The Moneyless Man (18 page)

Waste food made up less than 5% of my diet in the summer but I didn’t stop dumpster diving. I started doing it more and more, partly because I loved the adventure of it, and partly because I wanted good food to go into bellies instead of trash cans.

There is such a thing as a free lunch. And free breakfast and dinner for that matter. Foraging wild food is its truest form, as it comes straight from the earth. However, Great Britain has been tamed; its wilds are retreating rapidly. Where there were once woods, biodiversity and abundance, are now concrete-clad supermarkets, parking lots and their dumpsters. Urban sprawl has changed the nature of ‘foraging’. Rather than walking through midday fields picking food, the modern day urban forager operates at night, searching through the massive dumpsters that have replaced the bushes.

Dumpster diving for food sounds sordid and illegal; I understand this apprehension. But a lot of the time the only reason food has to be thrown out is because of a date stamped on it on an assembly line in a far away factory. The food may still be fine to eat, but the company has to operate within the law. In a
small greengrocery, the grocer can judge the state of their produce by its smell, feel, taste and look, and send vegetables for composting only when they’re no longer fit to eat. In a large supermarket, layers of packaging mean the assistants cannot use such discretion and judgment. Regardless of how the produce looks and feels within its plastic wrapping, if its date is yesterday’s, it’s in the garbage.

I find dumpster-diving a lot of fun, especially if you do it with a few friends. We often come away with so much food that our biggest job is distributing it to those who can use it. It’s even easier in the summer, because it is much warmer and drier, two important factors in a night-time activity. And although you have to wait longer for it to get dark, there also seems to be much more waste food around. This is likely to be due to demand being much more unpredictable in the holiday period; sales of many products, like salads and chilled goods, depend on the sun coming out, which doesn’t always happen in England.

Dumpster-divers are often called ‘freegans’, although using waste food is only a tiny part of freeganism. A freegan, according to their UK group, is someone who tries to live simply, reducing their consumption and the pressure they place on the environment, through recycling, sharing resources and – importantly – using their time to help others in voluntary work to help positive social actions locally. Some of the most generous people I have met, both of their time and their possessions, are freegans.

But why dig around in dumpsters late at night for food that has been deemed unfit for consumption, whether by the law or by a disempowered person along the food chain? For me, I must admit, it’s not ideal. The food often comes from industrialized processes, with all their embodied pollution and environmental destruction. And if everyone wanted to do it, there would be nowhere near enough food to go around; the producers would
go out of business if no one bought their products. It’s hardly a model of future sustainable living, as only a finite number of people could do it. However, not everyone wants to do it. In fact, so few people, that whenever you go to most dumpsters you’ll find them full of perfectly edible food. I live near a city of half a million people and I’ve yet to see a line at any trash can I’ve been to! I believe that we have an obligation to liberate every pound of edible food from the dumpsters of stores and supermarkets that, for whatever reason, have to throw it out. In 2009, during their food crisis, reports showed Haitian children picking individual grains of corn from the roads, dropped from sacks as trucks drove past. To have good food rotting in our trash cans is an insult to the families of those kids.

Another reason I feel compelled to use waste food is because once it goes into a dumpster, it effectively becomes carbon-positive to use it. Not only does using waste food mean that less food, with the embodied energy of its production, packaging, distribution and sale (particularly high for convenience food), is grown and processed, it also, bizarrely, reduces greenhouse gases. Most people believe that because food rots quickly, greenhouse gas production isn’t a problem. However, it is exactly the problem. When food breaks down, it produces methane, a potent greenhouse gas. According to a University of Arizona study, 29 million tonnes of ‘edible’ food ends up in landfill every year in the US (that’s $600 wasted each year by the average American family). That’s a lot of climate-changing methane, not to mention the environmental costs of transporting the waste food to the landfill sites and processing it.

From this perspective, you’d think that those who use waste food would be heroes in a world verging on climatic catastrophe and ecological collapse. Unfortunately, the opposite could not be more true. Not only do those who do it risk being socially outcast, it is a criminal offence; technically, it is theft.

Retrieving food from dumpsters on the privately-owned land of the businesses that throw the food out is a legal grey area. If the supermarkets wanted to be difficult, they could charge you with trespassing or even with stealing. In my eyes, if you throw something away, you relinquish ownership. In the UK, no one has ever been charged with stealing stuff from dumpsters, probably because supermarkets realize the negative press they’d get and the can of ethical worms they’d open. While the supermarkets cite legal reasons for the measures they use to stop people like me looking through their dirty laundry, they are a smokescreen; their real reasons are commercial. Every product saved from the dumpster is one fewer bought in the store. Neither is it in their interests to show us how wasteful their logistics systems are.

