"I'm looking for the rest of my hair, not food! Who are you to judge?"
A Freegan is someone who doesn’t believe in consumerism. They are willing to rummage through dumpsters and garbage in exchange for “treading lightly on the earth.” Their goal is to escape the cycle of consumerism by scavenging garbage bins for food, furniture, and god forbid, soap to clean the stench of filth off of them. Essentially, they are wannabe hobos whose logic could easily be written in a manifesto by a monkey throwing its feces onto a piece of paper.
Classy
I don’t think being resourceful is a bad idea, but I think eating garbage is…and I think their rationality behind what they do is patently absurd. Let’s examine some things:
1. The entire ideology of a Freegan is to circumvent capitalism and eliminate consumerism from their lives. This would make sense if the food that they ate wasn’t already purchased. So basically it’s ok for other people to buy things for you. It’s ok for other people to go against your beliefs while you benefit from those beliefs you fundamentally disagree with. As long as you don’t buy it directly you’re safe, right? Idiots.
2. I think most people can agree eating garbage is disgusting, but not only that, there’s millions of bacterial cultures developing in those garbage bins, and if you’re not smart enough to eat things other than garbage, you’re not smart enough to figure out a way to make your garbage safe for eating. Enjoy your E-coli, you overzealous jackasses.
Apparently the economy is so bad that now people are stealing from the homeless.
3. If Freegans were so gung-ho about avoiding consumerism and putting a dent in capitalism, then they aren’t doing a good job of it by providing a website dedicated to their cause. In fact, most of the facts I’ve researched for this article came from their very own website: http://freegan.info/. Freegans want to avoid consumerism? How about understanding the amount of energy, money, and technology it takes to run a website? You need to buy a domain name, that’s already money in GoDaddy’s pocket. You need to pay for a host or server to house all of the information and bandwidth on your website, and on top of that, you need a lot of electricity to keep it going. It is an advanced system, not some hippy miracle box. Finally, you need other people to have electricity, computers, an operating system for the computer, and an ISP to view your website that you’ve paid hundreds of dollars for. As of 1/20/09, the freegan website’s Alexa ranking (a traffic monitoring website) is 479,096 which can be estimated to garner at least 1000 unique visits per day, and it’s probably more now since they’ve appeared on Oprah and other shows to preach their hypocritical bullshit. That’s over 30,000 different people accessing your site per month. That’s over 30,000 people with their own internet plans, paying roughly $50.00 a month to stumble upon your silly drivel. That’s about 1.5 million dollars you’re inadvertently responsible for. What are you guys doing on Oprah anyway? You’re supposed to be treading lightly on the earth, not being on a show where advertisers spend thousands of dollars for airtime during her commercials. You do realize that people are taking pictures of your dumb asses, putting them on the internet and getting money from their ad revenue, right? Nevermind that glaring hypocrisy, you have to pull some toilet paper off of a Chalupa.
4. Between these blatant and absolutely breathtaking contradictions in philosophy and points of view in general, nothing set me off more than these two Freegans who spoke to the NY Times of all places:
For the record, I’ve put my penis in peanut butter jars many times before. I can only pray that you got the one I jar-raped.
As I’ve stated before, you have to be out of your damn mind if you’re separating yourself from capitalism by having a website, and then promoting it via the NY Times…a media outlet that charges for subscriptions, not to mention the huge amount of ad revenue they make on online ads alone. Way to distance yourself from ‘The Man,’ idiot.
I’ve found a solution to stop this, or at least make Freegans think twice about rummaging through our garbage. I, IamRob of FreakSafari.com, am now the first official “Peegan.” Observe:
Nice and clear. No dehydration for me!
An unsuspecting Freegan...eagerly waiting to save a buck.
Wait till I put some kidney stones in next time, loser!
Popularity: 19%
Great job man! I never really thought about how incredibly stupid these people are. Oh and I just peed in my trash.
…that’s disgusting.
My favorite part of the site was how they justified using cars and buses and such as.
You should poop in your garbage, though. Didn’t you tell me pee was sterile?
I’m so confused. Why was your cock in a peanut-butter jar?
Well there could be two explanations, Sporting. One is I wanted to see what it would be like to have sex with a jar of peanut butter, and the other could be that I lied about the number of explanations.
I’ve been recycling for years, I drive/use things until they fall apart, etc. These people need to continue to eat out of dumpsters in hopes that Darwin was on to something. Morons.
Great post BTW.
Rob, after careful review of their website, I’ve made a decision. I’m upping your ante and becoming a Spunkgan. I mean, I’m gonna be jerking off anyway, I might as well do it in the garbage can.
That’s actually the grossest and funniest thing i heard all day.
