Dumpsters and Roadkill: Dissecting the Food Politics of Evasion and Feral Visions

By Matt Dineen

How can we meet our basic human needs while simultaneously doing what keeps us going? It is the dilemma of our day: finding a way to follow our true passions while surviving in a capitalist society. Some attempt to incorporate their interests and values into their jobs. Others choose to separate work from their passions, holding down often mind-numbing occupations just to pay the bills.

Regardless, we all have to work to pay rent and food. Or is there another way? Is it possible to eat and live outside of the system?

In fact, there are already people out there attempting to do just that. They are living a completely different way—trying to follow their passions with reckless abandon while subverting the traditional strategies of survival.

But is this way of life as simple and romantic as it sounds?

Two different examples of this "third way" recently swept through Madison, WI. The first was a presentation by the author of the infamous book Evasion, now a cult classic within the punk-traveller subculture. Later, a group of North Carolinian primitivists stopped by on their Feral Visions tour.

Both presentations offered radical critiques of traditional American society but focused on putting these ideas into practice through alternative lifestyles. Although the critiques were fairly similar, these two events offered very different approaches to acquiring and consuming food...
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