sasha kovalchuk is an armchair communist who likes cycling and hates winter. He is an MA candidate in Political Science. sofija vrbaški is an anti-militarist, anti-fa, feminist activist and an MA candidate in Dispute Resolution. Both are roommates, dumpster divers, and graduate students in University of Victoria, situated on unceded Coast Salish territories.

We waste food at scandalous levels. The proof is in the dumpsters. Although many Canadians struggle to feed themselves daily, 45% of fruits, vegetable, and roots are discarded before ever reaching the dinner table (FAO). In total, Canada alone wastes $27 billion worth of food annually. In comparison, student debt in Canada, as of 2013, is $15 billion. The value of this trash is a free education nearly twice over for every Canadian student. To belabour the point, the value of wasted food equals to the GDP of the poorest 32 countries of the world combined. It is not only the food that goes to waste, but also the energy, farmland, and carbon emissions necessary for production and transportation (Statistics Canada).

As dumpster divers, we witness the scale of this waste first-hand. Although R. v. Patrick Sec.B1.8 established that person’s s. 8 privacy rights does not inhibit going through someone’s curbside garbage, we run the risk of being charged with trespassing under s.4 of British Columbia’s Trespass Act. In the case, the court affirmed Justice Ritter J.A.’s remark that: “[a] reasonable perso[n] would not expect that garbage is secure and private, and would conclude that garbage is not obviously private in nature”. So we can deduce that the no reasonable person would think thrown out food as private property. The law, however, only recognizes that trash is public once it leaves private property, i.e. once it is on the curb. Yet the discarded food in the dumpster, which is public in precedent would be denied to us because it is situated on private property. So we ask, since garbage is public and belongs to no one, how is it that we can be stopped (and potentially charged) for taking no one’s food?

The question becomes this: why should abandoned goods receive private protection when they would be more beneficial and less wasteful in the public sphere? In policy terms food wastage is an issue of the commons. Those issues encompass interests that affect everybody, for example air quality, and therefore justify regulating certain private practices like those of coal factories. Food, like air, everybody needs. Along these lines, we submit that the planet is a commons; something that belongs to everybody, including future generations. After all, according to the Federal Sustainability Development Act “‘sustainable development’ means development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet [their own]”.

To illustrate how private property stymies attempts for sustainability, let us examine the policy responses to food wastage without introducing the commons. Sustainability becomes political rhetoric because it omits the social and economic injustices born out of property. For instance, legislators in Belgium and France have passed laws that obligate supermarkets to donate surplus food to food banks. Such measures have led the European Union to investigate on how it can further expand these initiatives. What these types of laws do not address is why we need food banks in the first place? As Maya Angelou said “When I feed the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a communist”.

Take for instance the homeowners’ (the property-owning class’) approach to sustainability by retrofitting their houses. For a crude counterpoint, homes in slums made out of garbage would be a just as legitimate model of recyclable and reusable (hence sustainable) construction. These examples illustrate that a capitalist version of sustainability, as endorsed by Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace, and the Sierra Club, lacks any notions of social justice. So-called ‘eco-movements’ are an ideology that do not confront capitalism head-on, nor do they challenge the inequalities and waste that property produces. Sustainability and capitalism are incompatible because property is the nature of capitalism, and sustainability is the nature of the commons.

To paraphrase and echo Essig (2009) we have no illusion that our dumpster diving will change or subvert global capitalism. We dive for the commons as a cultural means to challenge property, a taboo in capitalist society. Sustainability and food are issues of the commons, and unless society is prepared to restructure property relations and law, both are relegated to the dumps.