Freeganism becoming a trend among concerned consumers

Not counting the times he eats out at restaurants, Elwin Cotman typically spends about $10 per… Not counting the times he eats out at restaurants, Elwin Cotman typically spends about $10 per month on food. For that same price, a donor can sponsor a malnourished child through the charity Feed the Children.

Cotman isn’t a child, however, and he’s definitely not malnourished. Cotman is a 25-year-old African-American with loud, ruddy freckles and a quiet, monotone voice. His grocery bill is light, because when Cotman goes to the grocery store, he usually passes the entrance and goes around to the Dumpster, where he salvages about 70 percent of his food.

Cotman isn’t unemployed — he works as an adult literacy tutor — but he wants to disconnect from what he calls the “capitalist economic system” and live a simpler, less wasteful life. Cotman identifies himself as a “freegan,” a member of a movement of concerned consumers who retrieve food and other necessities from waste receptacles.

At 2:15 a.m. one Wednesday, Cotman picked me up in his car to go Dumpster-diving. I gave him some money for gas, and we drove outside Pittsburgh to a premium grocery store, where Cotman parked directly in front of the Dumpster. He asked that I don’t reveal which store in particular.

While Cotman strolled up to the trash bin and clamorously flipped the lid, I hovered by the car. I had imagined shadowy back alleys, but the reality of a wide-open suburban parking lot, illuminated by towering overhead lamps, was far more intimidating. This was the type of place where my mom would buy organic blueberries. “Someone normal might see us,” I thought.

Even though Cotman grew up in Penn Hills, not far from the Dumpster we pilfered, years of practice have eliminated any self-consciousness about Dumpster-diving. He started during his freshman year as a Pitt student, when he joined the city chapter of the organization Food Not Bombs. The group’s website explains, “Food Not Bombs shares free vegan and vegetarian meals with the hungry in over 1,000 cities around the world every week to protest war, poverty and destruction of the environment.” The group hosts chapters in 45 states. In Pittsburgh, Cotman and others from Food Not Bombs would prepare and serve food that they salvaged from South Side Dumpsters to homeless people.

“I don’t believe in locking food up and forcing people to work in order to survive and get the sustenance they need. I think it’s ridiculous,” he said.

After Cotman opened the lid, we took turns jumping into the Dumpster and handing food over the side. The Dumpster did not smell rank, but there was a half-inch of egg yolk carpeting the floor. Cotman explained that stores tend to throw out large quantities of just a few products every day and that we were fortunate enough to come on an egg day. We loaded about four dozen eggs, 50 lunch-sized bags of sour cream and onion chips, a plastic crate of grapes and three tubs of pre-made pasta salad into Cotman’s trunk.

I was impressed with our haul, but Cotman had seen better. In 2005, Cotman graduated from Pitt with an English major and moved to Washington, D.C., where he paid $250 per month to live in a house called “The Fishing Hole” with like-minded activists. Though Cotman worked as an after-school middle school teacher, he and his housemates would Dumpster-dive every day.

“We live way beyond our economic means,” Cotman said. “[We] just had a kitchen full of food to the point where we could feed the homeless with it, to the point where we could invite people into our home and just give them food.”

It might seem like a coincidence that Cotman has met others who eat out of the trash and serve salvaged food to homeless people, but his habits are becoming fairly common. While there are no reliable surveys of the number of freegans in the United States, their notoriety in the national media has been escalating: In the past two years, Business Week, Anderson Cooper 360°, The Oprah Winfrey Show, Fox News Channel, Tucker Carlson and Marie Claire have all put freegans on display, usually with a conclusion in which the host or author tries the food and declares that it actually tastes great.

After raiding six loaves of artisan bread from a second store’s Dumpster, Cotman and I drove back to his house. He lives in a Lawrenceville row house named “Cyberpunk Apocalypse” that rents rooms to young writers for $50 per month. The house is owned and operated by another Pitt English department graduate, Daniel McCloskey, 23, who bought the house after receiving an unexpected inheritance from a great-aunt whom he never met. The food we salvaged was shared by the seven housemates who perform house chores and collect food according to a schedule on the refrigerator.

We stood in the kitchen to ate some of the food we gathered. I ate the chips, because they were sealed in bags, and then summoned the courage to try some of the bread. It was obvious why the bread was discarded: It fell apart in my hand.

As Cotman drove me home, we spoke about his future. He is a serious, amateur fantasy writer, who writes about “elves, fairies and unicorns.” However, he knows that, in the long-run, his lifestyle is as much a fantasy as his stories. When he gets older, he wants to teach middle schoolers and raise a family, so he doesn’t expect to have enough time to Dumpster-dive. Instead, he’s looking at ways to be practical while remaining idealistic, like mastering urban farming and living off the grid.