Posts tagged Dumpster diving

Finally got around to watching “Food Inc.” last night (streaming on Netflix) and considering food seemed an appropriate way to conclude our Lenten practice of taking on vegetarianism. It was a good reminder to us to try to be extra intentional about supporting the local co-op and CSA options when we need to buy food to supplement our (small) garden and our dumpster diving. And it may be helpful as we consider our future relationship with meat-eating.

I recommend it if you haven’t seen it yet: visit Food Inc.’s official site.

My sister sent me a link this morning to an article about a guy who does corporate dumpster diving and recycles/sells the electronics he finds. He used an interesting metaphor and it reminded me of something I heard on NPR yesterday from an environmental activist who is on trial for making a bunch of fake bids during an oil/gas lease auction last December to disrupt the process. Both involve at some level the imagery of finding your prey through their waste:

1. It’s Just Garbage, Forbes.com

Garrulous and hilarious, Atkinson’s a poet of garbage who fancies himself a scatologist, spending his nights nipple-deep in corporate excrement. “My dad was a hunter, and though I was never into that myself, I never forgot him explaining to me that the way you track your prey is through its crap. You can tell how the herd is eating, if there’s a sick animal in the group, whether they’re growing or contracting. If I was a CEO, I’d spend some time out back in the garbage every day—you learn more here than you ever could from a balance sheet.”

2. Student In Bogus Oil, Gas Bids Faces Prosecution, NPR.org

DeChristopher believes the reaction stems from “a new perspective of just an average American really believing that I had a role to play in my government and that I wasn’t helpless to stop this destruction.”

He then compared himself, with a laugh, to “that little fish in the Amazon that swims up your urine into your urethra and takes you down from the inside out.”

For the record, I believe he means this fish.

UPDATED: 3/10/08 Youtube video of the segment added.

The executive director where I work told me that there were some freegans featured on Oprah the other day (which may have helped convince one of her sisters to eat a meal she prepared which included some food we had shared from our dumpster diving bounty). I’ve take a few clips from the online slideshow and pasted them below with a link to Oprah’s site (and the blog of the freegans who were on the show). Kudos to Daniel and Amanda — looks like they got some good soundbites in and raised the issue of consumption on a show with an enormous reach. It’s nice to imagine the “Oprah effect” potentially convincing people to live more simply and consume less.

Since she started living as a freegan, Madeline says she is surprised at how little she actually needs to live. “I’ve been looking at how much I accumulated, and I’m still giving it away,” she says. “When I look at how people like my grandmother lived, she wouldn’t be doing this kind of throwaway society that we do now. She wouldn’t be going out and buying new outfits.”

Lisa says seeing how much quality food and other items Madeline was able to pull from the trash really opened her eyes. “Freegans believe that, in a way, we are slaves to buying,” she says. “When you think about it, we work so hard, but for what? To buy more. Whether it’s a house payment or a car or food, we just want to continue to consume. Freegans have decided to kind of try and turn their back on it completely and stop buying stuff.”
…
Daniel says he and Amanda adopted their freegan lifestyle out of frustration with our wasteful culture. “I think we’re 5 percent of the population and we consume 30 percent of the world’s resources. We just think that’s wrong that so many people suffer,” Daniel says.

Amanda says she is not worried about what other people think of them. “We’d much rather be known as people that dig in trash than people that buy needless things,” she says. “You have to learn to not get your happiness from things. It’s a pretty easy thing to learn once you try it.”
…
What made them think it was a good idea in the first place? Daniel says freegan ideas about consumption fit into their beliefs. “We try to live very simply, and we don’t spend a lot on ourselves. We are very happy with having a little,” he says. “We like to make it a priority to share a lot of our money. A lot of that comes from our Christian values of sharing and generosity.”

They say their scavenging can be so productive that they sometimes can’t even use everything they find! When that happens, Amanda says, they either give their surplus to others or donate it to shelters or charities. “Just put it back into the system rather than into a landfill,” she says.

• Daniel and Amanda’s blog
• Oprah’s show (“How Far Would You Go,” with a segment on freeganism) 
• Related on this site: while we’re not bona-fide freegans, we do dumpster dive. 

