I’ve known about dumpster diving since college, when a group of friends told me of their adventures looting the bins outside the Hostess Cupcake company for free Twinkies until said company saw fit to enhance said dumpster with a lock. I also partook, at select times of years, often scooping up odd and useful knick-knacks, furniture and random toys whenever my university ended spring term.

I’ve also heard tell of the availability of food in my city of Minneapolis – outside restaurant dumpsters, supplied to the homeless by charitable organizations, as the simple result of nearly everyone having some kind of excess. One formerly homeless person insists that it’s not worth giving panhandlers money – if they’re really homeless, they’ve got a squat and they can find food. (I have no way of checking whether this hearsay is true.)

So I’m not at all surprised by the Fregan movement, although I do think in its way it’s rather…well, short-sighted and stupid.  Jezebel covers the topic quite well, and I have to admit that yes, it’s quite preferable to go second-hand, although they like I mention that bedbug outbreak as a big reason to stop and say no to old-school sidewalk furniture adoption.

The examples cited as waste by the article in Marie Claire suggest the writer doesn’t know some concepts I was raised with:

“Those castoffs are composed, in part, of the less-than-perfect products consumers instinctively reject: bruised apples, wilted lettuce, dented cans. Who hasn’t passed on an entire carton of eggs after discovering a single slight fracture among the dozen? Supermarkets can’t unload the quarts of milk tagged with yesterday’s use-by date — which many of us interpret as a product’s expiration but in fact refers to its period of peak flavor.”

While the bruised apples are wasteful, dented cans are tossed because they allow in a deadly bacteria known as botulism, and a cracked egg can suggest other contamination. Yes, we are wasteful of food – but we are also privileged in that we have the freedom to reject food in order to protect ourselves from disease. I’m not advocating just throwing it all out, though – plenty of that food is great fodder for compost.

Thrifting and second-hand stores are always good ideas, and I’ve relied on them for years, just as I’ve come to love Craig’s List and freecycle. However, I’m much to squeamish about bugs, disease and someone else’s tampons to go for a full-on fregan dumpster dive; I also think that if people reduce their consumption fregans are going to find themselves shuttled right back into the consumer society they claim they’re trying to duck.

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