Not surprisingly, the last entry on stealing has created some controversy.
I'm in Florida right now, and used a small airline to get here. The airline has low fares in part because they do not serve complimentary items. During the flight, attendants roll a beverage cart down the isle and sell drinks, snacks, and souvenirs. An employee mentioned that people sometimes steal items from the carts and these items must be paid for by the flight attendants.
That sounds unreasonable and unfair, so I looked it up to see if it's legal. Turns out...it depends on the state.
This company is based in Florida, where there are no paycheck garnishment laws, but many other states make it illegal. For example, here is the law for Kentucky:
Kentucky law on wage deductions:
Kentucky - KRS statute 337.060
ILLEGAL DEDUCTIONS
No employer shall withhold from any employee's wages any part of the agreed wage rate; unless
(a) the employer is required to do so by local, state, or federal law
(b) when a deduction is expressly authorized in writing by the employee to cover insurance premiums, hospital, or medical dues
(c) other deductions not amounting to a rebate or deduction from the standard wage arrived at by collective bargaining or pursuant to wage agreement or statute
(d) deductions for union dues where such deductions are authorized by joint wage agreements or collective bargaining contracts negotiated between employers and employees or their representatives.
No employer shall deduct the following from the wages of employees:
(a) Fines
(b) Cash shortages in a common money till, cash box or register used by two (2) or more persons
(c) Breakage
(d) Losses due to acceptance by an employee of checks which are subsequently dishonored if such employee is given discretion to accept or reject any check
(e) Losses due to defective or faulty workmanship, lost or stolen property, damage to property, default of customer credit or nonpayment for goods or services received by the customer if such losses are not attributable to employee's willful or intentional disregard of employer's interest
It seems really unfair, (probably because it is) that a company can charge its employees for items that are lost, stolen, or damaged through no fault of their own. That means that if a can of soda is damaged on the airplane due to factory fault, or turbulence, or...whatever...that the flight attendant has to pay for it? Unfortunately, yes. I don't know what the exact policy of this airline is. Perhaps the employees can comp a damaged item but not a stolen one.
The good news is, this is not a national phenomenon. Also, no employer can dock an employees pay so that it goes below minimum wage. So if you're on shift and someone steals a high-price item, your boss can't deny you a check. You must receive at least minimum wage, which also varies state-by-state.
Here is the break-down on North Carolina law, which is very similar the Florida law. Here is the link to each states Department of Labor websites, where you can look up each individual state's laws regarding wage deductions and garnishments. Look for links that say "Wage and Hour" acts.
I've had a few people contact me with claims that "stealing goes against Freeganism", and that taking trash out of dumpsters is the only thing that counts. I want to remind everyone that dumpster diving is illegal. Dumpsters are on private property and if you take something out of them, you are stealing. That's why so many Freegan websites, books, and zines caution divers to go at night, keep a low profile, and generally not be sketchy. You can get into legal trouble for going into a company trash can.
Shrinkage is what businesses call the loss of items due to theft, loss, or damage. If an item is damaged because the stocker drops it, it goes into the trash, where a Freegan might choose to steal it. If an item rolls under the frozen pizza cooler and disappears, it's chalked up to shrinkage. If an item is taken from the shelf (stolen), that's part of shrinkage too. Although I want to make it clear that taking things from the shelf is not something I recommend or support, I do want to point out that taking it from the dumpster is just as illegal.
I'm currently sitting in a cafe in Florida and have a friend waiting on me to finish this rant, so I'm going to wrap it up for now. I just wanted to point a couple of things out real quick while I had some internet access. I'll elaborate on this later. Thanks for reading!
Tuesday, October 13, 2009
Sunday, October 4, 2009
Friday, October 2, 2009
Stealing
Let me preface this by saying that I do not condone stealing. From an individual, a local business, or a large corporation. Stealing basically gets thieves into trouble and I don't support that, but since it has it's place in a Freegan lifestyle, I want to talk about it from a perspective of practicality and protest.
It is entirely possible to live Freegan without ever stealing, and it's possible to live Freegan only by stealing.
There is a very good book produced by the Crimethinc. collective called "Days of War, Nights of Love", which is a romantic introduction to an Anarchist lifestyle and covers many topics- from insurrection, religion, sex and love, and travel. There is also a chapter entirely devoted to shoplifting. I'd love to just quote the entire thing here, since it's so great, but you can click on that link just as easily as I can.
Since many people in America live Freegan lifestyles as a form of silent protest against corporations, I think it's important to note that stealing is basically the only form of effective direct action (as Crimethinc. points out). If you've ever been to a protest or similar action, you probably know that feeling of quasi-failure that they tend to end with. Maybe some of the goals were met, but personally I've never been to an action that was 100% successful. Even boycotts tend to be lackluster. No matter how many people claim to hate WalMart, very few can truthfully claim to never shop there.
How does shoplifting function as direct action?
According to an online lawyer source, the effects of shoplifting cost U.S. businesses $16 billion per year. (50% of thefts are contributed to teenagers, and it's estimated that 90% of the population has stolen something in their lifetimes.)
If it is true that one in three businesses fail directly due to shoplifting, then clearly this is an effective way of bringing a business down. If shoplifting was targeted to larger corporations only (harder to bring down than a local business who may not be able to factor as much into loss prevention than a place like, say, WalMart) you can see how it would impact them.
This is why shoplifting is both "bad" and "good". Properly directed, it can have a profound effect on companies and businesses that may be hurting the community, or even the planet.
As a Freegan with a political agenda, it might seem more logical to steal food than to dumpster it. It depends on an individual's priorities and how they interpret the impact that companies have on the planet.
"Shoplifting from large corporations is easiest means of organically redistributing wealth from the rich to the poor. Shoplifting is both an easy way of punishing corporations that deliberately destroy the environment, exploit and abuse laborers, and destroy communities and local culture, and an effective way of acquiring resources to give to the impoverished victims of capitalist oppression."
OK, so we're hurting corporations. Great! But aren't we basically screwing employees out of fair pay since the store now has to make up for lost profit?
No! Employees are (generally) payed by the hour, not by the amount of product that is sold. Not that corporations have a rich history of doing things legally...but legally a company cannot pass off it's losses to the employee, who is probably already making minimum wage. By the time an employee is paid, the product has all been paid for.
The amount that a store loses due to damage, theft, or loss is call "shrinkage". Markups on products may occur to account for loss, either projected or actual. If you've ever worked in retail, you probably have some idea as to how much companies mark up product. It tends to be something around 150%. Most of this is done for pure profit, and not because of some horrible trend in theft of that particular item. A company may blame markups on thieves, but this is only a deterrent. Theft tends to happen more frequently in recessed economies. If prices are already inflated by 150%, the item already costs too much. Add economic collapse, and the item is then too expensive by default. Perhaps now it's stolen because the company was greedy in the first place by giving it a ridiculous markup. Who's to blame for that? I would say...not the consumer or the thief. And, if a person is already Freegan, what does it matter how much the item costs? As Crimethinc. puts it- "Shoplifting is a refusal of the exchange economy. It is a denial that people deserve to eat, live, and die based on how effectively they are able to exchange their labor and capital with others. It is a denial that a monetary value can be ascribed to everything, that having a piece of delicious chocolate in your mouth is worth exactly fifty cents or that an hour of one person's life can really be worth ten dollars more than that of another person. It is a refusal to accept the capitalist system, in which workers have to buy back the products of their own labor at a profit to the owners of capital, who thus get them coming and going. Shoplifting says NO to all the objectionable features that have come to characterize the modern corporation. It is an expression of discontent". The same could be said for Freeganism.
Back when I had a job, making X amount of dollars per hour, I was also buying my food. I found myself in stores thinking in terms of hours rather than dollars. Should I buy this thing that cost me two hours of my life? How long would I have to stand at my job to be able to afford this thing? I don't want to break up my life into increments of value like that. The only thing I have in this world is my life, and I'm not going to put a price on it. My time is priceless. It isn't worth 500 Twinkies, or 200 bags of coffee, or a new car. Think about this for a second: How much is your life worth? Put a price on it, right now. If you can, then there is something seriously wrong with this society. If you can't, and you agree that your life can't be priced, then I've proven my point.