Granted, it’s kind of a tabloid stunt to immediately mention that a man eats roadkill when he may intend his broader message to be about sustainability and the distance between us and our food, but I’m going to do it anyway. I came across a few links about urban foraging with a twist. Urban foraging includes things like collecting edible vegetables, plants, and herbs from vegetation that is growing around the city, in parks and so on…but for non-vegetarians, where’s the meat? (Obviously, my answer to that question would be: in the dumpster. We get more meat than we can deal with so we often distribute more of it to friends than we keep ourselves).The articles offered another take on the location of the meat: dead on the road or living in the pond, in the park, in the garbage in the back alley… (The roadkill article is cleverly titled “The 100 Mile-an-hour Diet” (1)).

And I have to admit, after my first visceral disgust, a very small CFL in my head began to flicker. Slightly. Some of the arguments had a certain amount of logic to them:

“The reason I opt for roadkill as opposed to hunting — which I’m also down with,” says Comeau, “is because there’s so much roadkill. I feel like it’s sort of ridiculous for me to start hunting, say, deer, when I can get so much deer on the side of the road.”

BUT…how do you tell if it’s fresh? Ah…moist eyes.

[The raccoon]’s mouth is bloodied from impact and his tongue has begun to dry out. One little black eyeball is missing, but the other still looks moist, a sign of freshness. It is late morning on a cool October day, and my hosts suppose he died some time the night before.

My concern is that all the instructions for butchering wild game seem to emphasize the importance of gutting an animal quickly after its death so that the meat won’t be contaminated by gastric juices and rot. Obviously, immediate butchering isn’t always possible with roadkill.

“There’s no animal where you would get some kind of poison that would occur to the point where you would die,” says Zuckerman. “If the stomach juices [got on the meat] there’d be a variation of food poisoning.” But this would only happen if the gut lining were broken, an easily observed detail.

(Actually, omnivores like raccoon, bear and pig should never be eaten uncooked. You can get a very nasty parasite called Trichina from them.)

Zuckerman points out the conditions aren’t necessarily all that different for game meat; sometimes he isn’t able to retrieve an animal for half a day, “Or you shoot something on a ridge and it bounces down the hill. Well, that’s kinda like roadkill.”

Zuckerman maintains that it’s easy to tell bad meat from good by the look and smell of it, and Barrett and Comeau say they’ve never gotten sick off roadkill, nor have any other roadside diners they know.

Well, my internal voice is saying, maybe if I knew how to skin and clean an animal I could do this?

Barrett lays the coon out on the grass. Both he and Comeau wear a familiar buck knife, ready at the hip. Our raccoon has some gravel stuck among the fur of his chest. His belly is damp with urine. Barrett drives the knife into the raccoon’s tough belly, drawing the blade upward from within.

It’s only the first incision that makes me wince. As Barrett cuts the fur back, I am surprised by how clean our critter looks on the inside. He is white and glistening, covered in an immaculate layer of fat.
…
Twenty minutes into the skinning, Barrett is hunched over the raccoon, still scraping away at belly hide. Because of a thick layer of white fat between the hide and meat, a raccoon can take longer to skin than a deer, despite its size. The hide must be scraped bare or the fat will blacken and rot on it, making it unusable. Where the hide is particularly well cleaned, the purplish undersides of hair follicles show through.

Comeau asks if I’d like to try.

A long, rapt silence ensues.

When I do take the knife in hand, I have to grip the edge of fur and pull it taut away from the body, slicing again and again into the tough skin. The fat is waxy and pleasing to the touch. I come away with specks of brownish dried blood on my hands, and a sheen of grease that won’t wash off in the river.
…
Two hours later, our creature is transformed again when Barrett chops off the head. He slices the belly open and bares the organs to the sun: tiny red heart, spongy lungs, bloated belly, blue-green intestines. They bring a strong smell of “yuck,” and flies. After he removes the organs, Barrett rinses the carcass in the river.

