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!