This is why I am against working for wages. Someone else (who doesn't really care about you at all) is putting a value on your time on this earth, by making you do things to serve their own purpose. Where does my life go? Why should I spend it living the dream of someone else? Why wouldn't I use my precious time to do the things that mean the most to me? It's criminal that so many mothers and fathers are taken out of their children's lives for this purpose. A child grows up lacking parents because they have chosen to put a value on their time. If we're going to value time, shouldn't time spent playing with your son or daughter trump the time spend making sandwiches, or punching numbers into a computer database?
Freeganism isn't just about free food for me. It's about taking back what is mine. No one should have to work in the systems that are set up now. That's not the say that work is inherently bad. Work is great. It feels wonderful to labor over something that you are passionate about. This is what modern workers refer to as "hobbies". I think it should be the other way around.
Do I recommend that everyone go out and dig in the trash for food, or steal clothes from a store? No. That's not that way it is now. Neither the Capitalist system or a Freegan lifestyle is fully sustainable alone. There needs to be a happy medium. One in which we all realize that our time here is our own.
It is entirely possible to live Freegan without ever stealing, and it's possible to live Freegan only by stealing.
There is a very good book produced by the Crimethinc. collective called "Days of War, Nights of Love", which is a romantic introduction to an Anarchist lifestyle and covers many topics- from insurrection, religion, sex and love, and travel. There is also a chapter entirely devoted to shoplifting. I'd love to just quote the entire thing here, since it's so great, but you can click on that link just as easily as I can.
Since many people in America live Freegan lifestyles as a form of silent protest against corporations, I think it's important to note that stealing is basically the only form of effective direct action (as Crimethinc. points out). If you've ever been to a protest or similar action, you probably know that feeling of quasi-failure that they tend to end with. Maybe some of the goals were met, but personally I've never been to an action that was 100% successful. Even boycotts tend to be lackluster. No matter how many people claim to hate WalMart, very few can truthfully claim to never shop there.
How does shoplifting function as direct action?
According to an online lawyer source, the effects of shoplifting cost U.S. businesses $16 billion per year. (50% of thefts are contributed to teenagers, and it's estimated that 90% of the population has stolen something in their lifetimes.)
If it is true that one in three businesses fail directly due to shoplifting, then clearly this is an effective way of bringing a business down. If shoplifting was targeted to larger corporations only (harder to bring down than a local business who may not be able to factor as much into loss prevention than a place like, say, WalMart) you can see how it would impact them.
This is why shoplifting is both "bad" and "good". Properly directed, it can have a profound effect on companies and businesses that may be hurting the community, or even the planet.
As a Freegan with a political agenda, it might seem more logical to steal food than to dumpster it. It depends on an individual's priorities and how they interpret the impact that companies have on the planet.
"Shoplifting from large corporations is easiest means of organically redistributing wealth from the rich to the poor. Shoplifting is both an easy way of punishing corporations that deliberately destroy the environment, exploit and abuse laborers, and destroy communities and local culture, and an effective way of acquiring resources to give to the impoverished victims of capitalist oppression."
OK, so we're hurting corporations. Great! But aren't we basically screwing employees out of fair pay since the store now has to make up for lost profit?
No! Employees are (generally) payed by the hour, not by the amount of product that is sold. Not that corporations have a rich history of doing things legally...but legally a company cannot pass off it's losses to the employee, who is probably already making minimum wage. By the time an employee is paid, the product has all been paid for.
The amount that a store loses due to damage, theft, or loss is call "shrinkage". Markups on products may occur to account for loss, either projected or actual. If you've ever worked in retail, you probably have some idea as to how much companies mark up product. It tends to be something around 150%. Most of this is done for pure profit, and not because of some horrible trend in theft of that particular item. A company may blame markups on thieves, but this is only a deterrent. Theft tends to happen more frequently in recessed economies. If prices are already inflated by 150%, the item already costs too much. Add economic collapse, and the item is then too expensive by default. Perhaps now it's stolen because the company was greedy in the first place by giving it a ridiculous markup. Who's to blame for that? I would say...not the consumer or the thief. And, if a person is already Freegan, what does it matter how much the item costs? As Crimethinc. puts it- "Shoplifting is a refusal of the exchange economy. It is a denial that people deserve to eat, live, and die based on how effectively they are able to exchange their labor and capital with others. It is a denial that a monetary value can be ascribed to everything, that having a piece of delicious chocolate in your mouth is worth exactly fifty cents or that an hour of one person's life can really be worth ten dollars more than that of another person. It is a refusal to accept the capitalist system, in which workers have to buy back the products of their own labor at a profit to the owners of capital, who thus get them coming and going. Shoplifting says NO to all the objectionable features that have come to characterize the modern corporation. It is an expression of discontent". The same could be said for Freeganism.
Back when I had a job, making X amount of dollars per hour, I was also buying my food. I found myself in stores thinking in terms of hours rather than dollars. Should I buy this thing that cost me two hours of my life? How long would I have to stand at my job to be able to afford this thing? I don't want to break up my life into increments of value like that. The only thing I have in this world is my life, and I'm not going to put a price on it. My time is priceless. It isn't worth 500 Twinkies, or 200 bags of coffee, or a new car. Think about this for a second: How much is your life worth? Put a price on it, right now. If you can, then there is something seriously wrong with this society. If you can't, and you agree that your life can't be priced, then I've proven my point.
This is why I am against working for wages. Someone else (who doesn't really care about you at all) is putting a value on your time on this earth, by making you do things to serve their own purpose. Where does my life go? Why should I spend it living the dream of someone else? Why wouldn't I use my precious time to do the things that mean the most to me? It's criminal that so many mothers and fathers are taken out of their children's lives for this purpose. A child grows up lacking parents because they have chosen to put a value on their time. If we're going to value time, shouldn't time spent playing with your son or daughter trump the time spend making sandwiches, or punching numbers into a computer database?
Freeganism isn't just about free food for me. It's about taking back what is mine. No one should have to work in the systems that are set up now. That's not the say that work is inherently bad. Work is great. It feels wonderful to labor over something that you are passionate about. This is what modern workers refer to as "hobbies". I think it should be the other way around.
Do I recommend that everyone go out and dig in the trash for food, or steal clothes from a store? No. That's not that way it is now. Neither the Capitalist system or a Freegan lifestyle is fully sustainable alone. There needs to be a happy medium. One in which we all realize that our time here is our own.
Sunday, September 13, 2009
Sometimes Garbage is Garbage
A lot of food get thrown away in this country. More than enough in a day to feed an entire continent...and yet, a lot of that food lying perfectly edible in the dumpster shouldn't ever leave it.
One of the first times I dumpstered was with a slightly crust-punk boy at a community house. It was 1 or 2 in the morning, and we had exhausted YouTube's supply of awesome gun videos. Previously I had only met this person, Neal, at one of my FreeSkool shooting classes, and we hadn't really spoken beyond me commenting on his AK-47 tattoo. He had just finished showing me how his brother taught him to knife fight, and after pseudo-slashing me a few times and a couple cups of that house's endless supply of hot coffee, we were wired with a house full of sleepy people.
"Let's go eat donuts out of the Krispy Kreme dumpster!" he suggested. Well, sure! "The only rule I have about eating from the Krispy Kreme dumpster is that no Krispy Kremes leave the dumpster." Fair enough.
So we drove down to the west side of town and jumped in. The thing was so full that when cars came close, we have to double over in order to get below the rim. We tore through boxes and discovered an entire bag full of still-warm donuts. We were a giggling mess, taking single bites of cream-filled sugar bombs and throwing them over our shoulders. It was there, on top of an approximate metric ton of powdered sugar that I really noticed Neal...but that's an entirely different story of trash-can romance. After all, this isn't a blog about dumpster make-out parties. And besides, that came much later...
My point is that "Neal had a point". A lot of the food that goes into the trash really should just stay there. I am guilty of loading up on junk food, now more than before. I could never justify buying bags of potato chips, cookies, or large bars of chocolate, but to see them lying helpless and perfectly edible in some lonely trash can...well, sometimes I just can't help myself.
I came across this brilliant article in The New York Times that had some really amazing figures. The whole "Americans are fat" tag isn't exactly news, and perhaps nothing in this article is surprising, but it sure as hell is depressing.