Despite Comeau and Barrett’s guidance, I’m fairly overwhelmed by what little participation I’ve managed in the day’s activities, and amazed to learn that both Barrett and Comeau are mostly self-taught.
…
“For a long time before I ever ate roadkill,” says Comeau, “I tried to find people who could teach me how to butcher.” She often saw roadkill deer and wanted to be able to use them. “Eventually a friend showed me, very briefly, how to skin. The next time I got a deer, I taught myself how to do it.”

Digging a little deeper, I find out that a different person who eats roadkill also has “never gotten sick eating roadkill, though he does take a supplement for worms,” (2) and that was enough to dispel any illusions (and let’s be honest, they were illusions) that I would ever do this. Unless I hit the animal myself. Maybe.

A separate article detailed an attempt to hunt small animals in the middle of the city.(3) Here’s a few choice clips:

[RABBIT] I slam the box down with a thud, slip another piece of cardboard beneath it, and walk—then run—to the car, expecting someone to accost me at any minute. Nobody does.

I ease the box into my bathtub and take off the lid. I look at the rabbit. It calmly looks back: Well, here we are. The rabbit. The bathtub. Me. It is undeniably cute; it is also dinner. I ease the barrel of the pistol inches from its head. I shoot. There is the small pop—the bullet is in its brain. The rabbit falls on its side, kicking, spurting blood, but silent. I reload and shoot. It keeps kicking, the blood pulsing out more softly, with the regularity of a heartbeat. Then nothing.

I find my Buck knife and start the tap—blood gathers, thickening in little pools. I rinse the rabbit. I cut off its head. I cut off its feet. I slice the hide along its stomach, careful not to let the blade push too deep, where it would perforate the guts, letting its bile spill out and contaminate the meat. I pull off its skin like a tight sock then cut the stomach lining and scoop out the organs. A terrible, hot smell fills the bathroom, like shit and sex and death and sweat—all the brutish smells of the body in one dense mist. I throw the guts, head, feet, and soggy fur into a plastic bag and take it to the Dumpster. I rinse the rabbit, throw it in a pot of saltwater to soak, and return to the office.

Later, I quarter the rabbit, cook it in a cast-iron skillet with white wine and rosemary and onions and potatoes and, since I’m feeling sinister, carrots. It tastes wild—nutty, tough, and surprisingly bitter.

“The rabbit tasted bitter,” I said to my father over the telephone. “But maybe that was just my guilt.”
…
I felt queasy about what I had just done, but I couldn’t explain why. Factory farms are reprehensible: their labyrinths of tiny, shit-filled cages; their abuse of minimum- (or sub-minimum-) wage workers; and well-documented cruelty to animals and people. The rabbit I had eaten had a free-range, organic life—hopping where it wanted to, eating what it wanted to. Hunting wild animals for food is the most ecologically and ethically sound way anybody, urban or rural, can eat meat. But when I told the friend whose car I had borrowed for the rabbit hunt about the project, she was revolted.

[PIGEON] A couple of minutes later, a dozen pigeons are jockeying to stand on my net and get at their last supper. A quick turn of the wrist and the net is flipped, trapping three. They struggle beneath the blue netting. I lift the edge, freeing two, then pull on a pair of gloves, grab the third by the back, and twist its head to break its neck. Unexpectedly, the head pops off, thin arcs of blood squirting into the grass. I stuff the decapitated bird in a garbage bag, stuff that into the saddlebag of my bike, and ride away.
…
[RAT] A few days after my aborted rat hunt, a vegetarian friend held forth on Immanuel Kant. The German philosopher argued that being cruel to animals was a bad thing—not for the animal’s sake, but for the man’s, that by hurting animals we are sullying our own humanity. In Kant’s words: “He who is cruel to animals becomes hard also in his dealings with men.”

But cruelty can also be a means toward greater understanding of what it means to be human.
…
[SQUIRREL] A Seattle Police Department public-records request for hunting-related arrests produced nothing. But, police spokesman Rich Pruitt said, urban hunters will probably get slapped with something. You can’t discharge a firearm in the city limits. An air pistol is not a firearm, but shooting it in public still constitutes reckless endangerment. Then there are the game violations (for geese and ducks) and animal-cruelty laws. Drowning vermin in traps, a common method for homeowners and building managers, is considered a “process” and therefore cruel. Shooting them in the head is not, but in most cases shooting is illegal anyway.

