Can I buy dinner for a freegan?

[HipGnosis]

I don’t get the ‘buy him dinner’ concept at all. Normal guys don’t do that. I see why that lead someone to deduce the OP was female.
I also don’t get the OP’s flat out rejecting asking him what’s acceptable to him.

Invite him to meet you at a restaurant. You meet him by coming out of the restaurant at the agreed time. Hold out your doggie bag and ask if he’d rather take it from you or from the trash. I’d be tempted to hurl the bag and say “FETCH!”.

[Amateur_Barbarian]

Order the porterhouse for two and when you can’t finish it, he can take over.

[VinylTurnip]

@Drunky_Smurf

I would recommend, to the OP, against doing this. It goes against every morale that a Freegan stands for. If you buy him dinner you will be spitting in his eye and kicking him in the nuts, metaphorically.

I concur. This is no time for metaphor.

[control-z]

This is really freaky. Does he also couch surf or can he be troubled to pay for his own shelter?

[BigT]

@Amateur_Barbarian

And maybe some self-designated Freegans on the Land are intellectually and ethically honest about it.

I’d wager many if not most are the kind of self-serving pissants who would rag about every aspect of living with Mom 'n Dad, including how paltry their allowance was. Anyone who can take the notion from “living off discards” to “steal whatever you want 'cuz, like, it’s all theft, dude” is just a parasite looking for admiration of their noble, self-serving laziness.

Your third sentence is fine, but your second does not make sense with regard to your first. If the possibility of ethical freganism exists, why would you assume that the majority are unethical? It isn’t just because of that uncited quote–you started with the assumption that it must be unethcial, even trying to argue that using someone’s waste is somehow wrong. You called them parasites before you could actually name any parasitical behavior. A parasite harms that which it feeds off of.

As for my advice? Dude has an Internet presence. Use an anonymous login and ask him your question in a generic way. “Have you ever had anyone volunteer to pay for your meal? Did you think that was a good thing?” Use the answer to inform what you should do.

If you can’t do that, ask around actual freegan sites or something. Asking here, where it seems that many posters think poorly of the guy, does not make sense. (Yes, he should throw a doggie bag in the trash, and treat the guy like an animal. That’s useful advice.)