I think one thing to remember about having any kind of specific dietary classification is how to retain the lifestyle while remaining healthy. As the article points out, "it is possible to be overweight and malnourished at the same time." When I became vegan about 5 years ago (I am no longer vegan or vegetarian) for health reasons, I found myself actually gaining weight. There were a couple of factors at work here. First, the products sold in stores as substitutes for animal products have ingredient lists about 8 inches thick, and are often high in calories and fat. Also, a lot of really unhealthy foods are surprisingly vegan, like Oreos. Second, I found myself paying much closer attention to food. The whole world was filled with new food, and new recipes to tinker with. I ate a lot more, period, because I thought about food all of the time.
Now, as a Freegan, I sometimes find myself stretched between two places. I think about my food more often, but I don't always have it. And when I do have it/find it, it's often junk. Literal trash. Dumpstering yields a lot of carbs. There is always so much bread in the garbage that it has become a joke between dumpster-divers. (Bagels especially enjoy the limelight of these conversations). So far I haven't noticed any changes in my weight or health. I try to keep myself as balanced as possible. And I really do believe in the power of a multi-vitamin every day.
Sometimes I hear people commenting on how living on society's scraps is unhealthy and unbalanced, and sometimes it probably is. But my argument is that most of American eats more garbage than I do. When I "shop" knee-deep in plastic bags, it's easy for me to choose "slightly bruised apples", "whole wheat pasta" and "bags and bags of vine-ripened tomatoes" instead of the "box of shattered cookies", "smushed up Twinkies" and "slightly tampered-with bags of cake frosting"....especially when my cargo space is limited. At the grocery store, items and displays are specifically designed to entice you into throwing them casually into your shopping cart. "Oh what the heck, frozen pizza is on sale".
Being inside grocery stores makes people hungry. That makes them buy more food. Being inside a giant compactor with sticky walls and a puddle of goo on the bottom doesn't exactly make every item of food scream "take me home with you!" It's just simple logic.
On the other hand, if you're hungry enough, you can eat just about anything. And a heavily-packaged box of cinnamon buns can seem much more appealing than a dented and slimy yellow squash, even if half of it is clearly salvageable.
I must remember to resist these temptations. Over the last decade, Americans collectively gained over one billion pounds, and it’s those living just above the poverty level who appear to be gaining weight most rapidly. The effects of this epidemic of obesity are not only the obvious health problems and costs associated with medical problems. They expand into the environmental and economic categories as well. It's estimated the the extra weight of passengers has cost airlines over a quarter of a billion dollars in jet fuel each year.
Animals tend to eat more when there is more food available. Give a goldfish too many fish flakes and it will eat itself stupid. Humans are basically no different.
"If humans are genetically programmed to put on weight whenever they encounter plenty, it would seem that by this point virtually everyone in America should be fat. Meanwhile, several million years of hominid evolution can’t explain why it is just in the past few decades that waistlines have expanded." The result of our excess and easy access to cheap, fatty food is what’s known as the “mismatch paradigm.” The human body is “mismatched” to the human situation. “We evolved on the savannahs of Africa...we now live in Candyland.”
As an example, "today, soft drinks account for about seven per cent of all the calories ingested in the United States, making them “the number one food consumed in the American diet.” If, instead of sweetened beverages, the average American drank water... he or she would weigh fifteen pounds less."
But terrible food has been cheap and available for a long time. Why is obesity suddenly becoming so much more of a problem than ever before? Further according to this article, only recently have portion sizes started to get out of control. I was noticing a few weeks ago how coffee cups in thrift stores from the '60s seem to be about 6-8oz. in capacity. Now they are twice that. A lot of this out-of-control portioning can be blamed on a man named David Wallerstein, who, in the 1960's owned a movie theatre, and realized that he could get more business by simply increasing the bucket sizes of his popcorn. Even when the popcorn was a week old, people who were given the larger buckets still ate proportionately more than the people who were given small buckets. Later, he started working for McDonald's on the board of directors and suggested the same thing. When people argued that the customers could just buy another bag of fries, Wallerstein explained that no one wants to look like a glutton, so they weren't going to do that. To make the customers spend more, the portion sizes went up.
I'm pretty convinced this man is pure evil. He preyed on the simple fact that human beings are kind of dumb, and rely on the portions given to them to determine when to stop eating. Some experiments conducted a few years ago (the same as the stale popcorn one) proved this. The researchers gave two groups of people some ingredients (dried pasta and jars of sauce) to people to take home and cook. One group was given very large portions and jars, and the other were given smaller portions. The "larger" group not only prepared 23% more, but they ate it all. Similarly, some people were given bowls of soup. Some of the bowls "magically" refilled as the person ate more and more and more. 73% more than the people who had regular bowls of soup.
Today, so many of us eat in front of a television or computer screen, gobbling down our meals quickly in between our "to-do"s. When we don't take time to experience a meal (taste, smell, feel the texture), and we eat it faster. And since it takes about 15 minutes to register a full belly, we end up eating more without realizing it. I've eaten many large meals and barely even noticed because I was absorbed in something playing out on a screen in front of me. Too much sensory input like that and the food is simply calories consumed en masse.
One of my goals with my house-bus project is to train myself away from distractions like that, and learn all over again how to carefully and slowly prepare and enjoy meals (among other things). I want to be more mindful about what I gather and put in my body, and if I do decide to indulge, to try to take Neal's advice and not let it leave the dumpster. I highly recommend this article for an eye-opener on the problems with obesity and portioning. It's another reason to be more anti-consumerist and boycott the corporations that are slowly suffocating us with our own biology for the sake of a few dollar bills.
One of the first times I dumpstered was with a slightly crust-punk boy at a community house. It was 1 or 2 in the morning, and we had exhausted YouTube's supply of awesome gun videos. Previously I had only met this person, Neal, at one of my FreeSkool shooting classes, and we hadn't really spoken beyond me commenting on his AK-47 tattoo. He had just finished showing me how his brother taught him to knife fight, and after pseudo-slashing me a few times and a couple cups of that house's endless supply of hot coffee, we were wired with a house full of sleepy people.
"Let's go eat donuts out of the Krispy Kreme dumpster!" he suggested. Well, sure! "The only rule I have about eating from the Krispy Kreme dumpster is that no Krispy Kremes leave the dumpster." Fair enough.
So we drove down to the west side of town and jumped in. The thing was so full that when cars came close, we have to double over in order to get below the rim. We tore through boxes and discovered an entire bag full of still-warm donuts. We were a giggling mess, taking single bites of cream-filled sugar bombs and throwing them over our shoulders. It was there, on top of an approximate metric ton of powdered sugar that I really noticed Neal...but that's an entirely different story of trash-can romance. After all, this isn't a blog about dumpster make-out parties. And besides, that came much later...
My point is that "Neal had a point". A lot of the food that goes into the trash really should just stay there. I am guilty of loading up on junk food, now more than before. I could never justify buying bags of potato chips, cookies, or large bars of chocolate, but to see them lying helpless and perfectly edible in some lonely trash can...well, sometimes I just can't help myself.
I came across this brilliant article in The New York Times that had some really amazing figures. The whole "Americans are fat" tag isn't exactly news, and perhaps nothing in this article is surprising, but it sure as hell is depressing.
I think one thing to remember about having any kind of specific dietary classification is how to retain the lifestyle while remaining healthy. As the article points out, "it is possible to be overweight and malnourished at the same time." When I became vegan about 5 years ago (I am no longer vegan or vegetarian) for health reasons, I found myself actually gaining weight. There were a couple of factors at work here. First, the products sold in stores as substitutes for animal products have ingredient lists about 8 inches thick, and are often high in calories and fat. Also, a lot of really unhealthy foods are surprisingly vegan, like Oreos. Second, I found myself paying much closer attention to food. The whole world was filled with new food, and new recipes to tinker with. I ate a lot more, period, because I thought about food all of the time.
Now, as a Freegan, I sometimes find myself stretched between two places. I think about my food more often, but I don't always have it. And when I do have it/find it, it's often junk. Literal trash. Dumpstering yields a lot of carbs. There is always so much bread in the garbage that it has become a joke between dumpster-divers. (Bagels especially enjoy the limelight of these conversations). So far I haven't noticed any changes in my weight or health. I try to keep myself as balanced as possible. And I really do believe in the power of a multi-vitamin every day.