But what about the eating? I asked Pruitt if a homeowner who had legally killed a dozen rats with snap traps could barbecue them in the front yard. He snickered: “If you want to eat your rats, I guess you can.” And your neighbor’s squirrels? More snickering. “Yeah, if they agree to it.”

My friend Eric is not technically my neighbor, but he and his housemates—one of whom is vegan—agree to let me trap a squirrel in their backyard in a residential area of Fremont, just a couple of blocks from the Buckaroo Tavern. Just an hour after setting the trap in the shade of a small tree, the vegan roommate calls out: “There’s one in there.”

Nobody knows how many squirrels live in Seattle. Or pigeons. Or rats. All of them are tough, wiry creatures—but on starvation rations, one could feed perhaps two people per day. If we were living in the rubble of what used to be Seattle, we cannot estimate how long we could survive off its vermin…

It takes four shots to kill the trapped squirrel. I aim at its head, between the thin bars of its metal cage, and shoot. It seizes up, presses its body against the bars, and bleeds. I reload. I shoot. It spasms and bleeds. I reload. I shoot. Bright blood splashes onto my leg and a bit of brain splatters onto my shoe. I reload. By the fourth shot, it is still.

Against expectations, watching animals struggle against death wasn’t getting any easier.
…
[SLUG] Harvesting slugs is less hunting than gathering, and hardly bears mentioning, but here is what you do: The morning after a good rain, peek beneath the leaves, bricks, and wooden planks of a friend’s garden and drop the slugs you find into any nonmetallic container. Allow them to fast for a couple of days, then feed them on sage or other savory leaves. Wash away the mucus—saltwater baths help—and sauté them in butter and garlic, like escargot. They are chewy.
…
[GEESE] But watching the geese, I begin to feel hollow. Why am I actually doing this? I don’t buy goose. I don’t really like goose. No soup kitchen would accept a carcass from me. So why am I here, paddling in a canoe, looking nervously over my shoulder, trying to kill an animal I don’t want to eat? What’s the point I’m trying to prove again? Why do I keep fantasizing about disasters? Why can’t I keep a girlfriend? What is going to happen to my mother? What is going to happen to me?

I slide the net underwater and stretch it out three feet from the side of the boat. I throw more breadcrumbs until a goose is just above the net. It is huge. And beautiful. In my mind I lift the net quickly, turn it, catch the goose and plunge it underwater, feel it struggle for air, wait until it gets limp and heavy before hauling it onboard and hiding it in my bag. In my mind, I cut off its head, skin it, scoop out its guts. My hands are still. I am fixated on the white of its cheeks, the fullness of its breast, the grace of its long neck, the slight curl of the feathers at the tip of its tail.

I let it live.
…
As I ride, I pass pigeons and squirrels, imagining what they look like beneath their skins. I can see their tough sinews, the distinct gray-and-blue squiggles of their organs, the pink veins spread across their chest cavities once their wrinkled lungs have been plucked out like soft, gray walnuts. Their freshly spilled blood is the brightest; it gets duller with every second it is in contact with the air. People are built the same way—the woman in the fancy car, the man jogging by with green sneakers, me.

Food for thought?

Sources:

• 1. The 100-Mile-an-Hour Diet
• 2. Wild Man, Wild Food: The Roadkill Diet
• 3. The Urban Hunt: A Summer Spent Killing—and Eating—Seattle’s Small Game
• via WorldChanging
• Flickr photo by steviebreech

When we were at Janel’s parent’s house over Christmas, we played a game called “Would you rather…?” which gives you two scenarios and has you choose which would be preferable. One of the questions that generated some discussion was whether you’d rather have an undeserved bad reputation, or have skeletons in your closet that no one knew about. I thought of that the other day when I got my copy of Heart magazine, which contained an article that referenced our dumpster diving, but I asked the question in reverse: would I rather have an undeserved good reputation or have to tell people that I’m really not all that saintly?

