Just a few blocks from Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue, bustling with Christmas shoppers, other New Yorkers are out getting what they need, with one big difference — by not spending any money.
For the city’s ”Freegans”, finding bell peppers, apples and bagels in the bags of trash that litter the city’s sidewalks is a way of life.
It is a winter evening in Manhattan’s Midtown business district and a group of the anti-consumer activists meets up outside a luxury grocery store, timing its run for after the store closes but before the garbage trucks arrive.
They work fast, rummaging through bags and finding a wide array of food: strawberries, sausages, bananas, yogurts, fruit juice and carrots — on this run, bags and bags of carrots.
After a few moments of frantic foraging, they tie the bags back up and lay out an impressive display of goods that they offer to passers-by.
”One strawberry with a little bit of mould, one out-of-date yogurt, and they throw everything in the garbage,” says one of the urban foragers, Christian Gutierrez (34), who lives in a squat in Manhattan’s trendy SoHo neighbourhood.
He wears a Burberry raincoat he’s proud to say he found in the trash, as well as shoes that didn’t even need reheeling.
Freeganism, which carries the slogan ”life beyond capitalism”, is a lifestyle that relies on sharing, recycling and salvaging.
The group works by what it calls ”urban foraging” and upholds the right to free lodging and voluntary joblessness — because, as the group says in its literature, ”man spends all his life working to pay bills and consume”.
Gutierrez, who doesn’t have a conventional job by choice, runs a mobile workshop making bicycles out of spare parts. ”Learn how to turn found bike parts into working bicycles and build your own bike,” he says, reading a list of Freegan events for December in New York. ”People come to fix their bikes and stay for dinner because my refrigerator is always full,” he adds.
Cindy Rosin (31), who teaches art in one of the city’s primary schools, says the group’s activities may seem odd to some people, but only because they have got used to the waste inherent in modern societies.
”We grew up trusting that the stores were doing the right thing,” she says. ”It’s difficult to believe that what’s in the garbage is not necessarily garbage.”
”There are lots of anti-consumerism groups in America,” she adds, citing the example of one group named ”compact”, whose members try not to spend any money for a year, she explains, while heading to the next stop outside a bakery.
”Bagels!” she shouts, opening a black trash bag full of the rolls, which still smell freshly baked.
Passers-by often seem perplexed by what the Freegans are doing on their ”trash tours”, but the group’s members don’t take any notice and take home most of what they find.
”Our goal is not to distribute food, but to inform people, to talk about the planet being destroyed, about this terrible waste,” says one of the group, Adam Weissman.
Tim Keating, who describes himself as a forager for more than 30 years, helps introduce newcomers to the trash tour as well as showing people how they can live on leaves and grains found in the city’s parks.
Much of the food from both the city and park foraging goes towards the group’s frequent Freegan Feasts. ”Help cook at 5.30pm and eat at 8.30pm,” says one of the group’s leaflets. — AFP
