I hate it when I make up a word that's already been pre-anticipated for me and "invented" by others. In this case, it's been pre-anticipated 3400 times, but numbers are not the issue, and have nothing to do with the uniquely original originality of what I originated first! Naturally the fact that I'm saying I pre-anticipated it first will make them claim otherwise -- as if the fact that they used the word online before I did means anything in terms of ultimate truth! Whoever said something first is not necessarily the most original sayer of what was said, OK? I realize that explaining this is complicated, so I won't. It is beneath my dignity! I mean, why ruin a perfectly good meme by allowing facts to get in the way of originality?

Besides, I was diving in dumpsters before most of these pipsqueaks were born. Don't get me wrong. I only took good stuff from dumpsters, and these people are stealing garbage; I'm just saying that my diving was more original than theirs, as is my use of the word "freaganomics."

Anyway, the freeganomics movement has now gone national with this LA Times "exposé":

Nelson, 51, once earned a six-figure income as director of communications at Barnes and Noble. Tired of representing a multimillion dollar company, she quit in 2005 and became a "freegan" -- the word combining "vegan" and "free" -- a growing subculture of people who have reduced their spending habits and live off consumer waste. Though many of its pioneers are vegans, people who neither eat nor use any animal-based products, the concept has caught on with Nelson and other meat-eaters who do not want to depend on businesses that they believe waste resources, harm the environment or allow unfair labor practices.

"We're doing something that is really socially unacceptable," Nelson said. "Not everyone is going to do it, but we hope it leads people to push their own limits and quit spending."

Nelson used to spend more than $100,000 a year for her food, clothes, books, transportation and a mortgage on a two-bedroom co-op in Greenwich Village. Now, she lives off savings, volunteers instead of works, and forages for groceries.

She garnishes her salad with tangy weeds picked from neighbors' yards. She freezes bagels and soup from the trash to make them last longer. She sold her co-op and bought a one-bedroom apartment in Flatbush, Brooklyn, about an hour from Manhattan by bike. Her annual expenditures now total about $25,000.

"I used to have 40 work blouses," said Nelson, sipping hot tea with mint leaves and stevia, a sweet plant she picked from a community garden. She shook her head in shame. "Forty tops, just for work."

Freeganism was born out of environmental justice and anti-globalization movements dating to the 1980s. The concept was inspired in part by groups like "Food Not Bombs," an international organization that feeds the homeless with surplus food that's often donated by businesses.

Freegans are often college-educated people from middle-class families.

In recent years, Internet sites like Meetup.com have posted announcements for trash tours in Seattle, Houston and Los Angeles and throughout England. Some teach people how to dumpster-dive for food, increasing the movement's popularity. At least 14,000 have taken the trash tour for groceries over the last two years in New York. Another site, Freegankitchen.com, offers lessons for cooking meals from food found in dumpsters, such as spaghetti squash salad.

Though recycling clothes and furniture doesn't strike most people as unusual, combing through heaps of trash for food can be unthinkable to many.

One recent night, Weissman and Nelson led a trash tour through New York for about 40 experienced and first-time diggers, including college students, a high school teacher, a taxi driver and a former investment banker. One veteran handed out plastic gloves.

And the caption:

Janet Kalish, center, with a papaya she collected during a New York City trash tour for people interested in becoming freegans -- anti-consumerists who, in the words of one advocate, are "opting out of capitalism in any way that we can."

In light of the admission of one of them that she "took home a salmon carcass from D'Agostino's trash and made ceviche," and "was somewhat surprised she did not get sick," I suppose that the stores' legal departments will weigh in, and Trader Joe's dumpsters will eventually have to be secured and up -- safe from the prying hands of the conspicously virtuous. Hey, maybe they can have a showdown! Dumpster divers get arrested! For trying to save the planet!

Not being a trained or licensed economist (I'm assuming they're as licensable as lawyers), I'm not competent to run the stats or do the number crunching which might shed some light on the extent to which the dumpster divers are actually saving the planet. However, because the word "freeganomics" is now in the public domain, I'm hoping someone will. There's probably a Ph.D. in the works. And imagine how much fun the field research would be!

But anyway, I wasn't planning a post on freeganomics until I saw this farmer's lament posted at Mrs. du Toit's blog:

....I don't want to turn this into a lament for times past. Time marches on, and the changes that have occurred have been good in the grand scheme of things. Cheap plentiful food means fewer hungry people. I'm convinced that there is no longer hunger in this country. I feed leftovers from the local free food pantry to my pigs. That's undeniably a good thing.

But... What has been lost?

