The Gleaners and I: The Ethics of Dumpster Diving

This review was published originally on cinekklesia on February 12, 2008.

For six years you shall sow your land and gather in its yield; but the seventh year you shall let it rest and lie fallow, so that the poor of your people may eat; and what they leave the wild animals may eat. You shall do the same with your vineyard, and with your olive orchard" (Exodus 23:10-1, NRSV).

My wife has told me the story of a student at our alma mater who, in the course of her adolescence, never learned how to do laundry. When she got to college, she apparently had no idea what to do with clothes that she had just worn. Thus, she simply would throw them out and buy new ones. When the housekeeping staff learned of this, they took it upon themselves to teach the young woman how to use the university-provided washers and dryers.

Besides the discomfiting image of low-paid service personnel teaching a woman of privilege a basic hygienic practice, the story is shocking because of the sheer waste. Can you imagine throwing away clothes every week just to turn around and buy new ones? Even if one could afford to do so, it just seems so utterly stupid and disrespectful not to reuse something designed for the long haul. It's one thing not to finish all of the food on one's plate, but it's quite another not to launder one's underwear!

In its own distinct way, Agnès Varda's The Gleaners and I (2000)—a.k.a., Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse—tackles the question of waste from the perspective of those who fight against it, whether out of sheer necessity or for moral reasons. Using Jean-François Millet's famous 1857 painting as a springboard, Varda travels around France with her digital video camera, searching for modern gleaners in locales both rural and urban. She meets a wide array of people who are refreshingly honest about why they do what they do and who implicitly challenge us to consider our own wasteful habits.

Varda begins with gleaners of the traditional variety: those who pick the produce left behind after the harvesters have made their run. In the course of a regular harvest, both humans and machines leave behind vast amounts of food, whether due to oversight or aesthetics (after all, the produce that we see in our grocery stores has to be "pleasing to the eye"). The gleaners Varda runs into pick such food for a variety of reasons: some have perfectly stable finances but have fun picking free food (who said thrift was dead?), while others simply pick to survive. Varda focuses on one particular man, estranged from his family, living in a camper, and scrounging for food in fields and dumpsters. While he gleans out of necessity, he also learns quickly that the pickings aren't all that bad, especially the packaged foods that businesses so readily throw away to make room for new inventory.

The most interesting subjects in Varda's study are those who choose to eat discarded food for moral reasons. In Paris, Varda spends a lot of time with an intelligent man who seems as though he "should" be conventionally successful. Nevertheless, he lives in public housing, makes money by selling magazines to commuters, and consumes almost all of his calories from an outdoor market's leftover produce. Varda waits with her camera for the market to close and spots our underemployed subject, picking up food from the ground, packing much of it in his bag, and eating the rest "on the go." While his dining habits may make the stomachs of the queasy churn, he makes a good point that the food is still perfectly safe (it was just on sale an hour or two prior, after all). Why should it go to waste? (If you're interested in dumpster diving as an intentional lifestyle, then check out Wikipedia's article on Freeganism. Thanks to my wife for informing me of this ideology.)

Of course, France is not simply an agricultural nation, and transferring the idea of gleaning to a post-industrial society requires analyzing our non-food throwaways, as well. This part of dumpster diving is probably more agreeable, as it involves non-perishable items: clothes, furniture, electronics, and the like. Even though Web sites like eBay and craigslist have made it easier than ever to unload our old stuff on willing takers, we still pitch a lot. In Varda's movie, we meet a man who references a brochure containing his municipality's schedule for leaving large, discarded items on the curb. He then bikes to the relevant neighborhood at night and rummages through his fellow citizens' refuse before the garbage collectors arrive. (He has to be quick, though, since he spots other post-industrial gleaners on the prowl for free stuff.)

Of course, as with discarded food, the non-food items still have life left in them. Much of what we pitch isn't broken, per se — just old. Like businesses, we, too, make room for upgrades: new clothes for a new "life stage," new furniture for a new home, new computers with even more speed, memory, and features. The post-industrial gleaners take advantage of their fellow citizens' throwaway habits, finding objects both practical and whimsical amidst the rubble.

Yet, one cannot help but notice that these scavenging heroes are perhaps engaging in a vice of their own: hoarding. No, I'm not talking about hoarding in a greedy sense; rather, the desperate revulsion that the post-industrial gleaner experiences at the site of waste translates into a messy abode full of, well, trash. There's only so much "found art" that one can produce before the aesthetics of such art become overwhelmed by sheer clutter. While our wasteful lifestyles are scandalous, I'm not sure what purpose is served by scavenging for the sake of scavenging — after all, once the scavenger passes away, what happens to his/her pile of stuff?

Nevertheless, the gleaners—those who do it for survival and those who do it in protest—have an important lesson to teach us. By their very actions, they shine a light on the rest of us, giving us reason to pause, take stock (literally), and see what we could re-use, recycle, or give away. One of the scavengers in Varda's film argues that waste is a sign of disrespect for the worker who initially produced the items we're throwing away. I'll take it a step further and argue that waste is a sign of disrespect for God's Creation. I wouldn't say that dumpster diving is a morally necessary activity; however, it would be good to make sure that our dumpsters weren't so full in the first place.

Postscript

It appears that The Gleaners and I was quite a hit in France. Varda made a short sequel titled Two Years Later (available on the same disc), which followed up with the more memorable subjects from the original, while documenting the fun and quirky fan mail our director received.