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A “FREEGAN” FOOD TOUR OF THE UPPER EAST SIDE

The following post was written in March 2016.

We met Janet Kalish and three of her colleagues for a “trash tour” of the Upper East Side at nine o’clock on a Wednesday night. We assembled in the Sony Atrium on Madison Ave., a privately owned public space at the base of the Sony Building that extends from 55th to 56th Street. The giant hall was eerily empty as we pulled apart some café tables to bring the chairs into a circle, and someone pointed out that the Atrium was a fitting space to gather and discuss the principles of Freeganism. As a corporate space conceded for free and public use, it exists precisely at the intersection of capitalism and anarchy that we were about to explore.

Kalish is one of the founders of Freegan.info, an organized network of activists fighting food and material waste. After a round of introductions, Kalish gave us a crash course in Freeganism. Freegans are tired of supporting an economic model that values profit over human and environmental rights. They take issue with the capitalist tradition that consumers constantly replace their possessions with new ones, and believe society has become blindly complicit in a cycle of unsustainable and unjust practices. By helping each other reclaim usable goods that have been thrown away, Freegans shed light on how needlessly wasteful the current system is and create an alternate economy of interdependence.

Much of the Freegans’ work consists of what is commonly known as “dumpster diving,” but it is more systematic than the term suggests. Kalish had a list of Upper East Side grocery stores, cafés, and pharmacies that bring their trash out around ten o’clock, hence the late meeting time. She explained that these businesses throw away whole and unused goods for all kinds of reasons. Sometimes a jar of jam breaks and an entire case of jam is tossed because the jars are too sticky to sell. Sometimes the trash is filled with seasonal products, such as Easter Candy or Super Bowl-themed beer. Many products are thrown away due to past or approaching expiration dates, which can often be an arbitrary or misleading guideline for food safety.

“Most people, when they do this for the first time, they experience a rush of excitement. Look at all of this free food!” Kalish warned us, before we took to the streets. “But that feeling is accompanied by an equally strong feeling of depression — it shouldn’t be this way.” She assured us that she does not prefer to get her food this way. She would prefer this was not an option.

We soon found out that there truly is a goldmine of edible and usable goods lining the streets every night, disguised as trash. The first jackpot on the tour was at a Morton Williams Supermarket on 3rd Ave. and 63rd Street. Kalish showed us how to carefully untie the black garbage bags and instructed us to retie them when we were finished. Right off the bat there were single-serving bottles of drinkable yogurt, still cold, made from grassfed cows’ milk in New York State, a local and organic product originally listed at $9/bottle. The excitement that Kalish described started to set in, and people that were hesitant to dig in the dumpster soon joined the action.

Next were large containers of Oikos greek yogurt, cartons of Tropicana orange Juice, and ½ gallons of almond milk. At one point a store clerk brought out some bags from the bakery with loaves of rye bread, ciabatta, and bagels, and the group descended on the pile as soon as it was dropped at the curb. We visited a natural food store on 1st Ave. where the bags were filled with still-frozen microwavable meals and sealed plastic containers of ready-to-eat food. The food was distributed to anyone who wanted it, and the group worked together, helping each other look for specific items that were requested. After a few more grocery stores and a stop at Duane Reade, the tour ended outside of Le Pain Quotidien to grab the day’s leftover pastries for a midnight treat.

By the end of the night I saw the city with new eyes. Walking back to the subway, I had an urge to open every black trash bag I passed to see what treasure it might hold. It felt like we had uncovered one of New York City’s best-kept food secrets, and I imagined holding my own trash tours, taking my friends out on a Friday night to loot the city. But as Kalish suggested, the feeling of excitement was accompanied by one of dread. We had visited maybe five or six stores in a city of thousands, and come away with enough food to feed our group of twenty for a whole week.

At first the Freegan solution of digging through the trash might seem extreme, and I expected more of an anti-capitalist militancy from the group. Over the course of the night, however, it became apparent how inclusive they are. Some of the Freegans acquire all of their food and material goods through foraging, but their doors are open to anyone, no matter their reasons or level of involvement. Half of their work is living the work, but the other half is advocacy and sharing this reality with folks like us. They are not selling any single solution to what we were witnessing. By living off of what they find in the trash, they are revealing the pervasiveness of the problem and proving how unjustified it is. Food waste is a hot issue right now among environmentalists and human rights activists, with the “ugly food movement” at the forefront of media attention. The Freegans are bringing to light a different question we might want to start asking, one with more radical implications. Does producing less waste require producing fewer goods? Can promoting a culture of re-use produce a more just and sustainable world?