“Dumpsters Across America” by Kate Sayre

“Are you just going to throw that away?” I ask the young man in the smock and baseball cap that read Zaro’s Bakery.

As I wait for my midnight train in Grand Central Station, I walk around and watch the stores close. At Zaro’s, I see a worker fill a garbage bag with a dozen fresh (well, sort of) loaves of bread, so I talk to him. The store is small and as I ask my question the young man’s manager quickly takes two steps so he is in front of the bread, as if the pumpernickel and I might get into a fight.

“Can I have that if you’re just going to throw it away?” I ask.

The young man looks at his manager with eyes that say, Why not, this is trash, right? But the authority shakes his head no and the young man continues to put the still edible bread in a wheeled trash bin presumably heading for the larger one outside. I try to reason but eventually leave hungry and miffed.

Such nonsensical wasting almost makes you want to dive into a dumpster for dinner.

So I did. I went dumpster diving. For those unfamiliar with the art, dumpster diving is the act of “reclaiming” waste; or, rather, the act of a person discovering unwanted goods in garbage bins behind America’s many large food/clothing/furniture emporiums and trying to live off the shocking excess.

For the majority who have never actually taken the plunge, dumpster diving might sound, if not crazy, at least a little gross. But if you’re not afraid of getting your hands dirty, you can win some surprisingly unspoiled spoils.

I went to three different cities in America—New York, Portland, Oregon, and Gainesville, Florida—and casually asked all the DIY folks I knew about “dumpstering,” “bin-diving,” or “containering,” as they call it.

They talked in what seemed to be fairy tales. In New York, I stayed in the apartment of several self-proclaimed “Freegans”—a combination of the words “free” and “vegan”—who told me about the delicious contents of several dumpsters around town. We’re talking dumpsters full of non-slimy, completely fresh food, the pre-washed lettuce and full packages of name brand cookies you’d find in high-end markets. One man even told me of a sushi restaurant in Chelsea that threw out perfectly safe sushi grade salmon when they closed for the night. I balked at this, but he swears it’s true.

Before I continue, let me say that to protect the not-so-innocent, names of interviewees have been changed. Mostly due to trespassing laws, dumpster diving lives in a gray area of legality. In New York, dumpster diving is actually a crime, though no one I met has yet been ticketed.

A Brooklyn-based Freegan and LGBT activist named Osh listed the bounty he regularly receives from dumpsters—fresh produce, canned vegetables and recently baked bread. He then bemoaned his dumpsters’ popularity.

“It used to be better before that stupid Freegan article on NPR,” Osh said. “You know, when that woman gave everyone a list of places.”

I don’t know to which NPR article he was referring, but let me apologize in advance if I out any secret diving Meccas. (I don’t think I do. Everyone already knew about the Trader Joe’s dumpster, right?)

Talking to these Freegans, you would get the impression that dumpster diving is on the rise in popularity.

“Now when I go down to Trader Joe’s [to dumpster dive] there are twenty people trying to dive one dumpster. There’s just not a lot of food—I mean, there’s a lot of food, but not enough for twenty people!” Osh said.

A quick Google search on dumpster diving revealed hundreds of thousands of results, and Google even suggested “Trader Joe’s” after I typed in “dumpster diving.” (Google always knows.) Craigslist has “I-Saw-You-Dumpster Diving” personal ads and Meetup.com has invites for those wanting to take a first-time dive with an experienced diver. The website eHow.com and Wikihow.com even give detailed systematic instructions on how to dumpster dive.

All signs point to trend. One Austin man trying to pick up a “cute” diver behind Goodwill via a Craigslist I-Saw-You ad writes, after wondering about his potential love’s “totally different socio-economic class”: “Looks like quite a little social scene going on there. Clearly, there is an entire dumpster diving subculture that I was not aware of.”

Indeed. Sam, a woman I spoke with in Portland, Oregon, who regularly dumpster dives, seems embarrassed to be part of any trend. Like any true member of a subculture, she hates to define herself as such. Her house also recently earned a two-page photo spread in Punk House: Interior in Anarchy, much to her chagrin. (One of six Portland houses included.)

Sam wouldn’t comment on the book or the photos, but her friend told me, “I think she didn’t know her friend-of-a-friend taking pictures was going to make a book. I guess it’s not a very punk thing, to be part of a book like that,” she said and laughed.

On the subject of dumpster diving, these women shared the ethos of the Freegans in Brooklyn—America wastes too much food. They seemed weary of consumerism and looked incredulous when I asked why they didn’t want regular jobs and steady incomes, things that might allow them to stop shopping behind the store and actually in it.

“Why would I want what everyone tells me I’m supposed to want?” Sam asked back.

The divers in Portland spoke highly of the Trader Joe’s dumpster, too. That’s right: Trader Joe’s. It’s funny that, even while thumbing their nose at consumer culture and refusing to spend money, these Freegans will still continue to patronize, in a sense, their favorite stores.

The Portland divers were able to pull up grocery bags full of stuff—fresh cucumbers, bananas (slightly brown), apples (not brown), cookies, and some savory, though slightly smooshed, baked goods. Also, they were even able to bring back flowers for decoration. In short, they discovered a serious cornucopia of prize trash.

