Antiwaste
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Gleaning, wild picking, unsold food… Freeganism, which allows people to eat for free in urban areas, questions our collective relationship to food. In France, from “dumpster diving” to collective gardening, its followers try to educate on the practice.
Why should food be paid for? With this simple question, the answers of the followers of “freeganism”, or “gratuivores”, invite us to completely rethink our relationship to consumption and, more generally, to the earth and the living. By questioning these ingrained habits of feeding ourselves by wandering down supermarket aisles and “picking” what is within our reach according to our income, freegans raise a major political question: whether education, energy, transport, health have been the subject, as basic needs, of state support (although constantly undermined), why should food, the most basic need of all, be the subject of an individual quest? Why haven’t we succeeded in pooling resources, food production and processing tools to make food a collective fight?
“Freeganism is much more than just rummaging through the bins outside supermarkets, explains Dalie Giroux, professor at the School of Political Studies at the University of Ottawa, specialist in anarchism. It is a political horizon where it is a question of refusing, in all possible ways, including by revolt, to pay to eat, that is to say…