These left-wing liberal cocksuckers need to find an actual way to help the nation continue to grow. As we have some liberal fuck-up in the “black” house now, who is constantly spending and spending tax payer dollars on a reformed healthcare (which is just a smaller red scare) and fucking the US in the ass entirely by saying we need change, we need this and that. NO WE DONT. We need to resort to the things that have kept our country alive for over 200 years, make the left wing fucks shut up and listen for like 10 minutes and tell all the hippies to just put their tofu and ganja down to let us right wingers have some say in this issue, because good ol’ nancy in congress won’t let us.
The incredibly hilarious thing about your post… is that I personally know both Mr. Adam Weissman and Cindy Rosin who are both pictured in your photos. Adam’s father is a wealthy Doctor who lives in an upscale suburb in new Jersey, and Cindy’s Father is an aerospace engineer for NASA. What makes me laugh is just how few of the “freegans” have resorted to this lifestyle out of necessity. If they really wanted to reduce their footprint then perhaps they should stop taking handouts from mommy and daddy in the name of “anti-consumerism”.
Adam is just as you have described if not more so… an obnoxious little twit who was even ostracized from our activism community for his creepiness and inability to stop preaching to people. I personally once had the pleasure of beating the shit out of him once in our office after he stepped over the line and meddled in my personal life… it was VERY satisfying!
For all of their preaching and posturing, freegans are just another bunch of suburban rich white kids who want to feel important… they are complete and utter posers and NOBODY in the real activist community takes them seriously.
They’re from NJ? Come on man, haven’t we suffered enough?!
Ugh, I don’t know why I’m responding here when the only purpose of this article is to judge other people and to spread misinformation. If you have a problem with freeganism, that is fine, but you can at least present all the facts. There are so many holes in what you are saying.
1. “It’s ok for other people to go against your beliefs while you benefit from those beliefs you fundamentally disagree with.”
When you eat food that is already thrown away, that is less food that YOU have to purchase. You are still limiting the amount of food that is purchased. You’re right, that food was already purchased, that’s the point - it wasn’t purchased FOR the freegans, it would be thrown away with or without freegans. At least it is going to use. When there are thousands of people dying from starvation in this world, it is irresponsible to let perfectly good food go to waste.
2. “I think most people can agree eating garbage is disgusting”
Most food that is thrown away in dumpsters is safe, untouched, and has never even touched the dumpster itself. Bagel stores routinely throw away garbage bags filled with nothing but bagels and other bread products. That is not garbage, in my humble opinion. Those bagels were made that morning and are thrown away in the early evening. Bagels do not go bad in that time, and the only thing they are touching is other bagels in a plastic bag. What is REALLY disgusting is that good food is regarded as useless by our society when there are starving people around the planet that would kill for that food.
“Enjoy your E-coli, you overzealous jackasses.” The e-coli epidemic is largely a result of the mass production and distribution of food, which freegans are trying to limit. If you are so opposed to these diseases, you should also be opposed to the system that fosters them.
3. “If Freegans were so gung-ho about avoiding consumerism and putting a dent in capitalism, then they aren’t doing a good job of it by providing a website dedicated to their cause”
This isn’t even an issue because no one ever made the claim that they can live completely outside the lines drawn by our society. Of course we have to live inside the system to a certain extent, that is the whole PROBLEM with the system. It makes it nearly impossible to escape and have a real “choice”. If you decide to live in the woods, that land is already owned by somebody - you need to pay for land just to EXIST. You’re just proving the point that the capitalist system leaves people with limited options in life. I don’t disagree.
4. “For the record, I’ve put my penis in peanut butter jars many times before.”
Many freegans choose not to eat food that is already half eaten or opened. In fact, they don’t even come across that kind of food often. Why? Because they generally dumpster dive at grocery stores, which will throw an entire package of produce away if just one vegetable has gone bad (many companies don’t allow for individual sale of items). Food stores are throwing away items that have never been touched by human hands.. Sometimes they will throw away food that is not expired and not bad in any way, but the food is taking up too much shelf space, so they chuck it. That is completely irresponsible and wasteful. You’ll never understand freegans until you understand the reality of what is being wasted in our society.
Wow an actual freegan responded. I thought I smelled moldy cheese.
I agree wholeheartedly with Crystal … that Freegans are attempting to live differently than what is expected and ingrained in us from childhood. It is a type of protest and it is not without some element of hypocrasy. It’s pretty much impossible to say anything of importance that isn’t hypocritical - because most often we make comments that apply to our society in which we live - must live. If Freegans were to simply go live in the woods, so to speak, they would as well have no influence on the rest of us. And that is part of why they do what they do - they’d like to see the world as it can be - not as it is.
We cannot continue to grow our population, consumption, and waste without destroying our world.
IamRob just got owned.
How do you figure he got owned? He’s saying Freegans are hypocrites, and the commenter is saying that to gain a larger awareness of Freeganism, it’s acceptable to compromise the integrity or ideals of Freeganism. How is Rob getting owned when that’s a shining example of hypocrisy? Idiot.