Lecia Bushak
Every month the Freegan Society holds a “Freegan Feast,” where they share a meal that was prepared entirely from scavenged scraps.
How will you spend your Thanksgiving break?
In an old apartment building in Harlem, a delicious smell drifts from a small kitchen where pots filled abundantly with vegetables simmer on the stove.
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Friendly faces enter and exit the kitchen, each bringing in more bags of food to add to the spread. This feast is being prepared by Freegans, who have collected all the food from trash bags and dumpsters the night before — for free.
Yet everything looked as though it were straight out of a home cooking show, fresh and delicious. On the dining room table were five enormous, untouched bread loaves. This was more like Thanksgiving dinner than the remains of a trash pile.
"We always have a soup," one Freegan told me as she poured cans of beans into a large pot. "It's a good communal type of food."
"Freegan Feasts" are held once a month, usually after a "Trash Tour" dumpster dive. In New York City, where production and waste is enormous, Freegans make a living of rejecting consumer society by using food thrown away by large supermarkets.
But Freeganism is more than just a way of surviving on free food. Take Marsha Hinds, for example. Hinds has been a Freegan member for a few years but has lived "freely" on her own for most of her life.
A 20-year resident of Crown Heights, Brooklyn, she is currently unemployed but still able to pay her $900-a-month rent.
"When I was employed doing editing or typing work," Hinds said, "I saved about 80 percent of my yearly income. Right now I have about $40,000 saved up, giving me enough money to live for two years without a job."
Hinds explained that food is not the only thing she'll take at no cost.
"I love free things," she said, "Especially free books. I've been a scavenger for most of my life — I'll take anything, whether it's microwaves, shoes or clothing."
One of Hinds' favorite pastimes is searching Bookcrossing.com, a site that allows people around the world to exchange books and is free to join, of course. The Brooklyn Free Store, on Grand Street between Bedford and Berry, is another place where old or used items can be donated and anyone can pick them up for free. There is even a bicycle group, 123 Bike Collective, that fixes bikes for free.
Inside Gio Andollo's apartment in Harlem where the feast was held are several couches and pieces of furniture that he says "were probably found off the street somewhere," but had been left by the previous inhabitants. Before moving to New York in September, Andollo lived in Orlando, Florida, where he was involved with Food Not Bombs, an organization that shares vegan and vegetarian meals with the hungry to protest war and poverty.
Even in Orlando, he was no stranger to dumpster-diving.
"We used to always find six-packs of root beers or Gatorades that had been thrown out, just because one bottle was broken," Andollo said of his earlier scavenging days. "We'd return home after diving and not even know what to do with all of them — all free, unopened drinks that usually cost $2 to $3 each."
And some students at NYU have gravitated to the Freegan lifestyle. One graduate student enrolled in the performance arts program in the Tisch School of the Arts, Aidan Nolan, said Freeganism was much more attractive to him after the economy soured.
He said it's just looking at the world in a different way: Seeing an apple with a bruise doesn't mean all the apples are bad.
