vegetarian meals as a protest against militarism and as a way of providing "solidarity not charity"—to refer to vegans who eat animal products if they find them in a dumpster.[14] McHenry's account is consistent with other published accounts of freeganism that show the word as beginning to be used in the mid-1990s by participants in the antiglobalization and radical environmental movements.[15]

The pamphlet "Why Freegan?"—written by former Against Me! drummer Warren Oakes in Gainesville, Florida in 1999[16]—defines freeganism as "an anti-consumeristic ethic about eating" and goes on to describe practices including dumpster diving, plate scraping, wild foraging, gardening, theft, employee scams, and barter as alternatives to paying for food.[17] The pamphlet also expanded the activities associated with "freeganism" with a long section on non-alimentary practices, including conserving water, pre-cycling, reusing goods, and using solar energy. More than just a set of behaviors, though, the pamphlet presents freeganism as having an overarching political goal: an "ultimate boycott" of "all the corporations, all the stores, all the pesticides, all the land and resources wasted, the capitalist system, the all-oppressive dollar, the wage slavery, the whole burrito" in favor of "liv[ing] a full satisfying life...while treading lightly on the earth." The first organized group of self-described "freegans" formed in 2003 as an offshoot of the Wetlands Preserve nightclub and associated Activism Center in New York City. According to the group freegan.info, "After years of trying to boycott products from unethical corporations responsible for human rights violations, environmental destruction, and animal abuse, many of us found that no matter what we bought we ended up supporting something deplorable. We came to realize that the problem isn’t just a few bad corporations but the entire system itself."[18] From 2005, freegan.info organized regular events including sewing and bicycle workshops, wild food foraging expeditions, and "trash tours"—public dumpster dives open to the public and to media.[19]

Other self-described freegan groups have, at one time or another, existed in United Kingdom, Sweden, Norway, Austria, France, Canada, Greece, Poland, Spain, Switzerland, South Korea, Japan, and Brazil, as well as a half-dozen U.S. cities. The majority of these groups are now inactive, however, and many people and organizations engaged in freegan activities do not use the label.

Impacts [20]

Media coverage of freeganism in the United States peaked around the financial crisis in 2007-2009 and dropped off subsequently. More recently, freeganism has been discussed in the context of increasing public interest in food waste. Tristram Stuart, a prominent food waste campaigner and founder of the organization "Feedback" claims that media attention to freeganism was crucial in attracting attention to the problem.[21] Other analyses of the origins of contemporary public policy initiatives around food waste have also concluded that freeganism contributed to new initiatives, like the French law on food waste or the U.S. food waste reduction challenge.[22][23]

Stigma

Research on freegans finds that individuals come from middle-class and upper-class backgrounds and have high levels of education (even if their present lifestyles make them low-income).[24][25]

I am extremely embarrassed for people to see me diving, because I can tell that I’m not just me, I’m also a representation of black people in general...I got harassed by security several times while diving on my own campus, until my white friends pop their heads out of the dumpsters.[26]

The Ultimate Guide To Dumpster Diving

2nd Edit:

How to

Disclaimer

Getting food from dumpsters isn’t the most sanitary thing you can do, so don’t do it if you are immunocompromised through youth, illness or old age, if you don’t want to risk infections, and are germ or pest phobic and/or nutritionally deficient.

Health & Safety

Be careful when climbing in and out of dumpsters. You’ll need a bright head-torch to see what you’re doing, even better is to have a friend holding another torch to advise you where you’re not looking. Hard toed rubber boots, hard gloves to protect your hands and long protective trouser legs and sleeves to protect against sharp objects and residue on your skin, also make sure the jacket zips off in the middle so you’re not taking it off over your head.

Remove all exterior clothing before travelling home and shower straight away, alternatively removable car seat covers, trash sacks, or sheets of newspaper will protect your car seat. Clean plastic trash sacks are a good way to protect your finds while wading in the dumpster, transporting your haul home, and when containing messy boots or clothes. When biking, line your panniers or backpack with plastic bags.

You still need to check labels and use all 5 senses when deciding what to bring home. The most nutritious food is that picked and eaten or processed to be eaten on the same day it ripens (retting, processing and cooking to make those nutrients more accessible aside), when dumpster diving for food, you should expect most of the products you find to have declined somewhat in quality.

According to the Center for Science in the Public Interest, food poisoning seems to be twice as likely in restaurants than at home. There is some research on higher levels of cases of gastroenteritis among dumpster divers in the US, though it is not obvious how it is comparable to other activities.

Best trick in the book is to leave all your products submerged in a bucket of water with vinegar or diluted bleach overnight to soak which kills most aerobic bacteria. Anything bulging, bloated or smells funny leave behind.

The Dumpster Diving Code

Out of respect to other dumpster divers and the owner of the premises there is few simple rules you can adhere to keep everyone happy. If you fail to adhere to the code, you risk having the owner of the dumpster lock the bin, pour bleach on the food or wait for you to return and shout at you for being a dirty hippie. None of that is fun, so read carefully.

