Are You Freegan?
Are you a freegan? Being a freegan is sort of like being a vegan. You do not consume any animal products, just like a vegan, unless someone gives it to you for free or you find it -- then you can eat whatever (freegans who eat meat are sometimes called meagans).
Being vegan is hard enough anyway. I did that for a while and I just gave up. I think it would have been possible for me to do it if I didn't travel around so much and have to rely on airport concessions and room service. I used to have a separate suitcase for my blender and cutting board and knives and all kinds of fucking annoying vegetables! Fuck that! It was too much for me to handle! I also gained a lot of weight because the only thing that I would eat was nuts and I would eat them constantly because they were already done! I didn't have to prepare them. Being freegan is a little easier. But the trick is to get someone to give your food to you for free.
Freegans believe that there is too much waste on the planet. The landfills are full and getting more full with stuff we don't need that we are throwing away in order to get other stuff we don't need. They are all about stopping the insanity of the spend/waste cycle and giving money to bad companies who exploit foreign labor. They feel that the best way to live is to employ some heavy duty recycling and become extremely resourceful. Instead of shopping, they dumpster dive. I think that this makes sense. They are similar to Food Not Bombs, an important San Francisco political group who would gather food thrown out daily by restaurants and use it to feed homeless people. I know a lot about Food Not Bombs because one of their founders worked at my father's bookstore when I was a kid. I liked Food Not Bombs because they were so practical and incredibly effective. They fed people -- that was their politics. They wanted to save the world by feeding people. It was remarkable and revolutionary in its simplicity.
I think freegans are just as cool, and I can see it catching on for real. I am not sure if I would want to dumpster dive, though. My husband is a big fan of dumpster diving. Half of the things in our house were recovered from dumpsters, garbage cans, street corners, dump sites. We can't ever drive past a pile of junk. We have to stop so he can go 'shopping.' Because usually it isn't junk. There are paintings, musical instruments, pillows, dolls, books, records, sculptures, big velvety overstuffed chairs, mattresses, clothes, shoes, jewelry - treasures, not trash.
I suppose I am suspicious of garbage because I spend so much time in New York City, where you just don't even want to look in a trash can. Looking very hard into a NYC garbage can and will just about ruin anyone's day. New York City garbage is the gold standard of garbage - it is what other garbage wishes it was. It is regular garbage with 1/3 more vomit and human blood! It makes its own gravy like certain kinds of dog food! But if I really think about it, in New York, the trash isn't always in the can! Just this past weekend I went to my favorite Chinese restaurant in Chelsea. It was very chilly out and I couldn't wait to get the wonderfully hot and savory noodle and dumpling soup that I crave when the weather is bad. I had a big bowl of the steaming goodness and I was extremely satisfied. I paid and got up to go to the bathroom. In the bathroom, right by the toilet, I noticed a big mass of brown matter all over the floor. Someone had stepped in it many times so it was flattened out and I thought it was brownies at first. I thought, "Well that's strange. They don't sell pastries here." And then the smell hit me and horrified, I realized it wasn't pastries. Sure, it may have been pastries at one time, but now, eh, it was no longer pastries. Also it was weird because it was just right by the toilet, but not in the toilet. So close, yet so far away. And I thought I had bad aim. It was an unbelievable mess. I started screaming and screaming and I ran out of the bathroom and the waitress looked at me and walked into the bathroom and then abruptly walked out in a very "it's not my job" manner - I couldn't believe that she didn't do anything!! I thought - wow shouldn't she call someone or deal with this somehow?! But she didn't. She just went back to her In Touch magazine after first taking a long moment to give me the stinkeye for screaming. I left with the unforgettable smell just lodged in the back of my nose and stormed out into the cold New York City winter vowing never to go to that particular restaurant again. I wouldn't even eat there if it was free.
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That took me back. Early 1970s in Southern California. Teachers and students (which included my girlfriend), construction workers, clerks and button pushers, auto mechanics, bartenders and one low-key local TV star, all of them so dedicated to dumpster diving that some of them even had routes. In the spring of 1970 we had a "Trashpicker's Ball" that featured 21 entrees, and everything except the meat and dairy products came out of some supermarket's dumpster.
We took this stuff seriously enough to have some serious fun with it.
I'll tell you something. I laughed so hard about the non-pastry that I couldn't breathe. Before that, the NYC garbage description hit home. Every dumpster there is a primordial stew of crime and illness.
I was working in a diner through high school back in the 80's. This little kids would come and use the bathroom all the time, and one of those sprayed the walls and floor with liquefied non-pastry matter. I don't know what was wrong with that kid. Flu? Sick? Extremely pressured? Why on the wall and the floor, and not the toilet?
Why? It was in NY State.
Also, I think it's great that other people eat garbage so that I don't have to.
I've been Freegan since the Kennedy Administration. Coming from a big catholic family of the 50s meant that economy was more than just a good idea. It's probably one of the few tenents of religion that I embrace: waste is sinful. I'd love to see it catch on and to awake to a day when gratuitous displays of wealth are done to express community cohesiveness instead of what we see today where it's all about the greedy need of the self.
