Dumpster Diving - A freegan dumpster diver's blog

30.04.2008: now we have a fridge full of bread:

12 spicy buns
9 bread rolls
12 organic ciabatta rolls
4 breads (a yoghurt bread, a sandwich loaf, rye bread )
2 celery
5 organic carrots
lemons
flowers
small pink raincoat

you can tell i didn't go on this dive because of the pink raincoat.

27.04.2008: i'd be lying if i said we always do it by the book. sometimes you're just too drunk or excited to follow the rules properly. i was coming back from a very cheap night out and figured it was the perfect time to check our new favourite dumpster. it belongs to a posh supermarket, but is situated right in the middle of a residential courtyard, making things tricky.

it was so late that all the courtyard lights were off, which is good, because as i was trying to find the right bin bag, carefully untying its knot, someone walked right past and didn't even notice me. but since there were no lights i decided, perhaps wrongly, that it'd be easier to just take the whole lot. so i did. and it was heavy too.

i suppose the good thing about this supermarket is a large proportion of what they throw out is actually bad (gr, mouldy bread). so after lugging it all home i had to bin a lot of it (again). it was worth it though:

4 half cooked baguettes
2 litres organic milk
1 litre juice
250g coffee beans
coffee cream
18 pitta breads

there was a large box marked with a cross and containing many tubs of "salad" (disgusting creamy mayonnaise stuff) too, but there was obviously something unidentifiably wrong with them, so it was all chucked. all 30+ tubs. and there was some tasty looking slabs of meat. yeah, real tasty. dripping yellow shit all over everywhere. exactly what i want in my kitchen.

23.04.2008: the mission's objective was more aligned with photo reconnaissance for a.. er, media project. but when there's food for the taking, food will be taken:

17 bananas
pack of biscuits
1 loaf
1 apple
grapes
bunch of plants

and kudos to alex who actually jumped in the dumspter to retrieve the buried bananas, despite the nasty smell.

hardest thing to photograph - garbage in the dark.

21.04.2008: sitting here eating my honeydew melon, i feel a little too bourgeoisie to say that we felt a little disappointed with yesterdays 'shopping', it looks like a lot but it didn't fill our fridge and didn't give us much for dinner. i made some simple cheese with the milk, and the scones were delicious, but we craved more. see, we're just as bad as everyone else.

but anyway, we did a double trip and amassed a total of:

8 red onions
10 oranges
1 lemon
3 red peppers
3 litres milk (two organic, all in date)
3 litres of juice
3 litres of different juice cordials
4 potatoes
1 honeydew melon
2kg flour
25 bread rolls
6 chocolate muffins
2 bags of cinammon twirls
360g tube of organic honey
500g brie
250g bag of mayonnaise
toilet clip-on cleaner
2 tubes of colgate toothpaste
1 tube of polos
2 kinder milk slices
bag of chocolates ('twists', like celebrations in england)

lots of food. also lots of not-food. a lot of it was thrown out due to damaged packaging (ripped or opened etc) we took the toilet thing for comedy value and can't fit it, it didn't come with instructions. some of the milk is a bit suspicious since it's still in date, but it's obvious if it's bad when you open it. maybe someone had left it outside the fridge and they then had to throw it out, maybe. if i knew we'd get more milk i'd have made more cheese. and the toothpaste is vile, with "cooling crystals" and everything. it's bright blue and burns your mouth. we normally buy our toothpaste from those expensive hippy shops, so figures.

please remember this is food for four people.

things we turned down include a crazy amount of fresh fettucini, which must have been thrown out for a reason as it was all in date - there were two crates of it. and i wish i'd taken more melons. it looked a bit skanky but it was delicious.

20.04.2008: shopping by the light of the full moon:

4 litres of organic milk
4 rye breads
6 organic ciabatta rolls
3 carrot scones
1kg oats
400g baby potatoes
2 aubergines
snack pack of baby carrots
6 apples
4 kinder milk slices
1 can of beer

when i went to take out our trash (packaging and what apples and potatoes were bad, etc) i couldn't help but notice the obscene amount of food someone had thrown out. there was at least three packs of sliced meat (most half full), a large tub of creme fraiche (barely a third used), a large block of cheese (which would have been edible had it been properly wrapped in foil), and several other unidentified tubs that were all far from empty. and none of it looked bad. you'd be forgiven for thinking we live in a world of plenty. this society has gotten itself into a sad state. affluence has turned everybody into assholes.

18.04.2008: it was a national holiday today, so:

nothing but dirty looks

the one place that was open today was still open. but no one listens to me when i say we're going out diving too early. and it'll get us into trouble.