First of all, we were under the impression that this article was going to be mainly about CEDC (where I work), with a few sentences or a paragraph about each of our “off duty” interests — not a feature about dumpster diving! Somewhere in the editing process, things must have changed and there are some inaccuracies I am not comfortable with, especially in the quotations attributed to me. A related thing I have a problem with is how the article and captions repeatedly indicate that we dumpster dive to distribute the food to the needy (and in one spot says “sometimes for themselves if anything is left.”) In reality it’s exactly the opposite way around — while I do dumpster dive because of my values, we dive to get food for ourselves and distribute the excess to friends and co-workers, and occaisionally to “the needy” if the opportunity arises. I have a feeling that the CBC segment was misunderstood…perhaps the transition between us and Food Not Bombs was not distinct enough, but FNB are the ones that should be getting that pat on the back, not me.

So there you have it. Now that’s off my chest and I feel a little bit better.

*The article referenced above is from Heart Magazine, Winter 2007.

Towards the end of last year, some folks from CBC followed a friend and I as we went on one of our dumpster diving excursions. I’ve linked the video in below. I had illusions of being a very eloquent dumpster diving apologist, speaking about how we began and why we do it…but at turns I was not eloquent or was not asked the questions, and most of what I did say ended up on the cutting room floor. Oh well! I’ll take this opportunity to share what I meant to say, and hopefully by joining us on a dumpster run a few more people in other cities will decide to give it a try and will save more good food from the trash.

How Janel and I began to dive

After hearing Ryan talk about it for many months and sampling his wares semi-regularly, I decided to give it a shot. I went with my younger brother, who was living here for the summer on a tight budget. We weren’t quite sure what to expect and were a little hesitant about it, but we found it as described and enjoyed wedges of spiced Gouda cheese (among other things). The more we went, the more confident we became and the more systems or routines we developed (Janel says she’s happy to eat it, but she’d rather be the quality control when we return and would just as well stay out of the dumpster.)

Why do we dumpster dive?

• God does not call us to try to live as comfortably as possible in an affluent culture—God calls us to live faithfully in the midst of it. Our culture of excess, overconsumption and waste is one that we feel compelled to oppose and this is one way we can actively do so. When we began we just imagined that we would save edible food from being wasted, but we’ve found that one step leads to another. Now when we get home and do the sorting, we find that we get a large amount of perfectly good food, but also a smaller amount of spoiled food. We’ve found that we can compost a lot of that and recycle a lot of the packaging it came in. If meat that we find doesn’t pass Janel’s quality control, we can feed it to a friend’s dog. So we are finding better uses for even much of the food that we won’t eat.
• It’s good for the environment (this is related to the first point)
• We save money. We have been able to set aside a chunk of money each month which would have gone towards food for ourselves and we donate it to other important causes. We take turns choosing where to give and how to divide the money.
• It reinfuses the phrase “Give us this day our daily bread” with new meaning and reminds us of our dependence (on God and also on the regular cycles of the planet).
• It feels like a parable rescuing garbage and acknowledging its worth.
• It’s kind of fun.

How to be a good dumpster diver

• Be quick
• Go after hours so customers don’t see you when they come to shop (and to give them some time to dump the “Sell by’s” for that day.)
• Keep the area clean (Don’t leave trash outside the dumpster and don’t pile up bags of food—I recommend working in a team with one person in the dumpster and one person moving them to the car more or less as you find them just in case a store worker comes out. Garbage bags look like garbage bags and if you’re piling them on the ground, it would be easy for them to assume you’re making a mess that they will have to clean up.)
• Be polite, not antagonistic to store workers (if you encounter them). A number of times I have even gone and asked permission at the loading dock, but normally we don’t even see anyone around.
• If you have a distribution system (friends, workplace, church, Food Not Bombs, etc.) take more than you can eat and share it freely with others. The more you take and can actually use, the more environmental side benefits you reap by rescuing it from the dumpster and the more resources you potentially free up for other good causes. For example, when we find a big haul of bread, Ryan sets up a table at work where people can take bread and drop a donation into a bucket which goes to Bread for the World (he calls it “Bread for bread for Bread for the World”).
• When you need to supplement your diving for nutritional or other specific needs, try to buy local. In the summer we joined a CSA as a supplement, and now we try to find any extras we might need at the local food Co-op.

