There’s just something about
living off the land. For one thing, not having to pay for something
as vital as clothing and food brings about feelings of self-sufficiency
and independence from conventional institutions. Such feelings can
be comforting during a time when rising oil prices, exportation
of jobs and a federal government with—how do I put this, an
odd set of priorities?—are casting doubt on some of those
institutions.
There are ways to avoid buying things. Picking wild edibles, growing
your own food, and living off what some people claim is perfectly
good, perfectly clean grub that our capitalist grocery store friends
waste by throwing away.
I’ve dumpstered for furniture and found cast-off clothing
in the past, but I’ve always drawn the line when it comes
to food. So I was bit stunned when an old friend recently announced
that she no longer feels the need to buy food, because she digs
most of what she eats out of the trash.
Fear factor
I knew that Jean did some of that but wanted to push it to the back
of my mind. Once I even put on a brave face and attended a potluck
at Jean’s where I knew there was “retrieved” food,
but not before having a meltdown. I called a clean-cut friend with
a high-paying computer job.
“I think that if you asked most people, nine out of ten of
them would not eat garbage,” he assured me.
And yet, I’m becoming aware of more and more people who not
only would, but do eat garbage-picked food. And I’m not talking
about just starving inner-city folks who do it to survive. Those
who eat garbage include college students and artists, people with
and without jobs, here in the United States and elsewhere in the
world. The practice seems especially popular with those who want
to save a buck while bucking consumerism at the same time.
I recently came across a French documentary by Agnés Varda
called The Gleaners and I, which begins by focusing on
the Jean-François Millet painting of women gathering wheat
leftover after a harvest. Varda then follows modern-day gleaners—those
who sift through already-plowed fields, closed markets, trash cans
and elsewhere, always finding a use for what society leaves behind.
And there’s a lot of it. The U.S. Department of Agriculture
has estimated that roughly a quarter of the food produced in this
country is wasted while people continue to go hungry. Wouldn’t
it make sense to try and get some of that back?
I decided to get a firsthand look at the trash picking of food,
but I felt I needed a guide. Jean agreed to take me on a dumpster
dive – a food forage through the lush suburban back alley
forest.
Rolling your own
On a recent Monday night I found Jean in her kitchen, rolling cigarettes
with some tobacco combined with herbs she picked from Detroit’s
vacant lots. She rolled the cigarettes on a trash-picked red plastic
tray.
Jean is a gleaner. At the age of 48, she’s been finding furniture
and other household items since she was a teenager. She uses local
herbs for medicinal purposes, specializes in “found art,”
and, in the last several years, has found digging in dumpsters behind
upscale grocery stores to be a viable alternative to food shopping.
Before leaving the house, we grabbed two pairs of latex gloves.
Then, wearing dark clothing, we piled into a borrowed Chevy pickup
and headed off to an undisclosed location. I feel like I’m
on the way to rob a place, even though I’m not. Trash is generally
considered abandoned property, although rummaging through private
dumpsters could be called trespassing if a garbage picker has been
asked to leave. Jean tells me that so far the cops haven’t
given her much of a hard time, but some store employees have. We
waited until the store was closed. We also parked in an empty lot
adjacent to the store so as to not attract attention. We then walked
over behind the store, and there, beyond an unlocked wooden gate,
were two large green dumpsters.
Contemporary hunter gatherers have a number of tricks up their sleeves
when it comes to dumpster diving. One of them is to know when establishments
such as bakeries, grocery stores, and restaurants throw out food
and, I suppose, when the garbage gets picked up. Typical things
that get trash picked are day-old bagels, packaged produce and packaged
cheese that is near its expiration date. Jean says she examines
and washes everything she finds, and sniffs certain things to make
sure they’re good. Trash pickers recommend staying safe by
picking from the middle of the dumpster, far from the disgusting
edges or top. And of course, it’s better to do it in lower
temperatures so the food stays fresher.
For us, it turned out to be a worst-case scenario. Jean guessed
that the trash had been recently emptied, and the one dumpster we
went through was less than half full, causing Jean to have to rummage
around near the bottom to find anything. I offered to jump in too,
but my job, thankfully, was to perch next to the dumpster and have
things handed over to me. It makes less work for the primary diver
not to have to balance stuff on the side of the dumpster and keep
jumping in and out.
Instead of finding large bags full of just slightly bruised or deformed
produce that Jean had talked about finding on luckier excursions,
we found the odd jar of peanut butter hidden in a plastic bag of
other trash, and a few eggplants from an overturned cardboard box,
covered in primordial slime. There were unopened packages of pita
bread, individual small packages of soy milk, a plastic bag of pre-cooked
meatballs. Some things looked okay, while other things, like the
open bags of tortilla chips and cereal, I felt were unacceptable.
Jean took most everything, while I quietly sputtered, “You
can’t be serious. Put that down. Eeeew gross!”
The gem of the evening was a bottle of cheap red wine. This is for
you, Jean whispered, handing over the slippery 2004 California shiraz,
covered in small glass chunks, the label tarnished with red seepage,
evidently from a neighboring bottle that broke.
We ended up loading four salvaged cardboard boxes with our findings
and quickly carrying them back to the pickup, where we eagerly shed
our gloves. I noticed that mine were torn. On the way home, I tried
not to scratch my nose.Health and ethics
Dumpster diving comes with obvious potential for peril. Apart from
the possibility of getting sick or dying from eating spoiled or
contaminated food, there’s the fact that some store owners
or managers are serious about keeping gleaners out of their trash
and will go as far as to splatter it with bleach. I’ve even
read of garbage pickers having to dodge razor wire, even bullets.
Because of the danger, I wonder if some people do it mainly for
kicks.
This brings me to the ethics of trash picking when you don’t
actually have to. I mean, why not leave the good stuff for people
who are starving? Jean has an answer for that. She says she picks
through trash behind nicer grocery stores in areas where people
can afford good, wholesome food, and afterward she often shares
her bounty with those who need it.
In fact, Jean saves some of her best finds for her mother, a senior
citizen with a fixed income. “I give her food that she can’t
afford to buy for herself,” Jean says.
After delivering the food to cash-strapped friends and family, Jean
sometimes takes a truckload of it to a low-income area and knocks
on doors to give it away. “It’s disgusting and immoral
to throw away food, I believe, when so much of the world is starving.”
And furthermore, it’s about treading lightly on the earth:
the less food she buys, the less food is produced and the more of
the earth’s precious resources are conserved. Less packaging
ends up in landfills.
Playing devil’s advocate, I tell her that the less food she
buys, the fewer people will have jobs. She smiles, replying that
if we stop depending on fossil fuels, the people working on oil
rigs will have to find other work too.
Processing
Back at Jean’s later that night, we washed all of the vegetables
and containers in really warm water and soap. I was amazed at how
most things, after being washed, looked like they could’ve
been plucked right from grocery store shelves. We uncorked the shiraz
and shared a glass with another friend while taking turns strumming
a guitar on the front porch. The wine wasn’t bad, especially
considering the price.
All told, it had been a fun adventure – one that has made
me feel a little more secure about my own food supply, and probably
less concerned about the germs and dirt I encounter in more innocuous
day-to-day scenarios. While I’m not ready to start living
on dumpster-picked food, it’s good to know that if I ever
have to, I can.
Ever resourceful, Jean tells me that she eventually converted the
eggplant, along with veggies from a previous gleaning, into a lovely
tomato sauce. I, on the other hand, missed out on eating any of
the garbage-picked food. To tell you the truth, after all that,
I just wasn’t hungry.
Email
singleserving@annarborpaper.com |
illustration
by Raul Pena
|
