The interesting newspaper story of the day, via S., is from the Chicago Tribune:
Wearing a jean jacket with a patch that reads “Rat Patrol” on the back, 20-year-old Casey Cherry vanishes into a blue Dumpster a few blocks from the intersection of Diversey Parkway and Sheridan Road.
Within seconds, he is knee-deep in bags of trash.
After a few minutes of digging, he “recovers” a plastic bag of slightly bruised celery. Another trash bag contains a plastic bowl of beef stew.
“Nah, not taking this,” mutters Cherry, who is a vegetarian. About 10 feet away, a man stops snow blowing a parking lot.
“Excuse me, I’m just curious,” stammers the snow-blowing stranger, pointing at Cherry. “He is not homeless, huh?” No, he’s not. Actually, Cherry has a job and lives nearby in a Lincoln Park apartment.
Cherry Dumpster dives because he is a “freegan,” a term that combines “free” and “vegan” to describe a group of people (typically Socialists) who oppose waste. Cherry is an aspiring vegan, who says he has a weakness for cheese. Instead of shopping at stores, many freegans dive in Dumpsters for groceries, clothes, books, discarded bikes and even computers. Some “alley shop” for discarded furniture. Many live in co-ops, squat in abandoned buildings and work at least part time to cover unavoidable expenses, says Adam Weissman, a spokesman for the freegan.info project out of New York.
Is it healthy to eat food full of bacteria and trash? That is just dumb!
This is also not news, but every now and then a mainstream media organization will ‘discover’ dumpster diving and put it on the front page, prompting a wave of copy-cat stories in other media. Ho-hum.
It’s not news, I had had a long conversation about this over the summer and spent a good half hour working out how I could live like this here in Toronto. It’s a fun mental exercise.