Dumpster Diving: One man’s trash is another man’s dinner

My friends eat garbage. This
is not to say that they eat junk
food, or that they avoid fruits
and vegetables. My friends eat
out of Dumpsters.

Since we were children, trash is something that we
have viewed negatively. Oscar the Grouch is a testament
to that. Oscar had this to say when interviewed
on Charlie Rose last November:

“Trash, booze and drugs are not the way to go.
With Sesame Street came a lot of things. There was an
endless stream of money, women and, naturally, trash.
I don’t even remember when they transformed Mr.
Snuffleupagus from an imaginary into a real character
on the show.”

I was hanging out with some friends the other day,
telling them a story (this is a true story). A rat in my
apartment was so desperate for food it climbed onto
my table and ate part of an apple in my fruit bowl.

“I hope you ate the apple,” said a friend of mine.
“No. Actually, I threw it away,” I replied. Some
weirdos, such as myself, see street rats as carriers of
bacteria, diseases and bubonic plague.

My friend said she would have eaten the apple and
would have to start going through my garbage. The
sad thing is I didn’t know if she was kidding.
I told her that’s gross.

“You probably shouldn’t eat with me then. I
Dumpster dive for food,” she said.

“Then I probably won’t,” I responded.

“Aw. That kind of hurts,” she said.

“Well, maybe you shouldn’t eat out of a f-ing
Dumpster.”

The ideal she and other people like her have espoused
is called “freeganism.” It is a way that people can rebel
against capitalism by not supporting grocery stores.
Won’t this hurt local farmers? Why not just shop at a
farmers’ market or at stores that support locally grown
food? Farmers are trying to make a living off of their
produce. They are not greedy capitalists trying to profit
from the starving masses.

Freeganists see Dumpster diving as “rescuing
food.”

It’s one thing to receive food from grocery stores and
restaurants, because they have excess, but it is quite
another thing to pull food out of a trash container.
My reasoning is as follows: Trash containers
are absolutely disgusting canisters of rotting
things. They are covered in filth and are
rarely (if ever) washed. To eat out of these
containers is completely unsanitary. I am all
for getting food from restaurants and stores
at the end of the day, just sans Dumpster.

For those of you who have forgotten, we
live in the United States of America. America
is a country where the standard of living is
high enough that most of us don’t need to
go through the garbage to “rescue” food.

If you were poor enough, I could understand
it, but with the majority of my friends
who Dumpster dive this is not the case.
My friend who digs through trash is not
poor. She has hundreds of meal swipes at
Shafer Court Dining Center (which does
say something about the quality of food at
Shafer).

It is a perfectly reasonable concept to want
to have a lifestyle that runs contradictory
to the ideals of capitalism, but to have to
eat out of a dumpster is a little extreme.
This food is unsanitary and should not be
consumed. To paraphrase my good friend
Daniel Plainview, “If I have a milkshake, and
you have a mikshake, and your milkshake
falls into a Dumpster, I will not drink your
milkshake.”

For further reading: “Refuse Junkie” by
Oscar the Grouch, 2006 Simon & Schuster