Legacy

As Brunet Breaux peddled through campus on his way to a final exam, he spotted a brown newsboy hat on the side of the road. Breaux slowed but did not stop; he didn’t have time to collect and brush off this new find. The newsboy hat would just have to wait to be added to Breaux’s collection of found accessories.

Breaux likes hats; he also likes things with a pre-worn and even dirty quality to them. He does not like spending money on clothing and other everyday provisions, so he and many others are taking their shopping elsewhere — to the trash.

In a world of ever-increasing environmental and economic awareness, consumers are familiar with the phrase “recycle, reduce, reuse,” a promise to save both money and the rainforest. Environmental advocates incorporate this mantra into their daily lives, switching to fluorescent light bulbs, recycling plastic bottles and reusing shopping bags. Others are a bit more drastic, opting instead to plunge headfirst into garbage to cut down on spending and squandering.

“Freegans” live an anti-consumerist lifestyle by limiting their participation with big corporations. Members of the group chooses to “dumpster dive” for many or all of their belongings, including food, clothing and furniture. Freegans don’t always pilfer waste because they can’t afford basic necessities, but because they often wish to make a pro-environmental or anti-materialistic statement.

Freeganism is prominent in several California communities and New York City, but has yet to garner a large following in Louisiana. Some LSU students, however, participate in the freegan lifestyle while traveling to major cities.

Chris, a creative writing freshman, remembers eating daily meals from the trash during his trip to Berkeley, California, where he stayed with his cousin, Reese . Reese, a student at the University of California, is also a resident of the Cloyne Co-op, a renovated hotel and casino. The Cloyne Co-op is home to about 100 Berkeley students who take part in communal living — it is entirely up to the students to maintain the building and cook their own food in the open kitchen. Chris recalled dining with the same group of about 15 Co-op students each night.

“When I was with them, I lived like the rest of them. We didn’t shower, we took baths in the ocean. We were really minimalist; we fed several people on just bread,” Chris said.

Chris explained how Reese and his friends would collect the bread that bakeries threw out at the end of each day. Sometimes the group would have to pick the leftover bread out of a dumpster, but sometimes storeowners would set out unused bread at the bakery’s backdoor for people like Chris and his cousin to take.

Chris went on tour with his cousin’s band, Butterfly Bones, through several California cities between Berkeley and Los Angeles, eating discarded bread and granola along the journey.

“They were just college students with little money, just trying to live off music, the necessities,” Chris said. “They lived just understanding that they were lucky to have a meal every day and to avoid excess.”

While some LSU students practice freeganism abroad, others participate in dumpster diving at home without labeling the activity. “I would call myself someone who has dumpster dived as well as being an anti-consumerist, or maybe just a hardcore recycler,” Caroline Anderson said, adjusting her black, Tina Fey glasses.

Anderson, a vocal performance freshman, said that she did not call herself a freegan, or any name at all, because she feels apprehensive about mentioning her trash-pillaging hobby to friends. She explained that the items she finds in the dumpster are clean, but people may judge her without knowing the facts.

Anderson often dumpster dived with her family at storage facilities in her hometown of Houston, Texas. She explained that when a renter did not pay for his storage unit, his possessions were discarded by the facility and became a prime target for dumpster divers.

Anderson’s father had been finding diamonds in the rough for years, but it took some coaxing to get her to join him. On Anderson’s first excursion to the storage unit’s waste receptacles, she found a tin of cash and realized that excavation could become a lucrative hobby.

At first Anderson enjoyed the practical benefits of digging up free junk. But after seeing so much “waste” in pristine condition, her new pastime took on a political edge.

“We live in a society where after three months, things like computers, TVs and phones aren’t good anymore and you need a new one. We see celebrities and people on television living frivolously, and wastefully, and make it look glamorous. But nobody thinks about the consequences. Landfills are full of working products that have been deemed trash simply because it’s not state-of-the-art, and that’s sickening to me,” Anderson said.

Anderson’s family has found TVs, vacuums and jewelry on their dumpster diving outings. But among all of the loot they have retrieved, Anderson’s brother has been the most successful, hitting the jackpot with his discovery of about 50 pairs of never-worn Nike shoes, which he then sold on eBay.

“When I use something from a dumpster, I know that I’m not only saving it from wasting away in a landfill and ruining our planet, but it means that the work that people put into making it wasn’t in vain,” Anderson said.

Brunet Breaux does not dumpster dive to make a statement; it’s just what he does when he’s hungry. He said that while he is not enraged by the existence of big corporations like Wal-Mart, he prefers to repair his clothing when it gets a hole, rather than buy a new item. As a musician, he chooses to spend his money on his hobby, instead of on food and clothing. (Breaux plays piano, guitar and an array of other unusual instrumentsthat include the mandolin and tin whistle).

“Other things are more important . . . I would rather spend money on nice equipment,” he said.

When Breaux and his friends attended Mandeville High School, the group’s idea of making a fast food run was digging into a bag of discarded burgers in a dumpster behind the local McDonald’s. “I got so much meat I did it again and again. It fed my friend’s family for like a week and a half,” Breaux said.

Breaux explained that he would go to McDonald’s within 30 minutes of closing and usually an employee would give him the bags of food that were headed for the trash.

Matt Wyatt, a natural resource ecology and management freshman, would often accompany Breaux on his quests to local dumpsters and recalled the group’s “dirty donut runs.” On these runs, the boys would drive to local bakeries after-hours and retrieve all of the donuts that had been thrown out for the day in a plastic bag separate from the non-hygienic waste.

“[The donuts] tasted perfectly fine, maybe a little dry at first,” Wyatt said. “It’s a crime to have so much left over … It’s just sick to see that much go to waste.”

Breaux noted that when he salvages food from the trash he only takes what he knows is clean; food still resting on a plate or seen being tossed into the trashcan, he feels, is fresh. “It’s not dirty, I saw someone put it in!” Breaux joked. “I mean, there’s a small possibility that the person has herpes … that would be unfortunate.”

Breaux also eats out of friends’ trashcans; he told me his friends save food for him that they would have otherwise discarded — ranging from restaurant leftovers to half-eaten yogurt cups.

In major coastal cities where freeganism is common, many participants do not physically dive into a dumpster at all; the practice is acknowledged by storeowners who leave food outside the doors of their businesses. Evidently, the stigmas Anderson and Breaux mentioned are less palpable in other places than here at LSU. Perhaps Anderson and Breaux will become pioneers for the Southern freegan movement. But as the trend continues to gain popularity, the number of LSU students saving cash by getting messy may also increase.

“Some people think getting food from the trash is strange, so they ask you a question to make fun of you,” Breaux said. “But I’m hungry and it’s free!”

*At Chris and Reese’s request, we did not archive the article with their last names.