What made you become a Freegan?

I guess in some ways I always have been although not always actively. I remember when I made the conscious decision to adopt the Freegan lifestyle– I have a friend of mine who was an extremely active and passionate Freegan. One day she asked me if I wanted to go out ‘skipping’ with her and I said yes. I could not believe what I saw that day – just the amount of stuff that was thrown away that was perfectly alright! It made me quite angry so I decided to do something about it. I might be only person but at least I can do my bit to reduce the amount of food waste that ends up in landfill.

What is it that makes someone a Freegan?

Well……..I think it starts with being concerned with what we as a species are doing to our planet and the desire to do something to change it. The amount of food that is perfectly edible that gets put into landfill is phenomenal. If I remember correctly, about a third of the food the average UK household buys gets thrown out. We believe that this is a horrible state of affairs to be in. While we can’t necessarily do much to change the way people think about food and waste. Or educate people that “best before” dates have nothing to do with when a food product goes off but is simply an indication of when a food’s flavour or appearance will begin to decline. We can still do our little bit to try and keep as much food as we can eat out of landfill and reduce our impact on the world and its resources by utilising what has already been produced more effectively.

What do you love the most about being a Freegan?

Variety. The never knowing what you could find in the next skip, never knowing what you’ll be eating for your meal in the evening. Some people find that the down side to Freeganism but for me that’s what I love about it. Plus believe it or not there is a real social side to it, we share tips and finds with each other, go skipping together and even have dinners and things together. It also means that there’s always tons of delicious, healthy food in the fridge and I can have as many people over for dinner as I like! It’s really good fun!

And finally, do you think more people should become Freegans?

I believe that if more people had a more “freegan” outlook on life, it would make such a massive impact on this country. By this I don’t mean that everyone should go and get their food out of skips. What I mean is that if all of us made sensible decisions about what we buy, getting just the right amount of food that we know we’ll eat and use it all, not buying excessively packaged food and trusting our noses and eyes to tell us when food has gone off instead of putting blind trust in some label that is wrong the vast majority of the time anyway, and things like that, we would be well on our way to making this world a much better one to live in.