Sometimes I hear people commenting on how living on society's scraps is unhealthy and unbalanced, and sometimes it probably is. But my argument is that most of American eats more garbage than I do. When I "shop" knee-deep in plastic bags, it's easy for me to choose "slightly bruised apples", "whole wheat pasta" and "bags and bags of vine-ripened tomatoes" instead of the "box of shattered cookies", "smushed up Twinkies" and "slightly tampered-with bags of cake frosting"....especially when my cargo space is limited. At the grocery store, items and displays are specifically designed to entice you into throwing them casually into your shopping cart. "Oh what the heck, frozen pizza is on sale".
Being inside grocery stores makes people hungry. That makes them buy more food. Being inside a giant compactor with sticky walls and a puddle of goo on the bottom doesn't exactly make every item of food scream "take me home with you!" It's just simple logic.
On the other hand, if you're hungry enough, you can eat just about anything. And a heavily-packaged box of cinnamon buns can seem much more appealing than a dented and slimy yellow squash, even if half of it is clearly salvageable.
I must remember to resist these temptations. Over the last decade, Americans collectively gained over one billion pounds, and it’s those living just above the poverty level who appear to be gaining weight most rapidly. The effects of this epidemic of obesity are not only the obvious health problems and costs associated with medical problems. They expand into the environmental and economic categories as well. It's estimated the the extra weight of passengers has cost airlines over a quarter of a billion dollars in jet fuel each year.
Animals tend to eat more when there is more food available. Give a goldfish too many fish flakes and it will eat itself stupid. Humans are basically no different.
"If humans are genetically programmed to put on weight whenever they encounter plenty, it would seem that by this point virtually everyone in America should be fat. Meanwhile, several million years of hominid evolution can’t explain why it is just in the past few decades that waistlines have expanded." The result of our excess and easy access to cheap, fatty food is what’s known as the “mismatch paradigm.” The human body is “mismatched” to the human situation. “We evolved on the savannahs of Africa...we now live in Candyland.”
As an example, "today, soft drinks account for about seven per cent of all the calories ingested in the United States, making them “the number one food consumed in the American diet.” If, instead of sweetened beverages, the average American drank water... he or she would weigh fifteen pounds less."
But terrible food has been cheap and available for a long time. Why is obesity suddenly becoming so much more of a problem than ever before? Further according to this article, only recently have portion sizes started to get out of control. I was noticing a few weeks ago how coffee cups in thrift stores from the '60s seem to be about 6-8oz. in capacity. Now they are twice that. A lot of this out-of-control portioning can be blamed on a man named David Wallerstein, who, in the 1960's owned a movie theatre, and realized that he could get more business by simply increasing the bucket sizes of his popcorn. Even when the popcorn was a week old, people who were given the larger buckets still ate proportionately more than the people who were given small buckets. Later, he started working for McDonald's on the board of directors and suggested the same thing. When people argued that the customers could just buy another bag of fries, Wallerstein explained that no one wants to look like a glutton, so they weren't going to do that. To make the customers spend more, the portion sizes went up.
I'm pretty convinced this man is pure evil. He preyed on the simple fact that human beings are kind of dumb, and rely on the portions given to them to determine when to stop eating. Some experiments conducted a few years ago (the same as the stale popcorn one) proved this. The researchers gave two groups of people some ingredients (dried pasta and jars of sauce) to people to take home and cook. One group was given very large portions and jars, and the other were given smaller portions. The "larger" group not only prepared 23% more, but they ate it all. Similarly, some people were given bowls of soup. Some of the bowls "magically" refilled as the person ate more and more and more. 73% more than the people who had regular bowls of soup.
Today, so many of us eat in front of a television or computer screen, gobbling down our meals quickly in between our "to-do"s. When we don't take time to experience a meal (taste, smell, feel the texture), and we eat it faster. And since it takes about 15 minutes to register a full belly, we end up eating more without realizing it. I've eaten many large meals and barely even noticed because I was absorbed in something playing out on a screen in front of me. Too much sensory input like that and the food is simply calories consumed en masse.
One of my goals with my house-bus project is to train myself away from distractions like that, and learn all over again how to carefully and slowly prepare and enjoy meals (among other things). I want to be more mindful about what I gather and put in my body, and if I do decide to indulge, to try to take Neal's advice and not let it leave the dumpster. I highly recommend this article for an eye-opener on the problems with obesity and portioning. It's another reason to be more anti-consumerist and boycott the corporations that are slowly suffocating us with our own biology for the sake of a few dollar bills.
Saturday, September 12, 2009
Packaging, Continued...
Last time I talking about the benefits of packaging (mainly plastics) for the Freegan lifestyle, but this time I want to touch on the disaster that man-made polymers have created on this planet, and why this alone was reason enough for me to swear off purchasing food products completely.
This is the research paper I wrote last year that opened my eyes to the horrors of polymers. I had a really hard time writing this thing. It was torture. I actually cried.
Plastic is everywhere. For the last fifty years, polymers have been rapidly enshrouding the planet. A walk down even a residential street will reveal the shrapnel of disposable lifestyles. Empty cigarette lighters, brightly colored twist-off bottle caps, candy wrappers, grocery bags hanging from tree limbs (aptly named “witch’s knickers”), and other discard are common sights. So common that they are often overlooked as part of society’s landscape. However, plastic lurks in less-obvious locations. For example, turn over a bottle of body wash and look at the ingredients. If the brand advertises itself as an exfoliant, chances are good that somewhere in the long list of unpronounceables is the nefarious word: “polyethylene” (Weisman 117). University of Plymouth marine biologist Richard Thompson explains: “They’re selling plastic meant to go right down the drain, into the sewers, into the rivers, right into the ocean. Bite-sized pieces of plastic to be swallowed by little sea creatures” (qtd in Weisman 117). It doesn’t stop there. These tiny plastic particles are used with increasing frequency for near-instant disposal.
So what’s the problem with some plankton eating microscopic bits of polyethylene? Polyethylene is one type of many man-made polymers. They are unlike the polymers that have been around for millions of years in the form of spider silk, plant cellulose, rubber, cotton, and even fingernails (Weisman 118). Unlike the simple chains of molecules produced in nature, synthetic polymers have been enhanced with the addition of other elements, making them stronger and unable to be broken down naturally. Contrary to what seems evident by the sight of deteriorating grocery bags on the side of the road, or brittle, yellowed signage, plastic does not break down. It only gets smaller. Deteriorated plastic is designed to photodegrade, meaning that “ultraviolet solar radiation weakens plastic’s tensile strength by breaking its long chain-like polymer molecules into shorter segments” (Weisman 126), thus the effects of weathered patio furniture or outdoor decor. Senior research scientist at North Carolina’s Research Triangle, Dr. Anthony Andrady explains that “plastic is still plastic. The material still remains a polymer. Polyethylene is not biodegraded in any practical time scale. There is no mechanism in the marine environment to biodegrade that long a molecule.” Even further, when large items break down into smaller pieces, and then down to powder, the “residue remains in the sea, where filter feeders will find it” (qtd in Weisman 126).
These discarded plastics don’t only affect filter feeders. Besides the direct connection between marine life serving as food for human consumption, like the cartoon poster of small fish being eat by a succession of larger and larger fish, humans end up as the biggest “fish”, ingesting the accumulated chemicals in the food chain players. While this may seem an obvious conclusion, on par with the argument for eating organic and hormone-free meats and foods, deeper problems than food sources lurk. Bisphenol A (BPA) is a major component in six-billion pounds of U.S. produced plastic, annually. BPA has been used for lining cans of food, dental fillings, baby bottles, and other plastics such as polycarbonates and epoxy resins, despite being a known endocrine disrupter. When BPA photodegrades, it releases chemicals that are similar in structure and effect to estrogen, which seep into the water supply. “When combined with chlorine used to purify municipal water, harmful estrogen-mimicking organ chlorides are also formed”. BPA, along with other similar chemicals, persistently run through our drinking water (Pyhtila 46).