Cool, I have been enjoying your comedy for years. This post reminds me of a Party at a Acupuncture collage they had ordered Chinese food -go figure- and as we were moving through the line some of us were trying to figure out if the chicken was pork or what was what, and my student asked if i was a vegetarian I replied I am a Buddhist so I am not supposed to eat meat..but i am a Zen Buddhist..so i am not supposed to care.
1. Hope you weren't referring to the Grand Sichuan on 9th Ave., Margaret. We've eaten there often but never used the bathroom. Now we NEVER will, just in case.
2. Husband? Do we know him? (whatever happened to Henry Cho? sorry, that's irrelevant) Why isn't he identified in your bio?
3. Damn, I love good comedian's blogs. No minimum! No cover! Call me a freeloader.
I saw Henry Cho on Comedy Central last weekend. I'm sure he's still around.
I don't really understand the relationship between freeganism and veganism, aside from the fact that eating discarded meat is a bad idea and there are those who practice both. At its core, freeganism is anti-consumerism, while veganism is anti-animal exploitation. The two are similar, but not necessarily so.
It is so simple like they do not buy any animal product. They consume it if its given or they hunted themselves. Right? For that, raise their own animals. lasvegasunion.com
For years I've told people I'm an 'economics vegetarian' - I won't eat any flesh over $1.99 a pound.
Your 'Freegan' values would conform well to where I work. The company's constantly hosting client meetings, and the staff is constantly swooping in on the remains of the buffet afterward like vultures.
Speaking as a seventh level vegan [won't eat anything that can cast a shadow] let me say how horrified I am by your latest epistle. I have volunteered for Food Not Bombs for a decade, starting out homeless myself, but hooked up enough with another great, mad collective [ http://www.reclaiming.org/ ] as to find places to crash for the better part of a year. One was Judy Foster's basement, just a few blocks from Gilman Street.
http://www.reclaimingquarterly.org/81/rq-81-judyfoster.html
Judy was the archetypal crone, an activist and healer. She took the "Freegan" thing to the next level. All of Berkeley's streetfreaks knew about Judy's "Gourmet Tuesdays". In addition to being a founding member of N.R.O.O.G.D., Judy ran a catering service for many years, retaining all her cooking tools in the basement of a small cottage in Albany, along with a shelf full of astrological books and other magical tools. Oh My Goddess, do I miss her.
LOL Margaret. You should have used the men's room. I used to work for an industrial/retail cleaning company. I have to say that women are pigs. They will leave excrement, blood-soaked clothing and paper, and even feces everywhere. I don't understand it. They also have no problem with attempting to flush anything down the toilet if it isn't THEIR toilet. There have been more women on your yam diet than you know.
I have stories that would really curl your lovely hair.
Ehrenreich theorized in Nickel and Dimed that women are piggish in cut rate department stores because they don't have to clean it up, and I believe she was right. I used to clean toilets in a big building and it was clear to me from day 1 who the pigs were and weren't.
Or maybe it's just because our bodies are just more untidy (if you know what I mean) and we're all po'd about it. I know I am!
First of all what is your purpose of being a vega or meagan or freegan? You are a meagan and freegan since the day you were born until you started to work and earning your first dollar. So what is your purpose now? I know Buddhist monks are vegan and some are freegan, so they have a purpose and they become monk on their own free will, what about you?
I would warn Ms. Cho and her fellow freegans that you always "get what you pay for." Then again, accessing Huffpo is free and a Margaret Cho post is funnier than a lot of things I've paid to see/read/listen to.
This post in particular, with the New York restroom horror, had me rolling...and feeling grateful that I live in a fly-over state.
isn't it weird how much better it tastes when it's free?
Hey Margaret, It sounds like you are carrying around too much baggage, both literally and figuratively, as you wrote:
"Being vegan is hard enough anyway...I used to have a separate suitcase for my blender and cutting board and knives and all kinds of fucking annoying vegetables! Fuck that! It was too much for me to handle!"
I'm sure that it must be all of the meat which you are eating which is making you swear at vegetables! Why else would you have such angry desire to attack them with your 'blender,' 'cutting board', and 'knives.' Why such hatred towards innocent plants?
In truth, you are just plain wrong. Being vegan is a model of simplicity.
You make the mistake of conflating conplexity and complicated. A living, healthy biosphere is very complex. Eating from it is very simple: Find a plant... eat it... SIMPLE. On the other hand, eating meat is very COMPLICATED. Eating meat complicates you. It complicates your health. It complicates your spirituality. It complicates your biosphere. It complicates your entire existence. Eating plants simplifies you. It is a daily, simplifying, spiritual routine without complication.
Respect,
VeganMilitia.
quite the contrary. eating vegetables requires me to go to the store, sift through piles of pickings, line up in a queue, swipe my credit card, return home, then wash the veggie before i can munch.
meat, on the other hand, conveniently comes passing through my back yard once or twice a week before i put it in the oven. meow. yum.
How silly of us carnivores to have not seen the light. It's so simple. I'm going to go gnaw on houseplant now.
What? The fabulous C.H.O. is married? Oooooo, there goes another dream.
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