Update

Ryan has added a post to the God’s Politics blog with links to some other relevant pages. Here are some of those links and a few more:

• The Tao Of Dumpster Diving by Ryan (Sojourners)
• Dumpster diving in the Washington Post
• On food (more food-related links)
• Is eating caviar countercultural? (a short blog entry in the early days of Ryan’s dumpstering, before I began going regularly)

Update II

I’ve expanded parts of this entry into an article on Catapult Magazine, including a small slideshow of some of our finds.

Update III: 12/4/09

Ryan’s got another blog post regarding the documentary “Dive!”: Dive!: Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Dumpster Diving but Were Afraid to Ask

There was an article in the Post today about the rise in popularity of dumpster diving. It’s unfortunate that the first story they tell is of an altercation between a diver and an employee, because in my experience, that relationship is usually quite symbiotic. We make sure to be quiet, quick, and clean—so that the area around the dumpster and the dumpster itself are cleaner when we leave then when we arrive. Sounds like a win-win for all involved. My friend Ryan (who introduced me to dumpster diving) is quoted a few times.

Diving for Dinner: Whether Motivated by Eco-Activism, Social Consciousness or Simply Scoring a Freebie, Scavenging for Groceries Gains in Popularity
…
The Environmental Protection Agency estimates that 96 billion pounds of food are thrown away each year, making up 12 percent of the trash produced in the United States. Because of federal and state regulations for restaurants and grocery stores, expiration dates often come before the food actually spoils. Much of it ends up in bags separate from the rest of a store’s garbage, providing easy access for divers.

“I’m trying to limit my participation in some of the corporate farming practices that are terrible for the environment and aren’t healthy,” said Columbia Heights resident Ryan Beiler, citing pesticides, animal cruelty and pollution. “I’m struck by the absurdity of how the American economy works.”

Beiler, Web editor for Sojourners magazine, estimated that 95 percent of the food he eats comes from his every-other-week dumpster runs.
…

“It’s about allowing God’s provisions to be available,” Beiler said. “I’ll eat vegetables for a week, and the next week it’ll be mostly carbs.”Beiler’s “dumpstering mentor,” his Columbia Heights neighbor Preston Winter, said that it’s difficult to maintain a balanced diet when he is relying on the trash but added that it’s also easy to get spoiled. He used to be excited when he found gourmet cheese, but now he’s come to expect it when he visits a high-end grocery store. He once found 40 unopened bottles of wine.

The reasons people are drawn back to the dumpster vary widely. Beiler said his Christian beliefs push him to live simply and refrain from wasting natural resources, whereas Winter described his motivation as “a mix of ‘wow, it’s free food’ and a desire to conserve resources.” Meadows said he dives mostly because he knows the food is there.

Click here for the full article.

It may just be the time of year or the particular circles I am in—or it may be a zeitgeist in the early stages of formation. There seems to be a lot of attention on food these days: where it comes from, how it’s raised, what’s in it, how it’s sold. In the last month we’ve had an issue on food from Sojourners, then a few weeks later an issue from Mother Jones. My father-in-law sent me a book review about food. A friend sent a link to a site about the “100 mile diet.” A group of friends joined a CSA with us and a number of us have small gardens out back.

Here’s a summary of some of the items, feel free to add more in the comments:

Our CSA: Clagett Farm

The 100 mile diet

When the average North American sits down to eat, each ingredient has typically travelled at least 1,500 miles—call it “the SUV diet.” On the first day of spring, 2005, Alisa Smith and James MacKinnon chose to confront this unsettling statistic with a simple experiment. For one year, they would buy or gather their food and drink from within 100 miles of their apartment in Vancouver, British Columbia.

Since then, James and Alisa have gotten up-close-and-personal with issues ranging from the family-farm crisis to the environmental value of organic pears shipped across the globe. They’ve reconsidered vegetarianism and sunk their hands into community gardening. They’ve eaten a lot of potatoes…

Sojourners: Let’s Eat! (May 2006)

• Shopping for Justice: My journey with Super Giant. by Bethany Spicher Schonberg
  

  “Lord, to those who hunger, give bread. And to those who have bread, give the hunger for justice.”
  —Latin American prayer

  I love grocery shopping. The tidy rows of boxes and cans, the perfect mounds of fruit, the wheeling of carts, the checking of lists, the whoosh of the automatic mister that leaves the leafy greens sparkling. I even like the Muzak.

