I’m standing on a mattress with a torch in my mouth surveying the large plastic bags surrounding my feet. The mattress is covered with a layer of mushy pears; it sits at the bottom of a large industrial dumpster. I lift the bags one by one, testing their weight. The light ones I put aside, the heavy ones I take and lift over the lip of the dumpster, carefully lowering them to the ground. Having amassed the heavy ones I boost back over the edge of the dumpster and drop to the ground. Crouching, I untie the bags. One contains six large tubs of coleslaw. One is comprised entirely of cabbages. Another is filled with yoghurts, loose mushrooms and, sadly, broken glass. A fourth is the bread bag, holding today’s discarded French sticks, almond croissants and small ornate rolls coated in black seeds. The fifth is the money bag: two quiches, three packs of tomatoes, grapes, frozen pizzas, and three packs of Thorntons mini fudge brownies. This is dumpster diving, freeganism, or ‘aggressive recycling’ – the act of entering supermarket bins to retrieve damaged or expired food. For the last month or so I have been largely sustaining myself on ‘dumpstered’ food.
Going through the trash is an age-old practice, from the rag and bone man to private detectives to that bloke on Albany road poking about in a skip. And yet, telling someone about your new hobby (‘Oohh I got a lovely seafood medley from the bin behind Tesco’s last night!’) will usually provoke a response of surprise and disgust. Admittedly, our natural reaction to hearing the words ‘climb, ‘into’, and ‘bin’ in conjunction is not a positive one. Picking out and eating your first found food is, however, very much a case of traversing an irrational hump of distrust. Dumpster diving poses no more of a health risk than, say, rubbing up against an unknown body in Solus, or eating food from City Pizza. We associate bins with dirtiness, but the reality is that supermarket bins are metal containers (sometimes completely spotless metal cages), filled with plastic bags of expired - i.e., still fine for another week - or ‘damaged’ food. Sometimes the packaging is split and food has spilled onto other foods, and it’s down to you whether or not to take the stuff home and clean it off. This gets about as gross as rinsing rogue gravy granules from packs of pasta or selectively removing mouldy tomatoes. That is to say, not very gross. By law, any meat, fish or eggs must be destroyed or made unfit for consumption before being chucked, so you very seldom come across anything truly rancid. Taking the plunge boils down to overcoming a knee-jerk gag response and, perhaps more problematically, overcoming the social inhibition holding us all back from leaping gleefully into the nearest bin. I must admit, I have frozen in embarrassment mid-rifle as a drunken student zombie approaches, then leant against the bin casually, or, if I am already inside, peered furtively over the top like a meerkat. Sometimes it’s best to flip the lid and clamber inside as quickly as possible. Then you can have a rest, get out your torch – an invaluable piece of equipment if you’re stealing in at the dead of night – and examine your winnings out of sight and at your leisure.
Dumpster diving is technically outlawed, but the police consistently turn a blind eye due to the complete worthlessness of the food. I have regularly rummaged through bins in direct view of bored looking security guards. Curiously, the other night a police helicopter hovered directly above me for five minutes, shining a light down as I sat on my haunches happily counting oranges next to a dumpster. They were probably up there chuckling into their microphones. It’s even hassle free to target a bin on a busy pedestrian filled road. I find it helps to go about matters in a businesslike way – embrace and enjoy your practice by maybe whistling a gay tune or offering passers by bread rolls. Witnesses tend to appear bemused or sometimes scared, assuming you’re some hunger-crazed hobo.
Dumpster diving is a case of the pros wildly outweighing the cons. Not to mention the obvious financial gains of foraging, reclaiming food can be viewed as a green endeavour. Put simply, food you take from bins is food saved from the landfill site. Probe even further into the bin bag and you uncover some interesting ethical incentives; dumpstering is viewed by some as a fun and tasty way of sticking it to the man. Mind bogglingly, each year supermarkets send £18 billion worth of food to landfill, and by retrieving this unnecessary waste dumpsterers are highlighting and tackling the inherent symptoms of our culture of excess. Food Not Bombs, a loosely knit group of anti-war collectives who distribute vegetarian and vegan food to those in need, acquire much of their stuff from supermarket trash. Similarly, the radical Christian group the Jesus Christians decrees its members eat only dumpstered food, and this is handed out to the needy too. In interviews the Jesus Christians state they are taking responsibility for the ills of consumerism: ‘It’s not just about making use of the waste from supermarket bins, it’s about a principle far greater and [more] eternal than that - about sharing what we have.’
But I don’t purport to dumpster dive as a way of single handedly bringing down the ugly goliath that is consumer culture. On the contrary, I carefully remove my swatch before going on forays and listen happily to my shiny iPod while frolicking in the bins. Each time I set off on an urban forage I hope no one has discovered and cleaned out my fruitful spot, and all the food I like the look of is taken home and eaten chiefly by me. That is to say, my motives for rummaging through the trash are fundamentally selfish and go directly against the more lofty ‘principles’ of dumpster diving. Having said that, the thought of so much food going to waste each night does pain me. I was determined for this not to turn into a sermon, so will leave it there. Scoff if you will.