Rule 1: Dumpster discretely

You don’t want to draw attention to yourself while you are dumpstering. People might get spooked and call the cops, or you might get shooed away. Keep noise to an absolute minimum. Speak with an inside voice, don’t throw things around and avoid knocking things over loudly. go during the cover of night if you can

Rule 2: Leave things better than how you found them

Dumpster diving can be messy, smelly business, but you’ve no right to go mess up someone’s garbage area. Avoid tearing bags open, tossing trash on the floor or leaving bags outside the dumpster. If you do need to tear the bags, make sure you tie them back up.

Not only is it rude to leave an area messy, you might attract raccoons and other pests, creating a problem for the innocent dumpster owner. Breaking this rule is a huge motivation for owners to lock their dumpsters, preventing future generations of divers to benefit from the cornucopia of food.

Rule 3: Check the legal status in your country

Dumpster diving is legal in the United States and Canada except where prohibited by local regulation.

However, if a dumpster is against a building or inside a fenced enclosure marked “No Trespassing,” you could be questioned, ticketed or even arrested by the police. If the officer responding takes a particular dislike to you they may even try to ticket or arrest you for breach of the peace or disorderly conduct, two charges so abstract there is nothing you can really do but keep a calm conduct, just be aware.

What can you find while dumpster diving?

The focus of this page is on meeting your food needs mostly free and easily on a freegan-vegan diet, but just because you can find other products in dumpsters cheaply in thrift stores (and the back of!) or online classifieds, doesn’t mean in this age of over-consumption and thoughtless waste, you can’t also find anything and everything in dumpsters, including:

Clothing, furniture, electronics, building materials, books, pet food and supplies, and so much more…

What gear do you need to dumpster dive?

Dumpster diving is a messy business.

You’ll want to ensure that you are well-equipped for the job so that the task is as pleasant as possible.

Long sleeve shirts and pants. I recommend that you equip yourself with a long sleeve shirt and pants. There is a risk that you might splash something nasty on yourself, and it’s better that it should end up on your clothing than your skin. What’s more, long sleeves and pants will protect you from any sharp objects and keep you warm.

A headlamp. If possible, you want to go dumpster diving during the cover of night to avoid detection and drawing attention to yourself. A headlamp is essential for freeing your hands for maximum flexibility and digging. Don’t assume the light of streetlamps will not be sufficient to give you the required visibility for optimum diving.

Thick gloves. You’ll want some gloves for protection and warmth. Getting your hands covered in trash water is unsettling, and also, will get your hands freezing, especially if you are dumpstering at night. Gloves will also protect you from sharp edges, glass and other dumpster hazards.

A face mask. This is optional, but helpful for novices. Even though a large portion of the food retrieved from dumpster is fresh, rot may have settled into a some. If you’ve got a strong sense of smell, a mask can help you stay strong in the light of unpleasant odors.

Close-toe shoes. Leave your dandy sandals at home. Get yourself a sturdy pair of shoes to take with you diving. This will help you jump and walk over the dumpster and its content.

Bags. To take home your haul.

Backpack, shopping trolley, bicycle, car or van. To help carry your enormous, delicious haul.

A small box cutter knife or scissors. Helpful for cutting into bags and boxes to view the insides.

You can purchase a universal skip key for dirt cheap which will open many (if not most) dumpsters. I’ve heard tails of freegans covertly bumping chain locks and replacing the broken link with an identical quick release link or practicing their picking technique on yale locks, as well as not so covertly, highly illegal, going to war with the management escalating to electric saws until they threw in the towel.

The Best Places to Dumpster Dive

Whilst you're still getting the lay of the land a good bike and set of paniers is fastest for nipping in out of lanes to see what grocery stores, restaurants, and food services are nearby and check their dumpsters when no one is outside. It may take a few days to learn when the trash pick-up day is and what time fresh food is dumped, so keep checking.

Corner stores are also excellent – these are smaller places and neither have the time or staff to effectively throw out food. If you live in a city, you’ll find a lot of success by going to downtown and checking behind and on the sides of small, corner grocery stores. Often, you can get a lot of good stuff by just skimming the top.

Remember, dumpster diving is a hunt. Don’t give up if the first few places you visit don’t have what you were looking for.

For stores closely positioned to a street, you may need to walk down to an alley and turn into it. Many cities will have compost-only bins, typically colored in a shade of green. These are perfect. They separate the food away from the non-food items, making it easy to find the grub you seek.

When Should you go Diving?

When is just as important as where.

Try to time your dumpstering adventure close to garbage day in the area you are targeting. You can easily find this information on a municipality’s website.

You can definitely find good stuff during other times, but if you want the biggest volume of things to choose from, go before or on garbage day (before the garbage is taken away, of course).

How to Pick Good Dumpster Food

In order to conserve energy and effort, follow the steps below:

Feel the outside of the bag to understand the shapes of things inside. Slightly lift the bag to get an idea of the weight. Are you feeling some boxy shapes? Is the bag lightweight? In this case, the bag may be full of empty containers and not worth the effort into opening it, if the bag smells or looks rotten move on.

