In July this year, as we faced the fact that the economy had moved from a credit crunch into a full-blown recession, the British Retail Consortium revealed that food prices were rising three times as fast as the average wage. At a time when money is becoming increasingly scarce and food increasingly valuable, it often feels like little can be done to stop that tug at the purse strings. However, it seems some have found a way to ease the pinch of the economic downturn, but it’s not for everyone.
Whatever you want to call it; skipping, dumpster-diving or freeganism, there is no getting around the fact that in involves rummaging around in bins in the middle of the night for food that’s been thrown away. I first came across this counter-consumerist movement quite by accident; when in the pub a friend of a friend finished her drink, got up to leave and announced that she was going up to Summertown to do some skipping.
Like the majority of people, I’d never heard of skipping – and, like the majority of people, once I had heard of it, I wasn’t an immediate convert. Besides, food has a use-by date for a reason, doesn’t it? Well, yes and no. One of the reasons why skipping can yield some profitable hauls that are safe to eat is the confusion surrounding use-by and best-before dates. Whereas use-by dates mean the food should definitely not be eaten after it’s expiry, the best-before date indicates that food is past its best after that date has expired, but is crucially still edible. The problem is that many consumers aren’t aware of this distinction, and so they don’t purchase food past its best-before date.
In a society where the consumer is king, this means that supermarkets are forced to trash food that is perfectly safe to eat. Unfortunately, since EU law requires both best-before and use-by dates, the Environment Agency’s plans to scrap best before dates last summer were still-born.
‘I’ll bring back armfuls of sandwiches to my halls. They go pretty quickly.’
Stephen Robertson, Director General of the British Retail Consortium, said that this shouldn’t matter, ‘Scrapping best-before dates won’t reduce food waste,’ he said. ‘Customer education will.’ He is also points out that it isn’t just food in supermarkets that goes to waste. The same use-by/best-before confusion in the home means that good food goes to waste in dustbins up and down the country. WRAP, the Government funded Waste and Resource Programme estimates that in England and Wales alone, household and commercial food wastage amounts to over 3.5 million tonnes of perfectly edible food being thrown away each year. This means that whilst in the midst of the recession, a staggering £12.2 billion of food per year is being needlessly bulldozed into landfill. Rummaging around in bins in the middle of night is starting to make sense.
So what is the skipping scene like in Oxford? ‘Robert’, a third year undergraduate, first went skipping a year ago. ‘I was already involved in various environmental groups, and then a friend told me about the amount of free food that was on offer. I was appalled at the amount of wastefulness’. Since then, he tries to go at least a couple of times a week. ‘Quite often you come across bins that have already been skipped – but usually there is something on offer, because we only take what we need and there is always more food than one person can take.’ Speaking to Robert, I wondered the extent to which freeganism remains a fringe activity of the idealistic few. ‘A fair amount of people in Oxford go skipping,’ he assures me. ‘Actually, you start to recognise people after a while’. When I ask what sort of food you can expect to find around the city, I’m amazed at the variety Robert describes: ‘Sandwiches, doughnuts, bread (there is always bread), fresh fruit and veg. I once found a whole packet of hobnobs – that was pretty nice,’ he muses. ‘My best haul? Well, once I found some tortellini and then in the very next bin I found a jar of posh pasta sauce. It was a good dinner that night.’
But is there really such a thing as a free meal? Robert asks me not to publish the specific supermarkets and cafes where he goes skipping. When such information has been published in the public domain before, freegans have found that the food in their favourite skips has been sprayed with bleach, or even mixed with broken glass. As well as that, removing food from bins is illegal – if caught, freegans could potentially be prosecuted under the 1968 Theft Act, although no freegans in Britain have ever been charged. Aside from the free food, Robert believes that freeganism is worth the risk. ‘It’s a way to try and counteract the socially accepted culture of wastefulness that is so obscene. Supermarkets, in the interests of increasing their profit margins, are willing to allow perfectly edible food, that has in many cases been over-packaged and travelled a great distance, to end up in a landfill site where it rots, contributing to global warming, driving us even more towards climate change. Freeganism is a way to negate these effects of over-consumption.’
Nevertheless, I put it to Robert that there are many who just wouldn’t want to take food from a bin. ‘No, maybe not…But what I’ve found is that whilst there are certainly those who aren’t willing to go skipping themselves, plenty of people are willing to eat what I find. Often, I’ll bring back armfuls of sandwiches from [well-known high street sandwich chain] to my halls, put them in a fridge and put up a sign telling them where the food is from, inviting people to help themselves. They go pretty quickly.’
But it’s not just students who engage in freeganism. Websites and forums from around the world have sprung up all over the internet dedicated to sharing information and tips. One website, www.freegan.org.uk advertises freegan meet-ups and skipping expeditions, and allows users to share their experiences. ‘I had my first freegan experience with a friend yesterday’, wrote one user, ‘It was amazing. We collected for free bread and cakes that we shared with five other people…I’m looking for people living in the same area as me to keep on collecting food’.
The website also shares the best places to go skipping, depending on what you are looking for. Sainsbury’s for example, is one of the best supermarkets to go skipping for bread according to one website, because of company policies that govern the life cycle of bread. The first day a loaf is baked on site, it sits on the bread counter to buy fresh, then if it’s not sold it gets sliced up and put on a shelf, on the third day it’s heavily reduced, and on the fourth day, it ends up in the skip at the back of the shop.
After talking to Robert and learning of his and other freegans’ experiences, I couldn’t help but admire their actions. Whilst skipping might not be for everyone, it does highlight the culture of over-consumption that many people in Britain are either ignorant of, or else apathetic towards. As food prices, the rate of climate change and the amount of food that goes to waste all continue to rise, Britain can’t afford to not take notice of the levels of wastefulness for much longer.
