Another Man’s Treasure
In the divers’ common judgment, the United States is a country filled with wasteful consumers who either don’t know enough or don’t care enough to consider whether something is actually bad before tossing it—a situation that the divers can and “should,” they say, capitalize on.
The sun is sinking behind Stanley’s Fruits and Vegetables, and the last few sedans and ten-speeds scuttle out of the parking lot as the business day closes shop. Soon all is desolate, and within minutes, around back, a different kind of grocery shopping begins. Not quite furtively, usually in groups of two or three, hosts of twenty-somethings descend like vultures upon the back alley in hopes of prying some edible goods from the day’s massive horde of rubbish. These scavengers, whom I spot on my way out of a store across the road, call themselves “dumpster-divers.”
While this was my first encounter with their defining activity, I first stumbled on their name as a junior in high school, when reading Lars Eighner’s “On Dumpster Diving” for an English class. Years later, also in an English class but this time in college, I again happened on the term—then in the form of a real, live dumpster-diver who was sitting next to me, eating a muffin that she had recently rescued from the trash. Since this second encounter, I had become fascinated by the lifestyle and had decided to keep an eye peeled for the disciples of this underground practice, which is also known, variously, as “urban foraging,” “trash-picking,” “gleaning,” “scavenging,” “salvaging,” and “curb-crawling.”
“You just have to use your brain about nasty stuff,” she says. “If it’s a little beat up, cool; but if it’s leaking brown puss, probably not.”
Out back of Stanley’s, Samantha, a diver from the north side of Chicago who also frequents Dominick’s and Panera Bread, tells me that she can well afford to buy food but is often mistaken as a street urchin. While she admits that “there is a stigma about garbage,” and that many of a dumpster’s contents have been thrown away for a reason, she swears that there is a lot of “perfectly good food” to be had for free. “You just have to use your brain about nasty stuff,” she says. “If it’s a little beat up, cool; but if it’s leaking brown puss, probably not.” In the divers’ common judgment, the United States is a country filled with wasteful consumers who either don’t know enough or don’t care enough to consider whether something is actually bad before tossing it—a situation that the divers can and “should,” they say, capitalize on.
Supermarkets offer an obvious testimony in their favor. Bound by government health regulations, a market cannot sell its products in excess of their aptly named sell-by date; yet most food remains edible and nutritious for some time afterwards. I throw away milk because it’s noticeably turned: not because it’s “1 Dec.” and the little sticker told me to do so. Because of the obligatory shelf purge that the law necessitates, the dumpsters behind supermarkets are often filled with perfectly good food, usually still packaged. The same is true of bakeries, which usually tout some sort of freshness guarantee and, consequently, throw way mass quantities of day-old bread and baked goods nightly. Pizza joints are similar, and their dumpsters usually feature the results of botched and prank orders, boxed and often still hot.
So who is taking advantage of all of this waste? The seemingly obvious response would be the homeless, or persons of extremely low income, who simply cannot afford to eat. Yet a Google search will tell you otherwise. There are over 1,100,000 hits, ranging from blogs and live journals to news articles and not-for-profit organizations.
This Internet presence says a lot about the nuances of dumpster-diving. First of all, it clearly isn’t just a survival technique for the desperate; it’s a common practice among people with access to the Internet. That means people who have a home and a computer, can afford an Internet connection, and have time to write about themselves. Furthermore, the fact that there are blogs, email lists, and other interactive forums in place means that dumpster-diving isn’t just an action: It’s a culture.