  So last summer, to celebrate the grand opening of a Super Giant grocery store in Washington, D.C.’s Columbia Heights neighborhood, I walked five blocks to buy flour for my fiancé’s birthday cake. Behind the renovated Tivoli Square complex, which now houses the Sojourners office, I found a gala underway: red, white, and blue bunting, a live salsa band, and shoppers scrambling for the opening-day sales.

• The Tao Of Dumpster Diving: Why scavenge? You get a lot of really good food that’s really, really free. by Ryan Beiler
  

  “What is this—some kind of school project? You guys aren’t homeless, are you?” asked the clean-cut young policeman with well-gelled hair. His confusion was understandable. Actually, the first thing he said was, “You’re eating out of the garbage? That’s disgusting.”

  Indeed, why would four middle-class guys be pawing through garbage bags looking for food? Officer Hair Gel vainly tried to fit us into a category that made sense to him. “Is this for some kind of frat thing?”

• Check Please! Our long-distance food system provides choice - but at what cost? by Cathleen Hockman-Wert
  

  When global food shortages loomed 30 years ago, the Mennonite Central Committee asked its constituents to eat and spend 10 percent less on food. To help with that, the international relief and development organization produced More-with-Less Cookbook, which connects Christian faith with eating rice and beans. Eating more simply, cookbook author Doris Janzen Longacre argued, was not about “cutting back.” Rather, it meant “living joyfully, richly, creatively.”

  Last summer, MCC released another cookbook that calls people of faith to connect values and eating habits. Simply in Season, which I co-wrote with Mary Beth Lind, promotes local, fairly traded, and sustainably grown foods, even if choosing them means spending more.

• Other resources : Useful links to go deeper with the special issue on Food.

• More from this issue

Mother Jones: The Revolution Will Not Be Shrink Wrapped (May/June 2006)

• No Bar Code, By Michael Pollan

  Eat at Joel’s! An evangelical Virginia farmer says a revolution against industrial agriculture is just down the road.

  I might never have found my way to Polyface Farm if Joel Salatin hadn’t refused to FedEx me one of his chickens.

  I’d heard a lot about the quality of the meat raised on his “beyond organic” farm, and was eager to sample some. Salatin and his family raise a half-dozen different species (grass-fed beef, chickens, pigs, turkeys, and rabbits) in an intricate rotation that has made his 550 hilly acres of pasture and woods in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley one of the most productive and sustainable small farms in America. But when I telephoned Joel to ask him to send me a broiler, he said he couldn’t do that. I figured he meant he wasn’t set up for shipping, so I offered to have an overnight delivery service come pick it up.

  “No, I don’t think you understand. I don’t believe it’s sustainable — organic,’ if you will — to FedEx meat all around the country,” Joel told me. “I’m afraid if you want to try one of our chickens, you’re going to have to drive down here to pick it up.”

Photo by Alicia Jo McMahan

I have a question. A handful of friends came over recently and we ate caviar and assorted other food which a friend of mine had pulled out of a garbage dumpster. (I have been known to liberate good food from dumpsters before, so that is not the question). Here is a quote from the invitation he sent out:

Come enjoy the eclectic bounty of my recent dumpster dives. Join us at casa de bakker at 7:30 for some kickass casserole and yes, actual caviar gleaned from the excess decadence of suburbia.

Now let me further set the scene. Janel is out of town. Our kitchen sink is on the fritz, so I have to wash dishes in the bathroom. Whenever we need water, we have to fill the Brita up in the shower. Another friend brings red wine, but it was in his trunk and it is warm. We play two rounds of Settlers of Catan. It’s five guys (without their wives or fiances or girlfriends), and one woman (recently back from Afghanistan and still jet-lagged).

Here’s the question: are we counter-cultural, or is this just an indicator that the guy-girl ratio was out of whack?

Can I get a shout out to eating garbage?