Over the summer, I saw supermarkets go to increasingly extraordinary lengths to protect their trash. Walls suited to a medieval castle didn’t seem to be enough. Some erected wire fences and hired security guards. Some poured blue dye and bleach over the contents of the dumpster, ripping packaging to make sure the contents definitely weren’t edible. If they were truly concerned about the legalities of people getting sick from eating waste food, they certainly wouldn’t do this; eating it in this condition would make food poisoning the least of our worries.

Ordinary shopping can feel quite boring. Go in, walk around the store in the pattern the retail design team have worked out will make you spend the most money, stand in a line for a few minutes, say a polite hello to the assistant, who will probably reply in Head Office-speak, and leave, with your bags full and your wallet empty. In contrast, some of the best times I had during the summer were the nights I went dumpster diving with friends. We’d get on our bikes, with empty saddlebag (or the bike trailer if we were going to a place where we knew we’d get a haul) and take off for a night’s adventuring.

When you go dumpster diving, you’ve absolutely no idea what you’ll find, you just know you’ll find something and often lots of it! I’ve had some hilarious times in dumpsters. The funniest was when I found a case of condoms whose packaging had been water-damaged but whose insides were absolutely untouched! That solved one hell of a headache; Fergus’s idea of making them out of the intestines of roadkill badgers was a bit hard to stomach. Not sure it would have aroused future lovers, either. Coming a close second in the ‘most bizarre dumpster finds contest’was my buddy Dave Hamilton, who found a £10 ($15) note one night and used it in an organic food store the next day to pick up some fine-quality food! Not exactly Freeconomic living, but he didn’t complain. I found cases of beer past their ‘best-before’ date (fit for consumption, but not in its prime) and cases of wine in which
one bottle had broken, meaning the rest were stained and not fit for sale.

Most nights we’d find anywhere between ten and twenty loaves of bread, and stumbling on cases of fruit and vegetables was far too common. But what to do with this excess? We did what most other freegans do; distributed it to friends and others whom we knew would really appreciate it. Many of my friends spend much of their time on voluntary projects, meaning their incomes are minuscule relative to the amount of work they do each week, so they always appreciate any food help. On my journeys back to the farm I’d drop off little parcels, the contents varying depending on whether the recipients were vegan, vegetarian or omnivore. Some even fed their dogs for free from my parcels; the dogs much preferred it to the stuff they usually got from a can.

One of the strangest evenings of dumpster diving came from making a movie for
Guardian online
with their journalist Jon Henley and cameraman Mustafa Khalili. I’d been reading Jon’s fascinating articles for years; jumping into dumpsters with him seemed surreal. I’m sure it was odd for him too. He told me that the following evening he would be dining with the French ambassador in London, as his wife was a journalist for a French newspaper. Yet here he was helping me take pizzas and pot pies out of the garbage. To my complete respect, he really joined in and even took some food back to London himself, including fruit juice for his child. If someone had told me ten years ago that I’d be living without money and rummaging through dumpsters with one of my favorite journalists, I wouldn’t have known whether to pack in my degree or study even harder!

My main purpose for dumpster diving during the summer months was to distribute food to others, but there were times when I found it particularly useful, most notably in the days leading up to festivals. I had no end of fresh vegetables available at the end of June, but a lot of it was stuff that would quickly go off
in a hot tent, not great for five-day festivals. I needed processed food that wouldn’t go moldy and required very little cooking, so I’d spend two or three nights before a festival looking for canned beans, bread, spreads, fresh and dried fruit, and snacks to enhance my staple diet of oatmeal, nuts and berries.

The south west of England, where I live, is a music festival Mecca in the summer. Best known for the Glastonbury Festival, there’s a different music festival every week from May to October in this part of the world. As you can imagine, it’s quite tempting to go to as many as you can, especially when they’re on your own doorstep.

At the start of my moneyless year, I assumed I wouldn’t be able to go to festivals in 2009. First, I couldn’t pay to get in. Second, once in, everything costs a lot. Food is the only essential item, but I like to have a couple of drinks when I’m listening to music with friends. Third, though some festivals take place relatively close to me, most involve at least a 120-mile round trip journey, not much in a car, but quite a lot on a bike. The distances meant if I wanted to go to a festival, not only would I have to take four days out of my really hectic schedule, it would take two, quite physically demanding, days to get there and back.

The first two problems sorted themselves out in May when Paul Crossland and Edmund Johnson asked me to help them promote their new project, Freelender, at the Buddhafield Festival. In return for helping them, I’d get into the festival for free. I am pretty fussy about what projects I’ll support but Freelender (
www.freelender.org
) fitted the bill perfectly. Its aim was to maximize use of resources in local communities, through a website where people could borrow and lend stuff (from books to bicycles) to and from those who may not otherwise be able to afford them. Not only does it save people money, it makes better
use of limited resources and helps build resilient communities through acts of kindness and trust. Very similar ideals to the Freeconomy Community and a good example of an organization springing up to fill another part of the ‘gift economy’; a social movement in which goods and services are regularly given without an explicit exchange agreement, relying on informal custom and the culture and spirit of giving.