16.04.2008: halfway home, sometime after 2am, i realise that i'm covered in flour. the front of my jacket is all white and i'm a total mess. i make a half-hearted attempt at brushing it off, doomed to fail, and rip another chunk from the loaf i'm carrying.

we'd been drinking in town, a smokey bar with lighting that made me yearn for my camera, a dingy place that had never made an attempt to remove any graffiti. i hadn't eaten since 5pm. and then only half a sandwich, so when we were kicked out we wandered up the road in search of a nearby bakery. six of us crowded around their dumpster as a guy i'd just met handed out fresh croissants and focaccia. i ate two on our walk to the next bar and they were beautiful. unfortunately we didn't have a bag, so we only took three loaves, unfortuantely also dusted in flour. a slightly dirty coat the next morning is a small price to pay for such good bread.

and to think i almost spent 50kr on a falafel

13.04.2008: we ran out of bread, so into the dumpster again. we had a nice walk around christiania, drinking a few beers and killing time, before heading out to the supermarkets. we can report that this is a bad idea. constantly needing to piss while out dumpster diving is no fun. sure there's plenty of places to piss if need be, but it's just not cool. and for the record, pissing near a dumspter is absolutely not on.

we tried the huge supermarket that used to offer us unlimited bread, which changed hands sometime in the last year, but again there was nothing. it appears they don't bake fresh bread all day anymore. also their new dumpsters are huge and unneedingly too deep. there's no way i'm getting inside one.

our second stop was cut short when we noticed someone smoking on their balcony several floors above our target dumpster. we've been shouted at before and don't want to aggravate the people living here, this is our favourite spot after all. unfortunately the entrance to this area is well lit, so us walking in all confident and then quickly u-turning must look a little obvious. i'm undecided but i suspect the alternative, creeping around in the shadows, is probably worse.

so third time lucky:

6 bread rolls
4 loaves
2 danish croissant things
2 bunches of leeks
6 broccoli heads
2 red peppers and 1 green
fresh dill
3 bananas
1 organic pear
1 organic orange
pair of non-slip gloves

we took so much broccoli because there was so much, the dumpster was absolutely full of them, and they were all so perfect i felt bad not taking more. i'll be making soup with them later. there was also a massive amount of bananas, but they were all in pretty bad shape, we took a few bunches and ended up with only three good ones. if we could have been bothered to make banana bread straight away we could have used more, but it was late. the non-slip gloves were hilarious, they're almost exactly the same as the ones i was wearing at the time, so much so that julie thought i'd left them in dumpster by accident.

so what do you do when you're in excess of bread, cheese and tomatoes?

make pizza!

you'll also be glad to hear that the kiwis we took from the dumpster the other day are finally becoming ripe enough to eat. as if this world isn't full of enough nonesense already.

10.04.2008: here's an email i received a few weeks ago (it was posted via the comments form so i feel justified in publishing it here):

The only problem I find with "freegans" is that you are taking from those who are truly in need. There are people who have no other choice but to go to a dumpster. they don't even have money to shop at the goodwill. Its like sometime I take clothing to the goodwill and then sometime I put in a dumpster because I know there is someone who needs it. but now we have those who can afford to buy and have decided to take from the truly poor because its in style. You aren't doing anything but taking from the poor and sick who are out there and have nothing but a dumpster to go to. They don't have anything else. They don't have a home to take the "dumpster food" to and wash and cook and make a great gourmet meal. They eat the food right then and there.

then let them eat cake!!

joking aside, she raises some good points, so i figured i'd try and put together some kind of reply. and it's difficult, because obviously i can afford food (quite blatantly, if i can afford a website etc). this is also why i don't like the word "freegan", it implicitly includes a choice and it's inherently middle class. and yes, i'm just a self-hating middle classer.

but anyway given that the statement is true, that by taking food from a dumpster we're directly depriving homeless people, there's a few defensive arguements i can come up with, of varying quality and conviction.

the first, and possibly only solid defense, is participation in Food Not Bombs. this point is self-evident and is well documented elswhere, so i'll leave it at that for now.

looking at the bigger picture, what we're driving at is how wasteful and unsustainable our society is. argueably, supermarket food wastage is one of the least important aspects of this, but it is the tastiest. and also the easiest to highlight in a way that everyone understands - free food. the freegan/dumpster diving contradiction is that its ultimate (succesful) conclusion is that food waste becomes zero. attaining the goal (destruction of the food industry) disables the process and is hence an altruistic goal. so in that sense, yes we're destroying a source of food for homeless people (and ourselves), but we're also trying to establish a society that actually gives a shit about such things and can sustain everybody.

taking a more mathematical angle, you need to balance the loss to homeless people with the losses to the rest of the world caused by participation in the food industry. without significant research this argument is going nowhere, and due to the small scale of freeganism and the large scale of the food industry, it'd probably go nowhere anyway. but i still think it needs consideration, especially if the actual impact of freeganism on the homeless isn't as significant as stated. this is a possibility.

