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Looking for a free lunch |
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| By Matt Mayer in Green Living | September 17, 2007 | ||
If you’re looking for the ultimate in low cost, low impact living your could check out becoming a freegan. Wikipedia has this for the definition of freeganism:
Freeganism is an anticonsumerism lifestyle where people employ alternative strategies for living based on “limited participation in the conventional economy and minimal consumption of resources. Freegans embrace community, generosity, social concern, freedom, cooperation, and sharing in opposition to a society based on materialism, moral apathy, competition, conformity, and greed.”[1] The lifestyle involves salvaging discarded, unspoiled food from supermarket dumpsters that have passed their expiration date, but are still edible and nutritious. They salvage the food not because they are poor or homeless, but as a political statement.
From the article:
Nelson, 51, once earned a six-figure income as director of communications at Barnes and Noble. Tired of representing a multimillion dollar company, she quit in 2005 and became a “freegan” — the word combining “vegan” and “free” — a growing subculture of people who have reduced their spending habits and live off consumer waste. Though many of its pioneers are vegans, people who neither eat nor use any animal-based products, the concept has caught on with Nelson and other meat-eaters who do not want to depend on businesses that they believe waste resources, harm the environment or allow unfair labor practices.
From my perspective, this could perhaps be the lowest impact lifestyle any of us have seen. They live off the throwaways from the rest of the world. It would stand to reason then that they aren’t creating much, if any, waste for the world to deal with. In fact, they are actually reducing the waste stream of the rest of the world by using it themselves.
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