awkwardly

Wednesday

Freegan.info apparently does not encourage drinking your own urine (like this freegan webpage I linked to years ago did).

"Freegans are people who are concerned so deeply with the social and ecological impact of economic over-consumption that they choose to buy and work as little as possible and, instead, to live directly off the massive waste created by our modern society. Freegans avoid contributing labor or wealth to an economy based on materialism, explotation, greed and waste by refusing to participate in it. Instead of producing their own waste, Freegans sustain themselves off the already existing waste thereby curtailing garbage and pollution and lessening the over-all volume in the waste stream."

I try to go to extremes with reducing, reusing and recycling, but the closest I've come to freeganism was taking a battered milk crate and plastic garbage can off the side of the highway.

They give some (more?) good reasons to backlash against vegetarians and vegans, if that sounds like something you want to do:

'We look askance even at those products sold to us as "socially responsible". While others look at a tofu hot dog and view it as "guilt-free" because it does not contain the flesh of animals, we recognize that a product is not made profitable from only one form of oppression. Capitalism NEVER considers the impact of its heavy hand; conservative in the cutting of economic cost, the corporation NEVER seeks to reign in its social and ecological cost -- unless there's money in it.

'And so, the freegan goes further than the vegan, noticing the plastic the tofu hot dogs are wrapped in, and thinking of fish and birds asphyxiating in slicks of oil in seas turned black with spilled crude. The freegan sees the card stock wrapper of the tofu hot dog and things of the serene forest that stood, home to multitudes of living beings, erased from the future through economically efficient "liquidation logging". The freegan looks at the white color of the card stock and thinks of the millions of tons of carcinogenic organochlorides invading waterways, contaminating living flesh after their chlorine component has served its function as bleach. The freegan remembers the deer shot, and the insect poisoned for having the audacity to eat crops growing on lands that used to be their habitat, crops that will be transformed into the product's "natural ingredients"...

'The freegan remembers the fish choking to death in deoxygenated water in a lake where nitrogen fertilizer runoff from the farm has caused an algal bloom. The freegan remembers the farm worker, underpaid and overworked, sending funds home to a country impoverished through imperialism by a government serving the interests of the wealthy corporate elite who guard their earnings as they consider acquiring a mid-sized company making tofu hot dogs...'

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