My dumpster diving days are far behind me, but that attitude used to be called "freegan".

For me, I wouldn't criticize anyone who chose to eat animal flesh sourced in this manner - no one in the capitalist supply chain is going to make any money off you, you're not increasing demand for animal flesh, eating that flesh does no harm to any living animal and makes it no more or less likely that more animals will be killed.

At the same time, the personal is political, and part of that is living your values in a way that is not only consistent but appears consistent to others. Publicly eating like a vegan, and sharing how your diet reflects your system of ethics, normalizes veganism and encourages people to respect and consider your point of view. Every time you, as a vegan, share a meal with others, you are also sharing your values, even if you unobtrusively choose a vegan meal option and don't say a word about other people's choices.

But if you call yourself a vegan, and then you eat meat, or wear leather, or otherwise consume animal products, it taints you with perceived hypocrisy, discredits your words and actions, and makes other vegans look bad by association.

Also, it just feels icky.

OP, I would ask, are you part of a collective? Are you in contact with other dumpster divers you could share or trade food with? Because I hate the waste involved, too, and though I wouldn't eat the animal flesh myself I would be willing to give it to someone whose ethics permit it.

Distance also matters a lot. I know where a bunch of little free libraries (no trademark) are in my community, but I don't visit them because they're too far away - I can check out books from Libby, I'm not going to take a bus ride for free books 😆

So advertising something like a free farm stand has diminishing returns, because you're going to reach a lot of people for whom the stuff at the stand isn't worth the time and effort to get to even if it's free.

Which is to say, instead of creating a farm stand and then trying to advertise it, one might want to figure out what the people in walking distance want in a farm stand first. Then you set up an email chain or something similar and let the locals know what's ripe when.

If you're in the United States, don't worry. Between tariffs and mass deportations, ordinary grocery store veggies are going to be more expensive than farmers' markets pretty soon.

When I was younger I really liked the idea of communes, but now I think intentional communities are more practical and avoid some of the worst aspects of communes.

The difference, to me, is communes typically collectivize all aspects of life - religion, culture, economy, working for a business owned by the commune and sharing property in common, and so on - and this not only isolates people from the surrounding community, but creates a dangerous power imbalance because of how much power the commune's leaders hold over every aspect of its members' lives.

Basically, I think a commune is what you get when you try to run a community like a family. And, unfortunately, there are a lot of abusive families out there.

But communes are only a subset of intentional communities.

In an IC, you don't have to share in any particular religious or philosophical belief system, you don't have to give everything you own to the group, you just have to want to live a lifestyle more sustainable and more closely connected to other community members than your average suburb or apartment building.

And you buy into the community and start contributing to common spaces and common meals and that's that.

You don't lose your home and family if you criticize the commune's leader. You don't have to hide your doubts about the commune's philosophy for fear of punishment. The community has a bunch of different income sources and doesn't fall apart if one communal business fails. There's no charismatic leader who, to give one completely hypothetical example, preys on teenage girls and gaslights their parents into thinking his dick is God's will. Power imbalances are limited because the power the community's leaders have over its members is limited.

Bonus:

Yes, and that's why, even in brutal hypercapitalist America, we fucking regulate the free market.

And why we should abolish the free market in the long run, for that matter.

Because having the "freedom" to buy poisonous adulterated foodstuffs, if you're too poor to buy real good food, is like having the "freedom" to accept sub-minimum wages if you're desperate enough for money. Not freedom, but exploitation.

Believe it or not, people on the left have been discussing this for centuries.

The general idea is recognizing a right to "personal property", which you get from using something, instead of the capitalist idea of "private property", which you get from buying something.

Currently in Western capitalist societies, if a rich person buys fifty houses, he owns fifty houses; he can live in one and collect rent from the other forty-nine, or leave the other forty-nine vacant, or tear them down to build one giant fortified survival compound, as he chooses. His property, his choice, whether it benefits the community or not.

In a society without private property, that rich person could only own one house - the house he lives in - because he lives in it and uses it. The people who live in and use the other forty-nine houses would own those. And the land underneath the houses would be owned by nobody, but belong collectively to the community, so no one person or company could accumulate land to the detriment of everyone else.

Landlords hate this idea.

Here's a really super basic summary:

https://www.workers.org/private-property/

And here's a long complicated discussion:

https://www.radicalphilosophy.com/article/anarchism-and-private-property

I don't.

I remember when American conservatives in the '60s claimed to support states' rights. But what they actually supported was segregation and Jim Crow. They used "states' rights" as a rhetorical tool to hide their racism behind a facade of principle, just like the Confederacy had a hundred years prior.

Among the American right, only useful idiots (like libertarians) actually believed in states' rights - or small government rhetoric in general - as a principle. It was always empty rhetoric. And now that Republicans are openly supporting Trump's big government authoritarian conservatism, it's become obvious how badly the Ron Paul types were used.

You don't understand. That protest provoked an emotional reaction in me and I didn't like it. Responsible protests don't hurt people's feelings. They went too far.

Here in California, utility companies are "solving" this by instituting extremely high fees for the privilege of connecting your solar power to the grid. If I recall from the last time I ran the numbers, rooftop solar panels no longer make economic sense for the vast majority of residential customers - it costs more money to install me solar panels and pay the monthly connection fees then you'll save by producing energy over the lifetime of the solar panels.

Edit: I just googled and it looks like after public outcry the regulators pulled their really bad fee schedule to replace with a slightly less bad fee schedule. The system works!

Probably the one time in history PG&E tried to fix a problem ahead of time. 😆

AOC is calling for protests. Equating protests to terrorism puts you in the ignoble company of the Iranian government, the Saudi monarchy, and the Georgia cops who charged protesters with felonies for distributing flyers.

Selective enforcement is the core of conservative law making.