Dr. Jennifer Sass, senior scientist in Washington D.C. with the National Resources Defense Council states: “anyone drinking tap water in most American cities is essentially taking hormones with their glass of water” (qtd in Pyhtila 47), and not only from plastic originating hormone-clones. The Associated Press found that municipal water supplies in many major cities are laced with up to 63 different identifiable pharmaceutical drugs including sex hormones such as estrogen from birth control, hormone replacement drugs, mood stabilizers, and anti-anxiety medications. Medications and their by-products find their way into the water via disposal, and what goes down the toilet after the human body has absorbed what it can. These drugs cannot be filtered out by the water treatment facilities, so each glass of water can potentially contain mini-doses of thousands of different drugs prescribed to thousands of different people (Pyhtila 47).
Although many developed countries (including the U.S.A.) have begun to ban BPA, it is still widely used. In 2007, the California Senate banned companies from “manufacturing, processing, or distributing any plastics packaging ranging in size from 8 ounces to 5 gallons that contain styrene, vinyl chloride, bisphenol A, perflouroctanoic acid, nonylphenol or alkylphenol”. (Verespej). However, this will not go into effect until 2015 (“Environment”).
The Ocean Protection Council (a state commission responsible for protecting California’s oceans) claims that sixty to eighty percent of all marine debris and ninety percent of floating marine debris is composed of plastic (Verespej). Although the majority of debris in landfills is composed of construction waste and paper products (Weisman 119), plastic is now the most common feature on the ocean’s surface. (And what happens when all of this plastic eventually sinks, and the ocean floor is covered in an impenetrable layer that will never break down?) Some researchers estimate that eight million items of garbage enter the ocean every single day, and most of them are plastic (“Debris”). In fact, there is now six times more plastic by weight than plankton in the upper part of the sea. If it seems paradoxical that there is more plastic in the ocean than on land, it is because eighty percent of plastic is originally discarded on land. “The world’s landfills [aren’t] overflowing with plastic…because most of it ends up in an ocean-fill”. It blows out of garbage trucks or railroad shipping containers, drifts out of landfills, and flows down storm drains into rivers that flow to the sea. (Weisman 123)
Plastic that ends up in the ocean is promptly ingested by marine life. Many people cut soda can rings so fish and birds won’t strangle on them like an unyielding noose. However, cut into strips, they highly resemble drifting jellyfish. So do plastic bags, which Kenya alone produces 4,000 tons of each month (Weisman 123). Plastic in a raw state (before being rendered into bottles, bags, or packaging) consists of tiny pellets in various colors. These pellets, called “nurdles” also look like tasty bites to many creatures. 5.5 quadrillion nurdles (or 250 billion pounds) are manufactured every year (Weisman 123-124). Since plastic cannot even be broken down on a molecular level, it also remains intact in animal stomachs. An estimated one million birds, and one hundred thousand marine mammals and turtles die from this cause every year. One turtle was found recently with over one thousand pieces of plastic in its stomach (“trash vortex”). Sea birds eat an alarming amount of plastic debris, and since it cannot pass through their delicate systems, a belly-full starves them to death by blocking their digestive tract. Even baby birds die of too much plastic in their systems because the parents regurgitate into their throats. They perish before they even learn to fly. Some birds wash up on shore laden with an incredible variety of plastic scraps within their small stomachs. “If they were human-sized, they’d have an average of more than 4 pounds of plastic in their bellies” (“Debris”).
Fortunately, there have been some optimistic scientific experiments dealing with the breakdown of plastics in the last few years, and most deal with bacteria. Bacteria are the most prevalent life form on earth. They constitute almost ninety percent of the planet’s biomass and are more diverse than any other living thing. Although extremely simple in structure, all life is thought to have formed from these unicellular blobs. It is almost poetic that science is now turning to bacteria to solve one of the most critical and complex environmental crises of our time. One of the most notable and promising experiments comes from seventeen-year-old Daniel Burd, a high school student in Ontario, Canada. Burd mixed dirt from a landfill with yeast and tap water, and added ground up polythene bags. After tweaking temperature and other variants, he managed to decompose the plastic by 43% in six weeks, and projected that an entire bag could be eaten in three months. The bacteria, Pseudomonas and Sphingomonas work in tandem with only a small amount of heat and carbon dioxide generated as waste. Since his results can be easily instituted in any home, Burd believes that it would be simple to duplicate the experiment on an industrial scale (Wylie). Although Burd won first place in the science fair, the world has yet to see any benefits from his discovery. For now, “no plastic has died a natural death yet”, and no single bacteria can digest plastic so far, because “50 years is too short a time for evolution to develop the necessary biochemistry” (Weisman 127). It is also debatable that plastic-eating bacteria would be beneficial at all, since most plastic is produced to protect food from harmful bacteria in the first place.
We live in a world created almost entirely in the last fifty years. Within that short time, two massive “garbage islands” have formed in the Atlantic and Pacific gyres. They cannot be viewed from satellite imagery because the accumulation is loose and floating at various levels in the water, and most of the bits of plastic have been broken down into small pieces by waves and friction. This is also the reason why it is so hard to clean up. When scientists use nets to trawl these areas, the water resembles a colorful, chunky soup, instead of clear water with the occasional krill or seaweed. Under the microscope, even more plastic can be seen. This is only the plastic that floats. About seventy percent of plastic that ends up in the ocean sinks to the bottom, and this is true for every sea. The North Sea alone contains an estimated 600,000 tons of litter (“trash vortex”).
With the world and its creatures weighed down with complex man-made molecules, it’s curious to think that millions of years from now, pressed next to the fossilized remains of delicate ferns and bony fish, will be the skeletons of cell phones, tubes of makeup, yogurt cups, and a myriad of complex supplies created for our disposable culture. If items such as papyrus paper can survive thousands of years, what chance does the planet have of sloughing off its polymer coat? Will some distant version of human beings still be able to rebuild our plastic society? Will they be astounded at the permanence of what has been created, or horrified that the label on a container of Gatorade is still flawlessly readable?
Works Cited
"Debris endangering birds." Plastics News 17.30 (2005). MasterFILE Premier. EBSCO. Asheville-Buncombe Tech Comm College Holly Lib. 23 Nov. 2008 <http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=f5h&AN=18455467&site=ehost-live >.
"Environment." California State Senate. 2007. 23 Nov. 2008 <http://www.sen.ca.gov/sfa/2007/_07_DL09.HTM >.
Pyhtila, Holly. "Pink Water: Plastics, Pesticides, and Pills Are Contaminating Out Drinking Supply." Earth Island Journal 23.3 (2008): 45-48. Academic Search Premier. EBSCO. Asheville-Buncombe Tech Comm College Holly Lib., Asheville, NC. 14 Nov. 2008 <http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=aph&AN=34384397&site=ehost-live >.
"The trash vortex." Greenpeace. 23 Nov. 2008 <http://www.greenpeace.org/international/campaigns/oceans/pollution/trash-vortex >.
Weisman, Alan. The World Without Us. New York: St. Martin's Press-Thomas Dunne, 2007.
Wylie, Anton. "Dissolving the plastic bag problem: The Phage Factor." The Register. 11 June 2008. 23 Nov. 2008 <http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/06/11/anton_wylie_phages/ >.
This is the research paper I wrote last year that opened my eyes to the horrors of polymers. I had a really hard time writing this thing. It was torture. I actually cried.
Plastic is everywhere. For the last fifty years, polymers have been rapidly enshrouding the planet. A walk down even a residential street will reveal the shrapnel of disposable lifestyles. Empty cigarette lighters, brightly colored twist-off bottle caps, candy wrappers, grocery bags hanging from tree limbs (aptly named “witch’s knickers”), and other discard are common sights. So common that they are often overlooked as part of society’s landscape. However, plastic lurks in less-obvious locations. For example, turn over a bottle of body wash and look at the ingredients. If the brand advertises itself as an exfoliant, chances are good that somewhere in the long list of unpronounceables is the nefarious word: “polyethylene” (Weisman 117). University of Plymouth marine biologist Richard Thompson explains: “They’re selling plastic meant to go right down the drain, into the sewers, into the rivers, right into the ocean. Bite-sized pieces of plastic to be swallowed by little sea creatures” (qtd in Weisman 117). It doesn’t stop there. These tiny plastic particles are used with increasing frequency for near-instant disposal.
