Waste & Consumption Waste and

Waste & Consumption Waste and Consumption Scarlett Lindeman has written a very disturbing article in the September/October 2012 issue of UTNE Magazine. Freegans: The Refined Art of Dumpster Diving was not what I expected. Lindeman reports that "30 to 50% of food production in the United States is wasted." This statistic is indicative of the laissez-faire altitude our modern society harbors toward waste. I had never really considered that the amount of trash and types of garbage produced by our industrialized society is a relatively new event.

This phenomenon may be viewed from a functionalist perspective. Freegans are an example of a counterculture, formed in response to the massive amount of waste produced by our society. In many ways it unconscionable that so much food is wasted at a time when so many still go hungry. The number of people in the world said to suffer from chronic hunger is estimated to be 1.02 billion by the United Nations Food and agriculture Organization. This works out to about one in seven people or 13.6% of the world's population.

More than 62% of these people live in Asia and the Pacific, while 26% live in Sub-Saharan Africa, 6% in Latin America and the Caribbean, 4% in the Near East and North Africa, and 2% in developed countries ("2012 World Hunger and Poverty Facts and Statisics"). Ironically, the world produces enough food to feed everyone. World agriculture produces 17% more calories per person today than it did 30 years ago, despite a 70% population increase.

This is enough to provide everyone in the world with at least 2,720 kilocalories (kcal) per person per day ("2012 World Hunger and Poverty Facts and Statisics"). I found the story about Ralph Reese, the NYC Union Square Whole Foods employee who was terminated for "misconduct" because he planned to consume a tuna sandwich that had was bound for the dumpster spoke volumes about the diversity of values in our society.

The idea of a food waste bureaucracy that is more concerned about profit than feeding people seems to me to be as unethical as it is appalling given the numbers of people that go to bed hungry each night. This story reflects the greed that is so persuasive from Wall Street to Main Street in today's American society.

I also was able to relate to the stigma associated with "dumpster diving." In many ways we have all been socially conditioned to reject the idea of eating food that has been discarded by another. As Lindeman points out, "Trash, regardless of what the plastic bag contains, is psychologically dirty, unclean, tainted, and unfit for human consumption." In many ways Freegans are to be admired for showing their gumption by repurposing what others consider garbage. Corporate America wants and needs people to consume in order to survive.

Lineman's 1930 quotation of Richardson Wright, the editor of House & Garden, still rings true as an accepted norm. People are expected and encouraged to.