What has been lost is the character of the American farmer. The people that build, that create, that civilize the wilderness, that value their independence and freedom above all else. The only people I know like us are over the age of 60. I don't feel worthy to count myself as one of them, as each and every one of them is infinitely more competent than I am.

Raw economic efficiency is the way decisions are inevitably made in America. That process does not consider the effects those decisions have on the non-economic aspects of our lives and our national character. We are an economic powerhouse, with a high standard of living and influence the world over. But what's so great about exporting culture, when culture consists of a McDonald's in every major foreign city? McDonald's isn't food, it's merely a shoddy facsimile of food. And it certainly isn't culture. Quality, taste, and beauty are rare things in our culture, at the expense of faster, cheaper, more convenient, and less effort. That's what our culture has become.

My wife and I have chosen to live differently. We work hard and produce nearly all of our own food. We take additional steps towards complete independence every year.

Seen this way, the dumpster diving phenomenon, while childish, histrionic, and neurotic, represents a pathetic, possibly instinctive desire for simpler times when there was hands-on involvement in the obtaining of food. Fortunately, the divers aren't smashing store windows to demonstrate against the WTO, but dismissing this mindset as idiotic (which it is) ignores its appeal.

Why do we laugh at the dumpster divers? I think it is because they are on a moral crusade. They take themselves seriously. They believe that they are saving the planet. They are making a statement that we are wasteful, that we are ruining the planet, and that they are not.

The irony here is that by trying to take them seriously, I will irritate them more than if I resorted to pure ridicule. They would see my attempt to understand the involvement of human instinct as condescending in the extreme.

Is it? Is it condescending to laugh at serious matters like instinct? I do it all the time, and I like to think I am also laughing at myself. I'm not planning to become a farmer, nor am I planning to take up dumpster diving and call it "freeganism." (For starters I am not a vegan, and never will be.)

OK, before I write another word, let me stress that I do not mean to make fun of farmers here. Nor am I in any way making a moral equivalency argument between American farmers and spoiled brats who think it's cool to pilfer from Trader Joe's dumpsters while solemnly proclaiming that you're better than everyone else. My father grew up on a farm, and my grandfather was a farmer until he died. Farmers are great people, and it's a shame to see the way their lifestyle has been rendered anachronistic, and almost impossible. To live the life my grandfather lived would be impossible. To illustrate, here's a picture I recently found of him, using horse-drawn farm equipment.

Yeah, I suppose if I went to a lot of time and trouble, I could manage to do that. I'd be willing to bet that the emotional reward would be enormous, too. But would it be cost effective? More likely, it would cost me more money to buy and maintain a fine set of plough horses and a tractor they could draw than it would to buy a tractor. And at the prices I might be able to get for whatever I could manage to grow using these methods, I'd be lucky to feed the horses, much less meet the mortgage payments on the acreage.

It's a crying shame. No, the dumpster divers are in no way comparable to the farmers. But I think my grandfather would have gotten quite a kick out of the modern urban trash thieves.

He made fun of my father for taking up life in the big city and did his best in the small amount of time I spent with him to make sure I knew that no one -- least of all him or his son, my father -- should ever be taken too seriously. No, I will not repeat what he said, lest he be as misunderstood as I often feel that I am. But it was a lifelong moral lesson, and I never forgot it.

The problem with people who take themselves too seriously is that a lot of them don't stop there. The younger and more emotional ones want to take things to the next step, which is telling other people what to do, and then to the next step -- which is working to enact their idiocy into actual laws. (I'm old enough to remember laughing at things like the anti-smoking movement, which is now solemnly mainstream, and not funny at all. I remember when decent people would never have castrated a normal male dog.) Freegans are militant vegans, santimonious moralists who believe not only in saving the planet personally, but in making me save the planet according to their rules. If they had their way, they'd stop me from eating meat, owning a dog with genitals, driving my car and probably a lot of other things I've never thought of.

My natural reaction is scorn and ridicule, but when I try to temper it with understanding, I guess I go too far. I probably have the defective liberal brain gene, but that's another topic.

AFTERTHOUGHT: I think my grandfather was onto something.

So was Freud.

But I think the freegans confuse instinct with emotion, and emotion with morality.

UPDATE: I just learned that the horses pictured with my grandfather were named "Prince" and "Topsy."

MORE: This video might shed some light on the nature of the dispute between my father and my grandfather.

"Country Ain't Country," by Travis Tritt

It actually brought tears to my eyes when I first heard it (probably because the dispute is in my blood.) (YouTube link here.)

Instinct? Or emotion?