Metadish, Fresh from NYC

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Entitled, spoiled NYU students end their semester by throwing out such treasures as a working iPod, a painting of a Mediterranean harbor and body lotion. Freegans are of course, there.

In case you’re unfamiliar, Freegans are anti-capitalist hippies that dig through other people’s garbage to prove that they’re better than the rest of us. Yeah, even you people that shop at Beacon’s Closet.

You know why I really loathe people like this (I mean despite the fact that they dig through other people’s garbage as giddy as a pedophile at the playground)? Because somewhere deep down inside me they make me feel a little hypocritical.

I mean ideologically, I’m as anti-capitalist as the next guy, I just don’t want to have to skeeve through other people’s trash to prove it. Well, that and the fact that nobody ever throws away 42″ plasma screen TVs.

Admittedly, in college me and roommates had like four sofas in our living room all of which had been acquired after other students left them behind at the end of a semester.  But what the hell were we supposed to do? We were lazy and we needed money for beer. It seemed like the perfect solution and only one of us even got body lice. Win, win.

The definition of a freegan according to their website:

Freeganism is a total boycott of an economic system where the profit motive has eclipsed ethical considerations and where massively complex systems of productions ensure that all the products we buy will have detrimental impacts most of which we may never even consider. Thus, instead of avoiding the purchase of products from one bad company only to support another, we avoid buying anything to the greatest degree we are able.

Bob Torres is a sociology professor at St. Lawrence University in Canton, N.Y. who shares many ideological and ethical views with the Freegans. Environmentalism, Mr. Torres said, “is becoming this issue of, consume the right set of green goods and you’re green,” regardless of how much in the way of natural resources those goods require to manufacture and distribute.

“If you ask the average person what can you do to reduce global warming, they’d say buy a Prius,” he added.

Well, I guess I can finally stop wearing that “My other car is a Prius” t-shirt.

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