my housemate and fellow coöper alex and i go dumpster food for our house and the community pantry fairly often. left to our own devices, we'd probably only eat dumstered food, but our house operates on a shared food system, and the pantry bulk orders food as well as dumpstering for it, so we end up eating stuff like dry beans and grains, milk, cheese, tea, spices, and the like.

this is ok with me, since for the most part we buy ethically sourced stuff from a decent food coöp in the city, but over the past half-year, the food we've both really been into has been the dumpstered stuff: endless amounts of produce (not farm fresh, but not bad), artisan bread, coffee, juice, and chocolate. but the best part is constantly stumbling upon massive amounts of a completely random foodstuffs — ie the "this week we're eating 150 lbs of plums and ten dozen tortillas!" phenom (nb this week we're eating four dozen ears of corn and two dozen avocados).

sooo... we decided that we'd like to keep track of some of the fun things we make with dumpstered food, a daily diet of mostly dumpstered food, and our ability to, most of the time, feed our house of fourteen people out of the city's trash.

fyi both alex and i are omnivores. i have no problem eating animals and animal products in small quantities when it's either ethically sourced or dumpstered.