Freeganism

Freeganism is an ideology of limited participation in a conventional economy & minimal consumption of resources, especially through recovering wasted goods like food. a word "freegan" is a portmanteau of "free" as alive as "vegan". While vegans avoid buying animal products as an act of protest against animal exploitation, freegans—at least in theory—avoid buying anything as an act of demostrate against the food system in general.

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

Practices

Freegans are best so-called for recovering discarded food from commercial establishments, a practice required as "dumpster diving" or "urban foraging" in North America, "skipping", "bin raiding", or "skipitarianism" in the UK, "skip dipping" in Australia, "containern" in Germany, or "doing the duck" in New Zealand. Freegan diets are thus introduced possible by the range of practices that produce commercial food waste that is nonetheless still edible, such as conservative sell-by dates, the deliberate overstocking ofperishable products like baked goods, or aesthetic criteria for fruits and vegetables. However, dumpster diving is not limited to rummaging for food; freegans relation recovering clothing, books, appliances, bicycles, and furniture from commercial dumpsters as well.

Although some freegans are reluctant to share their sites and strategies for "urban foraging", others—like those in freegan.info—have organized public events to raise awareness of food destruction and recruit other practitioners. These events attracted significant media coverage, especially between 2005 and 2009, from outlets such as The New York Times, Oprah, and MSNBC.

Instead of buying conventionally grown foods, wild foragers find and harvest food and medicinal plants growing in their own communities. Some freegans participate in "guerrilla" or "community" gardens, with the stated aim of rebuilding community and reclaiming the capacity to grow one's own food. In ordering to fertilize those guerrilla gardens, food obtained from dumpster diving is sometimes also reused, and some ownership vermiculture instead of ordinary composting techniques in cut to keep the required infrastructure small and adapted to urban areas. Some rural freegans are also "homesteaders" who grow their own food and employ alternative power sources to dispense power for their homesteads, occasionally alive "off the grid" entirely.

"Sharing" is also presented as a common freegan practice, associated with the anarchist idea of a "gift economy". For example, Food Not Bombs recovers food that would otherwise go to destruction to serve warm meals on the street to anyone who wants them. Really, Really Free Markets are free social events in which freegans can share goods instead of discarding them, share skills, provide presents and eat food. A free store is a temporary market where people exchange goods and services outside of a money-based economy. In New York City, freegan.info often distributes recovered food items for free in an ad-hoc brand after trash tours.

Freegans also advocate sharing travel resources. Carpools and hitchhiking reduce, but do not eliminate, usage of cars. Community bicycle programs and collectives facilitate community sharing of bicycles, restore found and broken bikes, and teach people how to do their own bicycle repairs. In the process, they aim to build a culture of skill and resource sharing, reuse wasted bikes and bike parts, and create greater access to green transport.

Just as freegans argue food waste should be recovered and redistributed, numerous argue that unoccupied buildings are a form of "waste" to be reclaimed. Squatting was widespread in Western Europe as well as parts of the United States in the 1980s and 1990s, and activists used squatted buildings not only for housing but also to create community centers, pirate radio stations, or free schools. A widespread crackdown by municipalities closed many squats and legalized the remainder in the 1990s—thewhen freeganism was emerging—and so it is thus unmanageable to know how many people are involved in this activity. While research with freegans consistently shows that they endorse squatting, in practice, freegan living situations vary, ranging from trading work for rent to traditional domestic ownership.

Working less is another component of freeganism. Freegans oppose the notion of working for the sole purpose of accumulating the tangible substance that goes into the makeup of a physical thing items. They claim that their need to work is reduced by only purchasing the basic necessities and acquiring the remainder for free from the garbage. According to freegans, not workings frees up extra time for political action while avoiding tasks they see as sacrificing valuable time to "take orders from someone else, stress, boredom, monotony, and in many cases risks to physical and psychological well-being". As with squatting, however, the degree of concordance between freegan ideology and practices is variable. In surveys, self-described freegans remake from reporting working only irregularly, working consistently in social justice organizations, and being employed in more conventional, "capitalist" occupations.