So what’s the problem with some plankton eating microscopic bits of polyethylene? Polyethylene is one type of many man-made polymers. They are unlike the polymers that have been around for millions of years in the form of spider silk, plant cellulose, rubber, cotton, and even fingernails (Weisman 118). Unlike the simple chains of molecules produced in nature, synthetic polymers have been enhanced with the addition of other elements, making them stronger and unable to be broken down naturally. Contrary to what seems evident by the sight of deteriorating grocery bags on the side of the road, or brittle, yellowed signage, plastic does not break down. It only gets smaller. Deteriorated plastic is designed to photodegrade, meaning that “ultraviolet solar radiation weakens plastic’s tensile strength by breaking its long chain-like polymer molecules into shorter segments” (Weisman 126), thus the effects of weathered patio furniture or outdoor decor. Senior research scientist at North Carolina’s Research Triangle, Dr. Anthony Andrady explains that “plastic is still plastic. The material still remains a polymer. Polyethylene is not biodegraded in any practical time scale. There is no mechanism in the marine environment to biodegrade that long a molecule.” Even further, when large items break down into smaller pieces, and then down to powder, the “residue remains in the sea, where filter feeders will find it” (qtd in Weisman 126).
These discarded plastics don’t only affect filter feeders. Besides the direct connection between marine life serving as food for human consumption, like the cartoon poster of small fish being eat by a succession of larger and larger fish, humans end up as the biggest “fish”, ingesting the accumulated chemicals in the food chain players. While this may seem an obvious conclusion, on par with the argument for eating organic and hormone-free meats and foods, deeper problems than food sources lurk. Bisphenol A (BPA) is a major component in six-billion pounds of U.S. produced plastic, annually. BPA has been used for lining cans of food, dental fillings, baby bottles, and other plastics such as polycarbonates and epoxy resins, despite being a known endocrine disrupter. When BPA photodegrades, it releases chemicals that are similar in structure and effect to estrogen, which seep into the water supply. “When combined with chlorine used to purify municipal water, harmful estrogen-mimicking organ chlorides are also formed”. BPA, along with other similar chemicals, persistently run through our drinking water (Pyhtila 46).
Dr. Jennifer Sass, senior scientist in Washington D.C. with the National Resources Defense Council states: “anyone drinking tap water in most American cities is essentially taking hormones with their glass of water” (qtd in Pyhtila 47), and not only from plastic originating hormone-clones. The Associated Press found that municipal water supplies in many major cities are laced with up to 63 different identifiable pharmaceutical drugs including sex hormones such as estrogen from birth control, hormone replacement drugs, mood stabilizers, and anti-anxiety medications. Medications and their by-products find their way into the water via disposal, and what goes down the toilet after the human body has absorbed what it can. These drugs cannot be filtered out by the water treatment facilities, so each glass of water can potentially contain mini-doses of thousands of different drugs prescribed to thousands of different people (Pyhtila 47).
Although many developed countries (including the U.S.A.) have begun to ban BPA, it is still widely used. In 2007, the California Senate banned companies from “manufacturing, processing, or distributing any plastics packaging ranging in size from 8 ounces to 5 gallons that contain styrene, vinyl chloride, bisphenol A, perflouroctanoic acid, nonylphenol or alkylphenol”. (Verespej). However, this will not go into effect until 2015 (“Environment”).
The Ocean Protection Council (a state commission responsible for protecting California’s oceans) claims that sixty to eighty percent of all marine debris and ninety percent of floating marine debris is composed of plastic (Verespej). Although the majority of debris in landfills is composed of construction waste and paper products (Weisman 119), plastic is now the most common feature on the ocean’s surface. (And what happens when all of this plastic eventually sinks, and the ocean floor is covered in an impenetrable layer that will never break down?) Some researchers estimate that eight million items of garbage enter the ocean every single day, and most of them are plastic (“Debris”). In fact, there is now six times more plastic by weight than plankton in the upper part of the sea. If it seems paradoxical that there is more plastic in the ocean than on land, it is because eighty percent of plastic is originally discarded on land. “The world’s landfills [aren’t] overflowing with plastic…because most of it ends up in an ocean-fill”. It blows out of garbage trucks or railroad shipping containers, drifts out of landfills, and flows down storm drains into rivers that flow to the sea. (Weisman 123)
Plastic that ends up in the ocean is promptly ingested by marine life. Many people cut soda can rings so fish and birds won’t strangle on them like an unyielding noose. However, cut into strips, they highly resemble drifting jellyfish. So do plastic bags, which Kenya alone produces 4,000 tons of each month (Weisman 123). Plastic in a raw state (before being rendered into bottles, bags, or packaging) consists of tiny pellets in various colors. These pellets, called “nurdles” also look like tasty bites to many creatures. 5.5 quadrillion nurdles (or 250 billion pounds) are manufactured every year (Weisman 123-124). Since plastic cannot even be broken down on a molecular level, it also remains intact in animal stomachs. An estimated one million birds, and one hundred thousand marine mammals and turtles die from this cause every year. One turtle was found recently with over one thousand pieces of plastic in its stomach (“trash vortex”). Sea birds eat an alarming amount of plastic debris, and since it cannot pass through their delicate systems, a belly-full starves them to death by blocking their digestive tract. Even baby birds die of too much plastic in their systems because the parents regurgitate into their throats. They perish before they even learn to fly. Some birds wash up on shore laden with an incredible variety of plastic scraps within their small stomachs. “If they were human-sized, they’d have an average of more than 4 pounds of plastic in their bellies” (“Debris”).
Fortunately, there have been some optimistic scientific experiments dealing with the breakdown of plastics in the last few years, and most deal with bacteria. Bacteria are the most prevalent life form on earth. They constitute almost ninety percent of the planet’s biomass and are more diverse than any other living thing. Although extremely simple in structure, all life is thought to have formed from these unicellular blobs. It is almost poetic that science is now turning to bacteria to solve one of the most critical and complex environmental crises of our time. One of the most notable and promising experiments comes from seventeen-year-old Daniel Burd, a high school student in Ontario, Canada. Burd mixed dirt from a landfill with yeast and tap water, and added ground up polythene bags. After tweaking temperature and other variants, he managed to decompose the plastic by 43% in six weeks, and projected that an entire bag could be eaten in three months. The bacteria, Pseudomonas and Sphingomonas work in tandem with only a small amount of heat and carbon dioxide generated as waste. Since his results can be easily instituted in any home, Burd believes that it would be simple to duplicate the experiment on an industrial scale (Wylie). Although Burd won first place in the science fair, the world has yet to see any benefits from his discovery. For now, “no plastic has died a natural death yet”, and no single bacteria can digest plastic so far, because “50 years is too short a time for evolution to develop the necessary biochemistry” (Weisman 127). It is also debatable that plastic-eating bacteria would be beneficial at all, since most plastic is produced to protect food from harmful bacteria in the first place.
We live in a world created almost entirely in the last fifty years. Within that short time, two massive “garbage islands” have formed in the Atlantic and Pacific gyres. They cannot be viewed from satellite imagery because the accumulation is loose and floating at various levels in the water, and most of the bits of plastic have been broken down into small pieces by waves and friction. This is also the reason why it is so hard to clean up. When scientists use nets to trawl these areas, the water resembles a colorful, chunky soup, instead of clear water with the occasional krill or seaweed. Under the microscope, even more plastic can be seen. This is only the plastic that floats. About seventy percent of plastic that ends up in the ocean sinks to the bottom, and this is true for every sea. The North Sea alone contains an estimated 600,000 tons of litter (“trash vortex”).
With the world and its creatures weighed down with complex man-made molecules, it’s curious to think that millions of years from now, pressed next to the fossilized remains of delicate ferns and bony fish, will be the skeletons of cell phones, tubes of makeup, yogurt cups, and a myriad of complex supplies created for our disposable culture. If items such as papyrus paper can survive thousands of years, what chance does the planet have of sloughing off its polymer coat? Will some distant version of human beings still be able to rebuild our plastic society? Will they be astounded at the permanence of what has been created, or horrified that the label on a container of Gatorade is still flawlessly readable?
