having a 12 hr a day job has cut into energy for late night excursions, but i am starting to get adjusted and last night with vince and natalie went dumpstering for produce. we've sort of been slacking on this front; a few months ago for some reason the tj's dumpster got really good and that slowly began distracting us from the more workaday prospects of the produce dumpsters. also, the bike dumpster next to tj's has started yeilding sweet things (tonight we got many good tires, chainrings and cranks, and allen wrenches, and a bell). but fruit and vegs are essential, and until i can organize my house to shop for produce at the farmers markets the dumpsters are where we'll be shopping. standard run that served us so well during winter (tj's -> qfc -> prod. stand -> wf) yielded some good stuff, but not in the quantities i've become accustomed to. i think the summer sun might be pretty brutal on the produce.

no time to cook fancy things, but housemate annie turned all the random vegs (cauliflower, bean sprouts, tomatoes, peppers, etc) into a delicious pseudocurry, a sherwood standard. g's r d. that and the fancy ginger ale we got was a nice dinner, made pleasenter by the company of my housemates in high summer spirits. heirloom toms on ebc bread with garlic basil cheese spread made a nice late night snack. yum. gonna pack some of that for lunch tomorrow i think.

have yet to explain to the kids i work with that most of the food i eat comes out of the trash. wonder how that'll go over. they eat such shit though... i have to restrain myself from railing on six year olds for all the wasteful packaging their gross food necessitates. arg.

nyt freeganism article.

i have yet to find a dumpster in Rome.

the mush leftover from the market appears to actually be disgusting; this may be a source of free food but it is also food that should probably go to poorer people than me. (there are a lot.)

grocery shopping feels foreign. at least most of my food can from this rad fruit/meat market, and feels fresh unpolished and real. the cheapness of it is somewhat offset by the exchange rate. but nontheless buying oranges to cold bite into with some pocket change from a human being is actually really great; i don't regret it. tonight's cooking (if we can somehow get the gas turned on in the apartment) is fresh prosciutto with penne and onions; plum tomato, fennel, lettuce, bell pepper put a foot firmly towards salad.

our humble garden:

either a day-old hangover is fucking me out of my mind or I have trashed my body something serious on some dumpster food. woke up at 4 with a "satan's long malformed toenail boring through your cranium" headache, and haven't improved much in the last 13 hours. dehydrated, veins feel like they are about ready to ditch my body entirely, and my stomach is a dang old grumbly acid place. culprits: old mango naked juice and the d. bacon i ate for brunch.

earlier in the week alex and i dumpstered about a dozen pineapples. been eating a few day since then, but when i cooked dinner for the house last night i decided to use more up and make a pineapple curry, which turned out really well.

ings: two pineapples, five tomatoes, 1 head spinach, 1 head kale, 1 hag chard, two onions, 1/2 head garlic, 1/4 cup ginger, 3 tbs green curry paste, zest from two lemons, and basil, cilantro, green onions, and tamari to taste.

also cooked a bunch of quinoa and mixed everything together to get proper "sherwood slop" consitency. feeds approx 14 people.

bought the can of coconut milk but everything else other than the quinoa was dumpstered.

general grocery store rule: light bags are full of emptiness, bags that are too heavy and take a full round shape are full of things you don't want to touch (wet coffee grounds, pork blood), and medium weight bags (heavy but liftable) are the most likely candidates for the Good Stuff. what to feel for is packaging, but heft. this is theoretically obvious but not at first evident when i started dumpstering. knowing what to feel for is important at big places, like whole foods or trader joes.

and different places have quirks. at the chocolate dumpster, we came home disappointed night after night having smelled the chocolate but being unable to find it, all jack-and-the-giant-beanstalk and such. what jesse showed us was that the bags we'd been throwing away (which were, incidentally, suspiciously heavy) were filled with chocolate, consistently, at the bottom. below all the waxpaper and pepsi cups.

