DUSTBINS OF HISTORY

People who raid supermarket waste-bins after hours to liberate the unwanted food have generally been known as 'freegans'. Some object to this term, though, on the grounds that it appears to imply, by portmanteau logic, a foraging for specifically vegan food. The preferred alternative is 'skippers', which runs the risk even more appallingly of suggesting a rummaging through building-site jetsam, but also has happier connotations of sports captaincy and a life on the ocean wave.

Only a small number of these nocturnal foragers are in financial extremis and half-starving. Most are people who could shop in the supermarket during opening hours if they wished, but choose instead to make a statement about the atrocious waste that goes on. Much of the recovered food is within its sell-by date, and even most of that which isn't is perfectly edible. To be fair, the supermarkets have made something of an effort to distribute nearly expired food to the needy, but it inevitably remains far too easy to dump it.

One chain has a policy now of securing its wasted food behind metal fences and cameras to prevent skippers from getting at it. Does this not pose a highly illuminating question? Apart from the legal issue of trespassing on private property, why should any company (or any individual) be concerned about what happens to waste material once it has been discarded? The very act of throwing away is a gesture of rejection, of declaring the disposed item to be superfluous to requirements, but as soon as somebody else tries to make use of it, an anal possessiveness comes over the disposer. The small child's conflict about the excrement that is expelled from his body is suggested. It is something repellent, and yet it must be his, because it has come from him.

The seeming reason that the supermarkets don't want skippers to take their refuse is that they may then stand indicted for their profligacy in a world of deprivation, when even the developed nations are plagued by growing poverty and mounting unemployment. But then skippers almost never advertise their activity (other than during the period in 2007 when the news media collectively seized on it). The chief reason for their opposition to skipping is of course that if you can help yourself to their products for free, why would you go back to queuing at the checkouts to buy them?

Notwithstanding the obvious capitalist objections, though, there remains the tantalising legal chimera of who owns rubbish, and why it should be as jealously protected from the enterprising forager as the products on shop shelves.