Labels

A few important points about dates, those dreaded indicators of food lifespan:

Best Before Dates: In North America, these have nothing to do with the safety of the food in question. It is an estimate placed by manufacturers as to how much time a food will remain “fresh” – that is, retain it’s best flavor and texture. Even though many stores and people will dump food that has passed its “best before” date, this date should not dissuade you from recovering food.

Sell Before Dates: These are used by stores to keep track of inventory, and give an indication of when this food should be moved off the shelf, and to the dumpster. Oftentimes, these ‘sell by’ dates may be many days before the ‘best before’ dates.

Use By Dates: These dates indicate a manufacturers estimate as too how many days a product will be safe to eat. These dates are somewhat significant. However, it’s not like a food will suddenly be edible one day before the “use by” date, and then magically become inedible the next. These dates are usually conservative for the sake of safety and as protection from litigation.

Resources

Trashwiki [27] is the go to that every freegan uses for maps and information on big cities when they don't know their way around or have someone to show them. Helplful 'last checked' dates also.

Stigma

Much like pre-owned materials, dumpster food face some illogical prejudices.

Nonetheless, food is routinely thrown out due to these reasons. It’s gotten to the point where 40% of all food created is sent to the landfill.

A large portion of the food thrown away is not dangerous or inedible, much of it has no issues at all.

Food Waste & Freeganism (Unnatural Vegan)

Food Waste & Freeganism (Part 2: What is a freegan and why does it matter?) [28]

Published on Sep 1, 2016 As I and others have said, vegan is not the moral baseline. There’s always more that we can do (or stop doing) to make the world a better place. I've talked about agricultural efficiency a bit in the past, but another major issue in our food supply (and one that we can do a lot about) is waste.

• Freeganism in a nutshell - https://youtu.be/ZzH6UEOz2Bs?t=23s
• Fake freegans - https://youtu.be/ZzH6UEOz2Bs?t=3m1s

__________

Hey guys, this is part two of my 2 part series talking about food waste and now freeganism. So if you want to see the one on food waste you can check that out right here [1] and then come back and watch this one or don't.

Freeganism in a nutshell [29]

Freegans are rescuers of sorts, only instead of rescuing people or animals they rescue food from being wasted, they get it from dumpsters, dumpster diving, often dumpsters behind grocery stores or bakeries, frequently still in the package and they eat that instead of buying food.

Given the harmfulness of food waste in terms of the environment that I talked about in the last video, this rather strange lifestyle freeganism is really commendable, it may even be morally superior to veganism in terms of immediate consequences on the world that we live in. As long as freegans aren't like cutting locks and vandalizing private property.

There's also no denying that such a lifestyle, freeganism, is less socially sustainable, obviously not everyone can live on waste so we do need vegan food products made for the market and people willing to buy them.

Freeganism is not an example that we can all follow, but it is something that some of the more adventurous of us can try, it also may be a good recommendation for people who are not quite ready to give up meat, obviously assuming they are willing to dig through garbage to get their fix which I'm willing to bet they're not.

• If dumpster diving, please be safe. Never choose rotten food and always wash and cook anything you do choose thoroughly before eating.

Speaking of meat, some freegans specifically ‘Meagans,’ those Freegans who are willing to eat freegan meat, they get a lot of hate in the vegan community, they're called fake vegans because they're eating meat, but again given the impact of waste on the environment, again check out part one, is this at all merited?

Again freegans are not buying the meat, they are not contributing in any way to demand, they are not stealing it off the shelves or buying it off the shelves, they are getting it from the dumpster, saving it from landfills, the grocery store is not going to replace this by buying more.

More animals are not being bred to suffer and die for the Meagan's meat:

“. . .some people will not give up eating meat. If freegans tell them there is a way that they can continue consuming animal products without economically supporting factory farming, they just might go for it.

Of course, it’s a good idea to keep educating on the benefits of healthy and ethical eating, because we don’t want a situation where, when less meat is available from the dumpsters, people go back to buying it from stores.

And many people won’t go freegan, but WILL go vegan. Through a combination of freegan and vegan outreach strategies, animal rights and social justice activists can hit the industry from several directions at once.”

Fake freegans [30]

Unfortunately not all freegans do it right, there are freegans who steal food, which the store does replace, there are also freegans who get their friends and families to buy food for them, that is not freeganism.

The concept is not rocket science, but it seems that people really don't understand the difference between food that had to be replaced because you stole it or food that someone else would have eaten, so food you know like at a food bank or at a party or something and food that was legitimately going to be wasted, so food off of a vacated table at like a mall food court or again straight from a dumpster or trash can.

I think it's human bias and a very deep desire to eat things, certain things, certain animal products and whatnot that keeps people from thinking clearly and it makes it more difficult for people new to freeganism to figure out actually how to do it correctly.

So if you are going to go freegan, or meagan or whatever, again that's great, just please be mindful that you are doing it correctly.

See Zero Waste for shopping habits that can be 'an intermediate to freeganism'