are we really taking food that would otherwise be eaten by someone who needed it more than us? it seems valid enough, but i just don't think it's true. whenever we dive we take only a fraction of what is available (excluding that cheese the other day, our bad) and we distribute when and where possible. but that's beside the point, we go at all times of the day and night and we've never not been able to find food at our regular locations. it works both ways, if other people were eating from the same sources then at times they'd be nothing for us. but that's just not the case. there's enough for everybody, as proven by the contents of the dumpster.

the dumpster never lies etc. let them eat cake, and whatever else we can find.

of course, what we should be doing is growing our own food. and we do, a little. but nevermind.

maybe now is a good time for some panels from an uncle scrooge comicbook entitled "how to make it rich":

any ideas for a better monologue?

09.04.2008: to celebrate action (actually it's more for ease of use) i've done some significant behind-the-scenes technology updates to the blog. this is all dandy, but it has required a change in our web address - we're now at
http://www.emoware.org/dumpster-diving/

subtle i know. but if you link to us or bookmark us or whatever, could you please update :] ..thanking you very much.

sigh, i wish i'd just built the blog properly to begin with. but nevermind.

08.04.2008: i fucking love this city:

4.9kg cheese
6 cucumbers
cauliflower
a tub and a half of mushrooms
lettuce
rye bread
4 oranges

it was a quick dive, half due to the rain and half due to the best dumpster this side of town. with our bags full of cheese and cucumbers, where else could we go? we took a very small fraction of the cucumbers, and they are all perfect. i'm thinking that perhaps we should have taken more and made relish or something. the cheese is just amazing:

and i do feel a bit bad that we took so much, it's a little greedy, but rather that than it rotting on a trash heap. we wont let it go to waste. and if you want some, feel free to pop round and get cheesed up.

one of the three dumpsters was full to the brim (it was literally all you could see inside) with cat food. we almost took some just for the hell of it, but it was a little too ridiculous.

actually, we've talked about setting up a live dumpster contents directory (i.e. "dumpster 0438 currently contains nothing but cat food"). if done well it could be brilliant, but it would require a large 'always on' user base. the time scales are much too short to be practical. an SMS network would work better, but i imagine that would be too costly. any ideas?

06.04.2008: we've returned to copenhagen and the old posse is back together, both the reason to celebrate and the party:

as a welcome home gift emil has given us each a netto work shirt, which he'd found in a dumpster a while back (along with a netto fleece). now we can go undercover. in our absence he's also found a dumpster key, this is all great news.

so, for our first trip out (and with new housemate alex) we headed to a nearby irma whose dumpsters we'd failed at raiding before. we'd been given a tip off and had to reinvestigate. previously we hadn't the guts to try all the residential entrances, so after a small amount of fumbling we were in. surrounded by so many kitchen and living room windows i felt a bit vulnerable, but it was gorgeous, all these twisting paths and gardening stuff. we were just about to give up when i found the bin clearly marked as theirs. it turns out what we'd seen through the locked gate was their trash, complete with their trademark tough black plastic bags that, amongst other things, contained:

3 bags of bread rolls
3 small posh loaves
roll of filo pastry
bag of ground coffee
9 oranges

we made a premature exit because a resident was wandering around and the last thing we wanted was a scene. we love our new bin too much.

next we tried an old favourite, the supermarket down the way that's recently changed hands. the layout is the same but they've upgraded the dumpsters with padlocks and technology. they're also much deeper than before. we didn't take anything, too much meat apparently (i was too busy taking photos), but we'll be back there for sure.

so as not to end the night on a bummer we visited the first store we ever dumpstered from. it was like coming home, and our take was suitably brilliant:

1 litre orange juice
1.5 litre mixed fruit juice
9kg tomatoes
2 tubs of kiwis (too hard to eat yet)
red lettuce
bag of carrots
5 tom's chocolate turtles
4 cans of beer (tuborg)

yeah, beer. we finally found beer. it was a truly magical moment. an employee had bought them back in january and they'd been left (presumably) in the staff room. there was a bunch of other junk in the bin that also had the telltale green sticker, so i guess they just had their bimonthly clean out.

there's a nice demonstration of the fruit and vege. tomorrow we make soup and sauce.

so. we've been gone a year and a half, and a lot has happened in our absence (namely ungdomshuset and a whole load of riots). i was a bit worried it'd be a very different scene, but so far it's just the same. emil tells me that it's bigger now, that people hold dumpster diving lessons and someone's created an online dumpster map (that was our idea), so i'm sure there's also more hostility towards us. but nevermind that, it's damn good to be back.

:Dumpster Diving