A few days ago while perusing Facebook I came across a
New York Times piece about a blogger who lost her high paying job and now dumpster dives to feed her family. I was reminded of my young starving artist friends in Columbus, Ohio who did this a decade ago, even before the recession hit.
One guy knew some employees at a local bagel shop who double bagged all the store's day old bagels in clear trash bags and tossed them in the dumpster. If he got there in time he could score dozens of free bagels.
Some others would go to the dumpster at World Market where they could find things like gourmet chocolates, just past their sell-by date, the box still wrapped in cellophane.
I never got my own food that way (though I certainly partook in the offerings of my resourceful friends on occasion), but my first apartment was furnished with a wide variety of slightly damaged items that my roommate and I found abandoned in our back ally. Among these treasures was a fuzzy-sounding, but functional antique record console. I had only a few records, but my roommate had a fantastic collection. It was in our eclectically decorated living room that I first fell in love with
Hank Williams, Sr. and
Stevie Wonder. There was nothing more exciting for us than discovering a new treasure that some neighbor had discarded. What we didn't scavenge from the street we got as hand-me-downs from friends and family or bought at our neighborhood
Volunteers of America thrift store for next to nothing.
Portland is a city with a real appreciation for things old and used. I think far less goes to waste here than in many other cities. The downside is that it's more challenging to find such items for free and the thrift stores, while plentiful, are pricier and more picked over.
But even in Portland's ultra-green culture there is a stigma surrounding this kind of living. Many people would rather buy cheap, poorly constructed, new consumer goods than used ones, much less pull them out of a dumpster. I think this clip from
Portlandia expresses what the general populace thinks about dumpster diving
O
While this is meant to be satire, most things on the show are only a slight exaggeration of Portland culture. I can't help but worry that poking fun in this way may only serve to perpetuate the cultural divide between those who reuse/
upcycle and those who think doing so is icky.
Everyone I've known who gathered the discarded goods of others was pretty conscious of sanitation. Certainly there are people who eat food straight out of the trash, but I do think this is an area in which one's standards are usually relative to one's level of desperation. Most environmental activists wouldn't go so far as to eat something they found that might be unsafe to eat for the sake of avoiding waste.
I often wonder at what most people are willing to put in their bodies without a second thought ("foods" made from genetically modified crops and artificial substances and riddled with pesticides and antibiotics) while maintaining the notion that it's unsafe and disgusting to eat something that someone else didn't want and tossed in a bin simply to get it out of the way.
I am fortunate to be financially stable enough to be on the throwing away side of the equation, but not to such an extent that I can afford to throw away much.
Ever since I moved out of my parents' home I've cringed at the thought of letting food go to waste. When I spent two years as an unemployed student in
Eugene scraping by on student loans and whatever I could get for selling my books, clothes, and plasma, I gained a deeper appreciation for having enough to eat.
I learned a lot about avoiding waste during the years I spent as a line cook at small independent restaurants in my early to mid twenties. I don't always do it as much as I should, but I try to remember to save my vegetable scraps to make stock for soup, to use up older ingredients before opening new ones, to make substitutions in recipes in order to use what I have available instead of buying extra items that I am unlikely to use again, to label and date food containers so that I know what I have and how old it is. In addition to creating less waste, this saves money. It's something that I am trying to be more consistent about.
It's mind-boggling how much perfectly good food goes to waste in this country between corporate policies (an old roommate of mine was written up by one of his managers at
Wild Oats for eating soup that was going to be thrown away) and thoughtless or absent-minded consumers (myself included). A 2008
New York Times article sites a government study that shows that 27 percent of America's food available for consumption is thrown away. Of course a lot of that is perishable items that weren't used in time (something that can be prevented with better planning), but certainly a significant portion is discarded long before it becomes unsafe to eat.
It's daunting to imagine how much space in landfills is taken up by the day old bagels that went un-salvaged.