Works Cited
"Debris endangering birds." Plastics News 17.30 (2005). MasterFILE Premier. EBSCO. Asheville-Buncombe Tech Comm College Holly Lib. 23 Nov. 2008 <http://search.ebscohost.co
"Environment." California State Senate. 2007. 23 Nov. 2008 <http://www.sen.ca.gov/sfa/
Pyhtila, Holly. "Pink Water: Plastics, Pesticides, and Pills Are Contaminating Out Drinking Supply." Earth Island Journal 23.3 (2008): 45-48. Academic Search Premier. EBSCO. Asheville-Buncombe Tech Comm College Holly Lib., Asheville, NC. 14 Nov. 2008 <http://search.ebscohost.co
"The trash vortex." Greenpeace. 23 Nov. 2008 <http://www.greenpeace.org/
Weisman, Alan. The World Without Us. New York: St. Martin's Press-Thomas Dunne, 2007.
Wylie, Anton. "Dissolving the plastic bag problem: The Phage Factor." The Register. 11 June 2008. 23 Nov. 2008 <http://www.theregister.co.
Wednesday, September 9, 2009
Packaging
Ah, nothing seems to be more inspiring than free breakfast. I spent last night in the school bus downtown, sleeping on my new bed. On the way home I stopped into the Days Inn to inspect their "Best Hot Country Breakfast" and, after nodding good morning to the concierge, was pleasantly surprised by a full buffet. This includes scrambled eggs, biscuits and gravy, bacon, sausage, yogurt, cottage cheese, chocolate and vanilla pudding, grits, tater tots, donuts, fruit, cereal, make-your-own-waffles, all kinds of bread, english muffins, bagels, juice, coffee, cappuccino, hot cocoa...yeah, you get the picture. More.
I sat down behind some Harley Davidson bikers and enjoyed a plate full of hot food and listened to them sing along to the Beatles which were being piped into the large seating area. I arrived about 20 minutes before 10am so I ate quickly. The bikers left me alone with my third glass of orange juice, and as I refilled my plate, "The Great Pretender" came on over the speakers. I smiled as I stacked fresh fruit onto a "to go" plate.
Life is good.
Hot breakfast in a hotel lobby is a pretty glamorous slice of freeganism. Usually I'm not even awake early enough to score mornings like that, and most of the food isn't the kind that stores well (besides little condiment packages, syrup, and juice). The vast majority of my food comes from dumpsters behind grocery stores. And, typically when people figure that out, they tend to look at me with wide eyes and gasp "but won't you get sick?!"
Foraging in the trash is the ultimate failing of human society. It has a rich past of being designated for the scruffiest of home-bums. I know many old homeless people who refuse to eat out of the trash as some kind of call to dignity.
"It's so gross!" some might protest. I've had people tell me that it's just plain dangerous, and that the Salvation Army gives away three meals a day (if you call peanut butter and jelly and a package of crackers a meal), which would be much safer.
I disagree that there is anything dangerous about eating food from a dumpster. First of all, have you ever noticed how much of the food in stores is completely covered in plastic? Even fresh fruit and vegetables are increasingly being shrink-wrapped. The industry of encasing biodegradable food in non-biodegradable packaging is a $50 billion a year industry ($70 billion goes toward the packaging industry as a whole). The cost of all this is passed down onto the consumer, and 9% of food costs goes toward the packaging.
There are good and bad points to this. I'll get into the bad later, but for the sake of "freegan safety" I should point out that food packaging prevents food waste. In the United States, food losses are only about 3%. Compared to undeveloped countries, where food waste from 30 to 50% isn't rare. This means that one pound of plastic packaging saves about 1.7 pounds of food. One pound of paper packaging saves 1.4 pounds of food.
Quite often, the things I find in the trash have never even touched a dumpster...or a human hand. True, most of my produce isn't the kind that is wrapped, but nature does a pretty good job of providing the proper protection. Also, there is an amazing thing that anyone can do (and everyone should, no matter what), and it is called "washing your fruits and vegetables before you eat them".
As someone pointed out from my last post, this movement could not survive without the very institutions and practices that it is protesting. Meaning that not everyone can be Freegan. (This is helpful for keeping our elitisms in check. Although it can be difficult to feel superior to someone when your pants are covered in garbage juice...) Plastic packaging was one of my main motivations for becoming Freegan in the first place. I wrote a research paper on effects of man-made polymers when I was in community college recently, and was completely horrified. I started to really look at what I was buying. I started choosing things based on their packaging, or lack thereof. And now that I refuse to buy any food, packaging or not, I realize that the existence of it makes it possible for me to salvage the items that I use to sustain me.
I'm going to cut this one a little short and carry on with a discussion about plastics and corporations in the next posting. Thanks for reading!
I sat down behind some Harley Davidson bikers and enjoyed a plate full of hot food and listened to them sing along to the Beatles which were being piped into the large seating area. I arrived about 20 minutes before 10am so I ate quickly. The bikers left me alone with my third glass of orange juice, and as I refilled my plate, "The Great Pretender" came on over the speakers. I smiled as I stacked fresh fruit onto a "to go" plate.
Life is good.
Hot breakfast in a hotel lobby is a pretty glamorous slice of freeganism. Usually I'm not even awake early enough to score mornings like that, and most of the food isn't the kind that stores well (besides little condiment packages, syrup, and juice). The vast majority of my food comes from dumpsters behind grocery stores. And, typically when people figure that out, they tend to look at me with wide eyes and gasp "but won't you get sick?!"
Foraging in the trash is the ultimate failing of human society. It has a rich past of being designated for the scruffiest of home-bums. I know many old homeless people who refuse to eat out of the trash as some kind of call to dignity.
"It's so gross!" some might protest. I've had people tell me that it's just plain dangerous, and that the Salvation Army gives away three meals a day (if you call peanut butter and jelly and a package of crackers a meal), which would be much safer.
I disagree that there is anything dangerous about eating food from a dumpster. First of all, have you ever noticed how much of the food in stores is completely covered in plastic? Even fresh fruit and vegetables are increasingly being shrink-wrapped. The industry of encasing biodegradable food in non-biodegradable packaging is a $50 billion a year industry ($70 billion goes toward the packaging industry as a whole). The cost of all this is passed down onto the consumer, and 9% of food costs goes toward the packaging.
There are good and bad points to this. I'll get into the bad later, but for the sake of "freegan safety" I should point out that food packaging prevents food waste. In the United States, food losses are only about 3%. Compared to undeveloped countries, where food waste from 30 to 50% isn't rare. This means that one pound of plastic packaging saves about 1.7 pounds of food. One pound of paper packaging saves 1.4 pounds of food.
Quite often, the things I find in the trash have never even touched a dumpster...or a human hand. True, most of my produce isn't the kind that is wrapped, but nature does a pretty good job of providing the proper protection. Also, there is an amazing thing that anyone can do (and everyone should, no matter what), and it is called "washing your fruits and vegetables before you eat them".
As someone pointed out from my last post, this movement could not survive without the very institutions and practices that it is protesting. Meaning that not everyone can be Freegan. (This is helpful for keeping our elitisms in check. Although it can be difficult to feel superior to someone when your pants are covered in garbage juice...) Plastic packaging was one of my main motivations for becoming Freegan in the first place. I wrote a research paper on effects of man-made polymers when I was in community college recently, and was completely horrified. I started to really look at what I was buying. I started choosing things based on their packaging, or lack thereof. And now that I refuse to buy any food, packaging or not, I realize that the existence of it makes it possible for me to salvage the items that I use to sustain me.
I'm going to cut this one a little short and carry on with a discussion about plastics and corporations in the next posting. Thanks for reading!
Friday, September 4, 2009
What How Why?
I'm sitting in a hotel lobby in Asheville having a leisurely breakfast. Toasted bagel with a gratuitous amount of cream cheese, coffee, and orange juice. This hotel also offers hard boiled eggs and waffles in a make-your-own machine, where batter is dispensed into a little cup and poured into a timed spinning iron.
The large metal coffee canteen in front of me is sweating from the cold orange juice that I poured into it from the hulking juice machine. A Styrofoam cup next to it is full of pancake syrup. On my last visit I stocked up on packets of cream cheese, peanut butter, and coffee creamer, so I don't bother with those.
After taking my last sip of coffee from the canteen top, I bunch up my hoodie around a new roll of toilet paper from the bathroom, smile good-morning to the group of patrons, and push open the glass doors into the morning sunlight.
This is what it's like to be freegan in this country.
