Dumpster diving

Dive, dive, dive Alex Barnard knows Dumpster diving.

He got about half his food digging through supermarket trash last summer while he was living in New York City.

All the furniture in his Princeton University dorm room came from things other folks threw away.

Even his favorite pair of jeans – Banana Republics – were scrounged up from somebody else’s garbage.

There are thousands just like Barnard across the United States, he says.

They call themselves freegans, or Dumpster divers. They rescue furniture, clothes, household goods and even food cast off by others as a way to exit what they see as out-of-control consumerism and corporate greed.

The movement is a total boycott of the economic system and its profit motive, Barnard says.

And the movement has a mission, he says: “If you have a problem with consumer culture in American society, do all you can to stop participating in the system.”

For Barnard, a Princeton University senior who focused his academic research on Dumpster diving, all this trash talk has paid off: He received one of the highest awards given to Princeton undergraduates.

Barnard won the 2009 Daniel M. Sachs Class of 1960 Graduating Scholarship and plans to use the award to pursue a master’s degree at the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology at Worcester College at the University of Oxford.

The scholarship will pay Barnard’s room, board, tuition and expenses at Oxford for two years. (”It’s a pretty amazing deal,” he says.)

Almost as amazing as the Dumpster divers themselves, he says.

Barnard, 21, who is from Flagstaff, Ariz., researched social activist movements like freeganism as a sociology major at Princeton and participated in quite a few activist movements himself. (He’s co-founder of the Princeton Animal Welfare Society, which promotes veganism and creates awareness about the treatment of animals.)

But recently he’s been talking trash – as in Dumpsters.

Last summer Barnard moved to New York City to spend time with the Dumpster divers.

“I saw an online thing that said ‘Come here and do Dumpster diving with us,’

” he recalls.

Barnard went and was surprised by what he found.

“I sort of expected to find a few gross items in the trash,” he admits.

Instead, he found usable food that had been discarded.

Barnard met hundreds of freegans in the city.

“Everyone seemed nice and well adjusted,” he says. “I was really happy.”

There were business people, teachers, government workers – “pretty much anything,” he says.

And definitely not just students.

“I expected it to be more young people but actually the group is diverse, middle age with careers, from all walks of life,” he says.

What do they all have in common?

A desire to change the way we live.

Freegans want to separate themselves from what they see as an unethical consumer society. Reclaiming clothes, furniture – or even food – from the trash is just one way of reshaping society, they say.

To put it another way, freegans are the conscientious objectors of capitalism, Barnard says. (The word “freegan” is a combination of the words “free” – as in it’s free because it came from a Dumpster – and “vegan,” a vegetarian who shuns all animal products.)

Not all freegans escape capitalism entirely, Barnard says.

Some hold jobs, some own houses, some pay rent.

Some use tactics like Dumpster diving to send a public message that we as a society throw out things that are perfectly usable.

Barnard has found boxes of pasta, crackers, cereal and cookies in supermarket Dumpsters.

He’s found day-old bread, wrapped produce, dented cans of soup – even 75 bags of gourmet coffee, selling at $9 a bag, one store threw out rather than keep on a shelf.

“That was a total bonanza to us,” Barnard says. “We went under the subway and handed out gourmet coffee to people.”

And Barnard has served up some cast-off cuisine to friends.

Fellow Princeton undergrad Will Fisher went Dumpster diving with Barnard in New York City and the pair cooked up a meal out of what they found.

“It was good,” Fisher says. “You wouldn’t know it came from a Dumpster unless someone told you.”

Which is the point.

Food is food, clothes are clothes, furniture is furniture, no matter where it comes from, Fisher says, although he was a little shocked over the whole idea at first.

“At first when I did Dumpster diving I was a little freaked out,” he admits. “It was not what I expected.”

Barnard, who sometimes wears his hair in a mohawk – “usually in situations where it’s not appropriate,” Fisher laughs – has been very adept at getting the message out about freeganism, Fisher notes.

Barnard wrote his junior paper on the subject and got high praise from his adviser.

“Despite his deep involvement with the freegans’ activities, he never took the freegans’ creed at face value, showing a great capacity for maintaining the necessary distance from his research subject,” says Delia Baldassarri, an assistant professor of sociology at Princeton.

The freegan movement is equally about action and symbolism, Baldassarri says.

“The fact they have decided not to buy food is a symbolic act,” she says. “It’s meant to send a message, not change the world.”

Freeganism really isn’t anything new, Barnard admits.

“You know you can live in society and consume less and reuse more than most people do,” he says.

It’s the idea of creating an alternative community to one of consumerism and capitalism, he says.

“It’s not just dropping out of society,” Barnard says. “People are building something new, not just saying ‘We have a problem with this society.’ They’re creating a new economic system based on the value of mutual needs and cooperation instead of a system based on greed and waste.”

At Oxford, Barnard plans to continue his study of alternative ways of living.

“It’s not just about food and not about eating trash. It’s looking at life in a more broad way,” he says.

“We have a confined Western view about how humans relate to the world and animals,” he says. “I believe we humans can do a better job, and it’s the job of social scientists to look for better possibilities.”

And maybe to peek inside the trash once in a while to see what can be used again.