Always Leave Something On Your Plate

There are vegans and then there are freegans. Freegans scour trash dumpsters and eat leftover food -- as a political statement. "It feels good when you watch all those people paying for food," Jeff Wiesner, a 19-year-old from Tenafly, N.J., said as he popped a piece of fruit in his mouth. "It's a Dumpster. You might get a little dirty, but it's not a big deal." "Being freegan is one way in which we are living a life that is consistent with the kind of world that we want to create," said Adam Weissman, 26, of Hackensack. "In terms of people having ownership of their lives and in terms of consuming in a way that is not destroying the planet." "Freegans are people who are concerned so deeply with the social and ecological impact of economic over-consumption that they choose to buy and work as little as possible and, instead, to live directly off the massive waste created by our modern society. Freegans avoid contributing labor or wealth to an economy based on materialism, explotation, greed and waste by refusing to participate in it. Instead of producing their own waste, Freegans sustain themselves off the already existing waste thereby curtailing garbage and pollution and lessening the over-all volume in the waste stream." When I was younger, we used to call these people lazy bums, dumpster divers, or squatters. In justifying their work-free work ethic, these dopes don't seem to realize that if there were no capitalism, there would be nothing left over for them to scrounge. Every day would be a scrabble for life. Perhaps we should buy each of them a one-way ticket to the utopia of North Korea, where waste doesn't exist -- where tree bark doesn't exist.