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‘Freeganism’ is the latest ethical food fad. It is practised by ‘freegans’, environmentally-minded people who eat food that’s past its best in an effort to limit waste. Freegans ‘dumpster dive’ for food that has been disposed of by shops and supermarkets. True freegans are students and left-wing radicals who rarely spend money on food – one told me he had spent only £5 on foodstuffs in the past six months and always eats food which is past its sell-by date. Many freegans are middle-class activists who choose to dumpster dive for ethical reasons and want to shrink their ‘ecological footprint’. Some are anarchists who believe that their actions challenge the ideology of mass consumerism – a way of thinking which can extend beyond freeganism to stealing food from Tesco.

In the interests of journalistic research, I decided to become a freegan for a weekend, and I bribed a friend to join me on my first freegan outing. It was a dark evening, and standing before the huge wheelie bins hidden down an alleyway beside a supermarket in darkest south-east London, I was scared. I also wished I had brought some rubber gloves. Opening a bin with my bare hands I spotted the clear plastic bags, which, an expert freegan had told me, contained food waste. All we found was a crushed packet of chocolate croissants. But then we discovered three bins
behind the Co-op, in the first of which we retrieved enough bread to keep a family going for a week, some burgers, some Fairtrade orange juice, and two perfectly intact pineapples. Delight turned to fear as we saw a light go out in the back room of the supermarket, and we threw our bounty into a bag and scarpered. At home we made a delicious pineapple smoothie, even tastier because it was free.



I imagined Lewisham Market might be easy for freegans, but the pickings were surprisingly sparse. At 8 pm the market was all packed up and the bin men were moving in. Minutes before they were due to be mashed by the rubbish truck, we spied some cabbages, cherries and oranges hidden away in cardboard boxes, but the cherries had already begun to decompose. Down another alleyway we found the most revolting bins yet, layered in black grime and ponging of old sewage.

The following day I brought along Ruby, an expert freegan. Together we wandered around Wandsworth where we spotted four other freegans on bicycles with empty rucksacks. We followed them to the staff car park behind Iceland, where, in the regulation clear plastic bags, we found two packets of potatoes, a packet of sausage rolls, a bunch of bananas, some bread rolls, a bag of onions and a packet of prawns. A Polish freegan, diving in head-first to claim some Petits Filous yoghurts, told us that we should try the BP shop down the road.

Ripping open the bags behind the BP garage, my jaw dropped as we discovered four garlic-bread pizzas, a bag of apple turnovers, some grapes, several packets of KP Nuts, a pack of mince (slightly brown), a pack of sliced chicken, three loaves of bread, a pile of strawberry doughnuts, some egg and cress sandwiches and the best freegan find of the weekend – a huge pack of miniature Mars Bars. The garlic bread, nuts, doughnuts and chocolates were perfectly edible – but I wouldn’t recommend freeganism to anyone but my worst enemy, unless the end of the world is nigh.