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....