My roommate and I both go to college, so when the question comes up regarding what to do on a friday night, most people we know have the typical response of "going out" or partying. When friday night rolled around for us a week ago, the answer was, of course, "let's go dumpstering."
Our other roommate decided that our challenge would be a great topic for her anthropology class and has labeled us "modern foragers." But rather than just hearing our stories about dumpstering, she decided to experience it for herself, and with that she documented our experience.
We frequent a local grocery store where the dumpsters are in a secluded section behind closed doors. The initial walk-in to the dumpster room has a distinct odor of rotten food mixed with cleaning material. The closed doors create a humid incubation that allows some of the food to ferment and putrify creating a smell that nauseates most people, but to us it smells like freedom.
Each dumpster is usually filled with trash bags loaded with produce, frozen meals, bread and much more. To get a sense of what a dumpster bag typically looks like:
As you can see plenty of food, to the point of excess, and all still looking relatively good.
To explain how giddy we are each time we enter the dumpster room is like trying to explain the excitement that a six year-old feels when Christmas morning rolls around. Literally, we never know what to expect when looking through the dumpster, so we are often so excited we look like two kids opening up birthday presents.
Doing the dive
Being really excited for dumpster porn
Diggin' in
The batch of food also dictates how we are going to eat for the next few days and what we are able to make. As the ol' sayin' goes: "When life gives you lemons, make lemonade." In our case the situation was limes, apples, raspberries and strawberries and what we made was limeade, applesauce and jam.
Delicious Raspberry jam
Limeade
Making applesauce that we later mixed with jam
As you can see, we have become more resourceful with what we have been given, and while we aren't kitchen geniuses, we do recognize that if we just take a little time out of our lives to make some jam or limeade, we are not only saving all of this food from going to waste, but we are also able to feed ourselves and some of our neighbors. We are also trying to eat comfortably as we did before. We have made some dishes with excellent results:
Potatoes (that are about to be mashed) with some gravy made from scratch and raspberry apple sauce
Margherita pizza
Spaghetti with a tomato sauce and mixed with swiss cheese
As you can see our eating habits are relatively good and in some cases better and healthier than the average meal (since a lot of our meals we have to prepare from scratch). This goes to show that the perception of dumpster food as being "dirty" and "unsanitary" is often not true in any sense, and in fact can often be just as delicious and nutritious as a normal meal.
