Freegans

I was introduced to world of Freegans last week. I had never heard of them before and thought my boyfriend was joking. But I googled it and he was right. Freegans really do exist. Clicking onto a Freegan's website I started my research into this lifestyle. At first glance I was excited by what I saw, my mind running ahead of myself and thinking about my new life as a Freegan. But as I read on I started to become a little disillusioned and annoyed. I can fully understand and support the belief that we shouldn't throw away all the food assigned as past its sell-by-date by supermarkets. Sell-by-dates are not very accurate and a lot of food can continue to be safely edible well past this date. Honey for example is fine for years after the suggested shelf life. I understand the supermarkets need to put an early date on to avoid being sued and accused of selling gone off food but for many food items I say we should use our own judgement. How seriously ill are we going to get by eating cereal that is a month out of date? To prove this point my parents and I ate a bag of crisps that went off over 4 months ago last weekend. We are all still standing. The crisps didn't even taste any different.
A big offender in food waste is holidays and seasonal themed packaging. Food that has been packaged according to what holiday it is tediously linked to will be chucked away when the holiday has passed regardless of the shelf life of whats inside. The same goes for competitions and deals. Once the competition has ended, rather than repackage in a new wrapping, the whole lot gets thrown away.
So Freegans find this food in bins outside shops and eat it. To discourage them the shops often pour bleach or dye over the food to make it inedible. Seems like a waste of time and effort. The website has a FAQ page which covers the issue of legality. Are you allowed to dip into bins and take what you want? If someone has thrown it away they have cut all ties with it, they have dropped ownership of it. If you do not want something, you put it in the bin. But these bins are on someone else's property so you can face charges of trespassing. They comment on the irony of shop managers shouting 'Stop stealing our rubbish!'
Why don't they give this food to the poor? A question I always asked. The practicality and costs of doing this would not be beneficial to the shops. This would probably open up some tricky legal issue of giving supposedly 'out of date' food to homeless people and the possible consequences. Also, why should the poor get second best? But something is better than nothing.
So this was all fine and good. We shouldn't throw away so much food, sell-by-dates shouldn't be so strictly imposed. I agree with all this. However the tone of the website was aggressive and fighting back at me over issues I hadn't raised, comments I hadn't made. As I read on I started to realise that Freegans weren't just about eating free food found in bins, they believe that the world doesn't need money. We should be helping each other in the ways that we can and get help back in return. Our communities should run on skills shared, not what we can pay for. This notion is nice, but impractical. Sure, it would be great if the world wasn't run on money, if people could get what they needed without paying for it. Wouldn't the world be a much pleasanter place without the love of money? But this is never going to happen. Suddenly the focus shifted to this fight, the fight to not need money, to share what we have. In my mind this reduces the credibility of Freeganism drastically. I can see people fighting to reduce food wastage, the demand that the food that supermarkets do throw out goes to the poor, or even to those who don't mind eating 'out of date' food. But people aren't going to make any noise about living in a world without money because they know it is unrealistic. It has ruined what could be a great push forward to reduce waste and reduce costs into something deemed 'hippyish and backward'.
Needless to say, my excitement about Freegans ended there.