“The food is still good,” Portland dumpster diver Alex assured me. “The first time I heard about it, I thought there’d be something wrong with the food. Otherwise, I thought, you know, they wouldn’t throw it away, right? But it’s still good.”

To be fair, Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods, as well as Portland grocery chain New Seasons, do donate edible though unsellable food to homeless shelters, and I hear Whole Foods even has a compost system for its food waste. An article on dumpster diving in the Washington Post quotes a Whole Foods spokeswoman as saying the store doesn’t throw away edible food. However, I saw much that was fit for human consumption in the trash.

In fact, soon I was convinced that I could eat garbage, too. The garbage sounded and looked good. Seriously good. And free, so free! So I thought I would go home and try it in my new hometown of Gainesville.

In Gainesville, we don’t have a Trader Joe’s and our grocery store trash isn’t thrown away in neat boxes, but rather in mushy half-eaten heaps along with raw eggs. (That’s right: raw eggs. Who knew?) A lot of food, yes, but in short, nothing edible.

I went to the dumpsters of a fancy grocery called Fresh Market, our version of Whole Foods, and to my dismay I grabbed several bags of what turned out to be honest waste—nothing worth reclaiming. No still-good-though-slightly-past-sell-by-date Kashi cereal or almost-fresh deli salads. Those were just dreams I’d had. The worst mistake I made was opening up the fish store’s dumpster (self-explanatory) and a close second was ripping open a Papa John’s bag of maggot-infested dough. (It’s hard to tell which dumpster corresponds to which store when you’re staring at the back of a strip mall.)

True, I found a myriad of food. We waste as much as the big cities. However, all of Gainesville’s good trash seems to be touching the real, other type of trash. Food-borne disease, anyone? I found a few unimpressive items, and many wonderful non-food related goodies (such as potted houseplants and furniture), but unfortunately, my best food find was unsolicited charity. At one point, a waitress on her smoke break near the dumpsters saw me and handed me a delicious plate of half-eaten leftover gnocchi. I was embarrassed but, like I said, it was delicious.

Not so much a glut of free, clean food as there was in New York and Portland (though, admittedly, there I knew where to look). Do New York businesses strive harder to meet the never-ending needs of their consumers than businesses in Gainesville do? Is Portland, as I’ve suspected for many years now, just better in every way to most cities? These questions I can’t answer.

I’m ashamed to admit that I didn’t enjoy climbing into or out of giant, slick-walled, cockroach-infested, 5-foot dumpsters. I just don’t have the knack or the need. However, while I won’t be diving into rotting trash again any time soon, this definitely started me thinking about food waste and my impact on the earth.

According to the Environmental Protection Agency as quoted in the New York Times, Americans create 30 million tons of food waste annually. Fresh fruits and vegetables, milk, and bread products make up two-thirds of the waste. 27% of consumable food goes in the trash each year—that includes grocery stores as well as restaurants, cafeterias, and our own kitchens.

If those statistics are hard to picture, then imagine this: Jonathan Bloom, founder of www.WastedFood.com, said in an article published in Environmental Nutrition, “We waste enough food to fill the Rose Bowl every day.” That’s a stadium large enough to hold approximately 97,000 football fans.

As the amount of food wasted rises, so does the number of those who go hungry—in the U.S. and the rest of the world. And the problem isn’t only that, as my grandmother used to say, there are starving children in Ethiopia (which there are but would they have wanted those unpalatable Brussels sprouts, I continue to ask). Food waste also places a huge toll on our environment.

“Wasting food squanders resources like energy, water and soil. Seventeen percent of the energy in the U.S. is now used to grow and distribute food. Ninety percent of the water in the U.S. is for agriculture usage. We are losing soil in the U.S. ten times faster than we can replenish it,” said Bloom.

Instead of being composted naturally—which has environmental benefits ranging from improving soil health to reducing the need to fertilizers and pesticides—uneaten food generally goes straight to the dump. The EPA says each year the U.S. throws 31 million tons into landfills or incinerators. Because the food cannot biodegrade under such anaerobic conditions, this excess decomposes to create methane, making landfills the largest producers of human-related methane in the world.

Why does this food go to waste? Many blogs and news articles conjecture that it costs businesses more to save the food than to throw it away, or that donating food near its sell-by date will result in some sort of litigation when someone somewhere inevitably gets sick. There doesn’t seem to be a definitive answer or much of a solution, but I hope people start to become more mindful of their waste. The Society of Saint Andrew is one of many organizations that help connect edible but non-sellable food to those who need it. I urge readers to persuade businesses to participate in such food recovery programs.

The amount of food wasted in the U.S. and other developed countries is a serious issue. We need to start taking measures toward reducing our profligate consumerism and wastefulness, but I wonder if eating America’s trash straight from the dumpster is the solution. You can’t be dependent on a system that you are trying to destroy. Also, if you want to inspire others to change, perhaps you shouldn’t encourage them to do something they’ve been taught, for the purposes of basic human survival, is disgusting.

Unless you’re near a Trader Joe’s.
 

Kate Sayre is an MFA fiction student at University of Florida and is currently working on a collection of short stories.