I became Freegan a few months ago, after I swore to stop purchasing meat products. At that time I wasn't a stranger to dumpster diving. I would occasionally jump into the health food store trash and fish out packages of whatever was in there. Even downtown I would rummage through the trash cans and often find boxed up leftovers of fresh restaurant fare. For a few years of my life I was vegetarian, with six months of that being vegan. I made that change to protest the horrible practices of factory farming, and later found the health benefits.
More recently, when I decided to continue eating meat if it was available, but not supporting it with my dollars, I was doing the same thing. Lots of people make similar silent protests by refusing to buy certain products, or by refusing to patronize certain stores. It's called a boycott. Individually, boycotts are basically fruitless. It makes a single person feel better about her choices, but the company will continue to thrive, and the product will continue to be restocked on shelves. En masse, of course, boycotts are highly effective.
With the way that marketing has been more and more individualized, each of our shopping habits are traceable. I saw a news piece once that shows how WalMart keeps real-time records of what is being purchased in every store at every single register in order to efficiently restock. So if a particular store in Florida is selling emergency candles due to an impending hurricane, the computer "knows" this and the orders to ship out more emergency candles to that location is put in. This feature also tracks buying habits in order to properly market items. Now next year in September, this WalMart will have a surplus of emergency candles before the rush, whereas the rest of the year, this item is not in high demand.
This is an example of how one company tracks it's customers spending habits, but there are many companies that can track consumers on more direct levels. Most of us have seen examples of direct marketing like this. Customer Reward cards at supermarkets give discounts to members (it's always free to sign up...you just have to give your information) and customized coupons print out with your receipt. (I always got coupons for soy milk and Morningstar Farms, whereas Joe-Bob behind me might get coupons for Lean Cuisine and Kraft Singles). It gets a lot more specific than this and it's kind of spooky.
Like most people in this country, I think we're much too consumer-driven. Shopping has become an activity that people partake in for "fun". Think about that (I've done it too)...we find ourselves bored, so we go to a store and buy things we don't need as an activity. I'm sorry but shopping is not a good hobby. This trend in human behavior has gone so far as to become a joke. Little quips about shopping addictions are printed out on cheap t-shirts for children. The un-funny part is that shopping is an addiction with a lot of people. Of course we all know that. It's been a major part of our economic bust recently, with millions of American deep into debt from it's favorite leisure activity.
So it's no wonder that if people view luxury items as needs (shopping to relieve boredom or loneliness), then most people wouldn't even think that food is also a luxury item. This country produces double the amount of food that it consumes. A University of Arizona study from 2004 found that 40 to 50% of all food ready for harvest never gets eaten. And, "on average, households waste 14 per cent of their food purchases. Fifteen per cent of that includes products still within their expiration date but never opened. Timothy Jones estimates an average family of four currently tosses out $590 per year, just in meat, fruits, vegetables and grain products". That's $1,200 a year in wasted food. That's 5oo pounds of food, 15% of which is still in it's original packaging, 60% of which is still perfectly edible. That's also equivalent to 29 million tons of food waste each year, or enough to fill the Rose Bowl every three days. That's just American households. Restaurants throw away 6,000 tons of food every day. Nationwide, food scraps make up 17 percent of what we send to landfills (most of the bulk of landfills is paper and construction materials). The amount of food we waste in America alone is enough to feed every single hungry person in Africa. Yet, over 1 billion people on this planet are hungry, and 1 in 8 children under 12 years of age go to bed hungry in America.
So, if food is cheap enough and plentiful enough for us to literally throw half of it away and we're still getting fat...why is our USDA's CCC (Commodity Credit Corporation- an emergency pantry for the U.S.) essentially empty?
Being able to drive to the grocery store and buy whatever we want to eat today is an incredible luxury. At some point I realized that the companies that provide this gross amount of food shouldn't be supported anymore. If I can live off of the scraps of this country drowning in it's own excess, when why not?
More on the How later....
The large metal coffee canteen in front of me is sweating from the cold orange juice that I poured into it from the hulking juice machine. A Styrofoam cup next to it is full of pancake syrup. On my last visit I stocked up on packets of cream cheese, peanut butter, and coffee creamer, so I don't bother with those.
After taking my last sip of coffee from the canteen top, I bunch up my hoodie around a new roll of toilet paper from the bathroom, smile good-morning to the group of patrons, and push open the glass doors into the morning sunlight.
This is what it's like to be freegan in this country.
I became Freegan a few months ago, after I swore to stop purchasing meat products. At that time I wasn't a stranger to dumpster diving. I would occasionally jump into the health food store trash and fish out packages of whatever was in there. Even downtown I would rummage through the trash cans and often find boxed up leftovers of fresh restaurant fare. For a few years of my life I was vegetarian, with six months of that being vegan. I made that change to protest the horrible practices of factory farming, and later found the health benefits.
More recently, when I decided to continue eating meat if it was available, but not supporting it with my dollars, I was doing the same thing. Lots of people make similar silent protests by refusing to buy certain products, or by refusing to patronize certain stores. It's called a boycott. Individually, boycotts are basically fruitless. It makes a single person feel better about her choices, but the company will continue to thrive, and the product will continue to be restocked on shelves. En masse, of course, boycotts are highly effective.
With the way that marketing has been more and more individualized, each of our shopping habits are traceable. I saw a news piece once that shows how WalMart keeps real-time records of what is being purchased in every store at every single register in order to efficiently restock. So if a particular store in Florida is selling emergency candles due to an impending hurricane, the computer "knows" this and the orders to ship out more emergency candles to that location is put in. This feature also tracks buying habits in order to properly market items. Now next year in September, this WalMart will have a surplus of emergency candles before the rush, whereas the rest of the year, this item is not in high demand.
This is an example of how one company tracks it's customers spending habits, but there are many companies that can track consumers on more direct levels. Most of us have seen examples of direct marketing like this. Customer Reward cards at supermarkets give discounts to members (it's always free to sign up...you just have to give your information) and customized coupons print out with your receipt. (I always got coupons for soy milk and Morningstar Farms, whereas Joe-Bob behind me might get coupons for Lean Cuisine and Kraft Singles). It gets a lot more specific than this and it's kind of spooky.
Like most people in this country, I think we're much too consumer-driven. Shopping has become an activity that people partake in for "fun". Think about that (I've done it too)...we find ourselves bored, so we go to a store and buy things we don't need as an activity. I'm sorry but shopping is not a good hobby. This trend in human behavior has gone so far as to become a joke. Little quips about shopping addictions are printed out on cheap t-shirts for children. The un-funny part is that shopping is an addiction with a lot of people. Of course we all know that. It's been a major part of our economic bust recently, with millions of American deep into debt from it's favorite leisure activity.
So it's no wonder that if people view luxury items as needs (shopping to relieve boredom or loneliness), then most people wouldn't even think that food is also a luxury item. This country produces double the amount of food that it consumes. A University of Arizona study from 2004 found that 40 to 50% of all food ready for harvest never gets eaten. And, "on average, households waste 14 per cent of their food purchases. Fifteen per cent of that includes products still within their expiration date but never opened. Timothy Jones estimates an average family of four currently tosses out $590 per year, just in meat, fruits, vegetables and grain products". That's $1,200 a year in wasted food. That's 5oo pounds of food, 15% of which is still in it's original packaging, 60% of which is still perfectly edible. That's also equivalent to 29 million tons of food waste each year, or enough to fill the Rose Bowl every three days. That's just American households. Restaurants throw away 6,000 tons of food every day. Nationwide, food scraps make up 17 percent of what we send to landfills (most of the bulk of landfills is paper and construction materials). The amount of food we waste in America alone is enough to feed every single hungry person in Africa. Yet, over 1 billion people on this planet are hungry, and 1 in 8 children under 12 years of age go to bed hungry in America.
So, if food is cheap enough and plentiful enough for us to literally throw half of it away and we're still getting fat...why is our USDA's CCC (Commodity Credit Corporation- an emergency pantry for the U.S.) essentially empty?
Being able to drive to the grocery store and buy whatever we want to eat today is an incredible luxury. At some point I realized that the companies that provide this gross amount of food shouldn't be supported anymore. If I can live off of the scraps of this country drowning in it's own excess, when why not?
More on the How later....
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