where are good places to dumpster? the posh and the yuppie, from grocery stores to specialty stores. bakeries, all bakeries. rory mentioned distribution centers, which seem to me like the real gold mines for expensive food. and the places where they make the food, where you can find ends, scraps, leftovers, & c. Pasta & Co, in seattle, throws away all kinds of expensive fresh pasta in bags and sacks (ravioli, linguine, everything) presumably because its not worth the money to collect the dregs of any operation. the places where they make the food obviously also occasionally throw out ingredients. pasta and co gave us a ton of eggs, currants, cherries, and party nuts (for, you know, party nut pasta) as well as an option on a few pounds of celery powder.

re owen's query...

alex and i were lucky enough that through our social pseudo-network/pseudo-social network we knew lots of people that already knew where and how to dumpster-dive in our city. so my first advice would be to ask around and see if anyone else has already scoped things out; that's how we found a fair amount of the dumpsters we regularly go to.

the other places we found have been purely trial and error. once we had the confidence that there are good dumpsters out there, we were more than willing to go on bike rides to odd places on the off chance that we might find some new food.

if you want specifics, i'd say a good place to start would be all the local grocery stores. look for a store that is small enough that they can't afford a trash compactor, and more than likely their dumpster will have lots of good produce in it (if there's some place like a trader joe's near you, give it a shot, they seem particularly apt to throw nice non produce stuff out).

also very rewarding but much more difficult to track down on your own are distribution centers for stuff like naked/odwalla juice, fake meat products, and the like. the dumpsters outside of those places are full of massive amounts of things that the trucks didn't deliver for whatever reason.

in general i guess just think of businesses that generate waste in such a manner that it's more economical for them to throw it out that do something useful with it. and then find it and eat it.

oh, and this may be a bit nit-picky, but i really dislike the idea of people being worried about "giving away their hot spots" and jealously guarding knowledge about "their" dumpters or whatever, and like to discourage that sentiment whenever possible. for better or worse, there's really not a whole lot of people willing to pick through garbage and then eat the food they found in it, so there's not a whole lot of reason to be worried about being out-competed for dumpsters. but practicalities aside, the dumpsters are a community resource (cf oldschool gleaning), and the idea of people hoarding food from them is entirely antithetical to the reasons that i go dumpster-diving in the first place.

ok so two slices of bread. tomato pesto on one, hummus & r. pepper flakes other. apple-sage sausages halved, sauteed with onions, garlic, pepper, basil.

the goat milk is good-- rich and thick. good in coffee, good with the dumpster chocolate.

basil or rosemary lemonade: make a simple syrup (2:1 sugar:water) and, when you take it off the heat, throw in a bunch of something herby. basil or rosemary are particularly good. let it steep and chill. longer = stronger flavor, obv.. Add 1-2 tablespoons/cup, fill rest with fresh lemon juice and water. (rosemary is better for lemonade, basil for limeade. limeade variant: less sugar in the syrup, but add brown sugar as it cools.)


everything i've had today (save spices-- if we dumpstered those, we 'd be golden-- and the water in my coffee) has been dumpstered.

At Whole Foods, found a gallon and one half of raw goat milk, 10 bottles of whipped cream, 2 cartons of Strauss whole milk yogurt, and a bag full of gerber daisies.

There was also a dumpster filled with shrimp about a foot-- boxed, pre-cooked, even pre-breaded shrimp. I considered going back for the trailer, but without being able to bread them myself, it seemd not worthwhile. Also they expired in November, and were lukewarm.

Been eating: tj's hummus, field roast fake meat. The dumpsters give me a more wholesome breakfast than I'd ever eat otherwise: yogurt, toast, egg, grain-meat, hummus, fruit.

What is goat milk supposed to taste like?

breakfast/lunch: portobello-burger sandwich, accompanied by spinach nuggets with yogurt dip.

dinner: home-made bagels, sandwichized: smoked salmon and provolone w/hummus, tomatoes sprouts and lettuce.

i think mel may have gone out and bought sprouts but other than that i think everything i ate today was dumpstered.