To my surprise, there is scattered evidence that people are reading my book. It makes me uncomfortable – that perhaps, somewhere, a graduate seminar is trashing it, someone is posting a takedown on goodreads, etc. But since I’ve largely assumed that my book was rapidly consigned to the intellectual dustheap – appropriate, for a book… Continue reading Sociology, floating in the ether
Although I haven’t quite crested the New York Times bestseller’s list, I’ve been quite pleased to have been contacted by a few outlets to talk about my new book: What’s in the Dumpster (Tiny Spark) How to Fix All That Food Waste (Good Magazine) Freeganism: Food Waste’s First Wave (The New Food Economy) Freegans… Continue reading Fame
Should a book on freegans—that is to say, people who try to live for “free” in the present through appropriating capitalism’s waste, while trying to build a future in which the things people need are provided for “free” through a gift economy—be free? This is a purely academic question. My “book” on freegans—I’m going to… Continue reading Free
I had only been going into New York to hang out with freegan.info for a month when I featured in my first media story. A Dutch journalist was quite taken with the incongruity of a Princeton University student going through the garbage, and despite my protestations that there were way more knowledgeable people in the… Continue reading Fool Me Twice
Baked goods have a somewhat legendary status among dumpster divers. In the anarchist travelogue Evasion, the author shoplifts and hitch-hikes his way across middle America subsisting almost entirely off of bagels. On freegan.info trash tours, we rarely could resist the temptation to stop at Dunkin Donuts—even though most of us were vegan and we generally… Continue reading Let Them Eat Cake
There has been an extraordinary amount of media attention and policy action around food waste lately. Major environmental groups like NRDC and totally not-at-all environmental groups like the Institution for Mechanical Engineering have released reports documenting how 30-50% of food is wasted in the US and abroad. While reports from non-profits on some issue or… Continue reading The Limits of Think.Eat.Save
The day after New Years, I took a trip down memory lane to engage in what was one of my favorite activities during my undergraduate days at Princeton: digging through trash on the streets of New York with the members of freegan.info.* My ostensible reason for going was that I’ve been playing with the idea… Continue reading Elephant Graveyard
At long last, my first peer-reviewed academic publication is available online in the journal Ethnography, at least to those with access to an academic database. I wrote this as my Junior Paper at Princeton, and I have to confess that my thinking on some of these issues has evolved and matured a bit. Still, given… Continue reading In Between Protests, I Also Do Some Sociology
At the start of June, the New York Times published a piece by Jake Halpern called “The Freegan Establishment” on a group of radicals near-and-dear to my heart. While some might be less-than-enthusiastic about being the person that comes to mind when the issue of eating trash comes up, I was quite flatterd to have… Continue reading Not (Quite) Buying It
Alex V. Barnard - Sociology 