by Cathy Erway
Small handful of grape tomatoes, halved
Sprinkle of finely sliced red onion (for garnish)
Place beans in a medium pot and fill with just enough water to cover.
Tear off the stems of the ancho chilies and pour out the seeds. Break each one into a few pieces. Place into a covered pot with 3 cups of water and bring to a boil. Turn off heat, and let sit, covered, for 15 minutes.
In a large pan, heat up the vegetable oil and saute the shallot, jalapeño, and ⅔ of the garlic on medium heat for about 5 minutes, until softened. Add the ancho chilies with their soaking water and bring to a low simmer. Add salt, oregano, brown sugar, and vinegar. Turn off heat and let cool for at least 15 minutes. Transfer chili mixture to a food processor. Add onion and remaining ⅓ of the chopped garlic. Pulse until liquefied into a smooth sauce. Taste for seasoning. Sauce may taste very bitter at this point, which is fine.
Preheat oven to 375 degrees. In a 9 x 9 baking dish at least 2 inches deep, begin layering the chilaquiles. Scatter a somewhat even layer of half of the tortilla strips on the bottom. Add about ⅓ of the sauce evenly on top. Add a layer of half the spinach. Add about ⅓ of the shredded cheese, then about half of the black beans. Add another layer of tortillas, more sauce, the rest of the spinach, more cheese, and the rest of the beans. Top with the rest of the sauce, then the rest of the cheese. Scatter the halved grape tomatoes on top. Bake for 30 minutes. Remove from the oven, and scatter sliced onion on top. Let cool a moment before serving.
Baked Brie with Cranberry Sauce and Crackers
A variation of the appetizer served by Sean and Meredith with tangy, homemade cranberry sauce instead of mango sauce. Cranberries are best bought fresh in the fall, when they’re in season, but keeping them in the freezer year-round and thawing before using them works just as well here.
(MAKES ABOUT 6 APPETIZER-SIZED SERVINGS)
1 orange
1 lemon
½ cup sugar
12 ounces fresh cranberries (or substitute frozen and thawed)
½ cup water
1 8-ounce wedge of Brie
Zest the orange and lemon with a fine grater or citrus zester and reserve. Juice each fruit, removing the seeds, and reserve. In a medium saucepan, combine the sugar, cranberries, water, zest, and fruit juice, and heat at medium-high. Cook for about 20 minutes, stirring occasionally. Cranberries should be very soft but still just intact. Taste for seasoning, adding more sugar if desired. Let cool for 10-15 minutes.
Preheat oven to 375 degrees. In a 9-inch-deep pie pan, place the Brie in the center and pour the cranberry sauce around its edges just until it fills the pan (leaving a little more than ½ inch from the top, or else it may bubble over the edges). Bake for about 15 minutes, until the mixture is bubbly and the cheese just begins to ooze into the sauce. Let cool 5 minutes. Serve with crackers.
CHAPTER 5
Getting Dirty TRASH DIVING, FREEGANS, AND FRUGALISTAS
Be industrious and frugal, and you will be rich.
—Benjamin Franklin
“No, no, no. That’s just gross.”
“I really can’t think about doing that.”
“That’s wrong.”
I honestly couldn’t understand what all my friends had against eating garbage. Some people instantly shut off when they hear eating and Dumpster used in the same sentence. Others seemed interested in trash diving, or even appreciative of the cause, but weren’t ready to get down and dirty themselves. A few others were less turned off by actual trash diving than they were by the ruffian attitudes of the trash divers they’d encountered personally. Then there was the look on Ben’s face when I told him I wanted to give it a try. Actually, I think I might have asked him if he wanted to come along with me. Either way, it was completely still, devoid of any humor.
“Seriously, that’s just not for me. You can do it, though.”
All this fuss over looking for usable objects in the trash, I thought. That was essentially what trash diving meant. It’s also a practice that’s done in the name of social critique along with reclaiming goods for personal use. For many, it’s less about actually needing the goods for pure survival than about the ideology of reusing and repurposing instead of buying. And I was very intrigued by it that winter of 2007. I can’t remember when I’d first heard murmurs of the terms trash diving or freegans, people who consumed thrown-out or otherwise free goods. But I had friends and friends of friends who were involved to some extent in this lifestyle, as well as in related ideas like communal habitats, bike repair, and basically salvaging whatever refuse they could from what they felt was an overly materialistic culture to make art, clothes, food, or shelter or to fulfill other needs.
Freeganism popped up sometime in the mid-1990s, the coinage a play on free and vegan. Yet even though vegan culture has close ties to freeganism, the two are not mutually exclusive, and freegans are not always vegans. The first waves rose within radical activist groups such as Food Not Bombs, which served free vegetarian food, often dug up from the trash, to those in need. The anarchist street theater group of the 1960s Haight-Ashbury scene called the Diggers also touched on what would become freegan ideals by giving away salvaged food. I had little knowledge of all the history and tenets of freeganism at first, but I was intrigued by tales of large feasts cooked and shared by these friends-of-friends freegans, which were supposedly all made from food found in the Dumpsters behind supermarkets. A gold mine in disguise? I wondered. Was creating a banquet based around thrown-out produce and packaged goods sort of like the food version of making art only from found materials?
For some reason, I wasn’t averse to the thought of foraging through trash bins for food. I couldn’t put my finger on why this was. My parents had raised me to eat bread no matter if it was stale, and to drink milk a few days past the store’s sell-by date so long as it didn’t reek. As long as the food found in the trash wasn’t creeping with mold and rot, so what? I reasoned. I imagined lifting a Dumpster bin and uncovering a cache of things like unopened packages of cookies. It seemed a heck of a lot more appetizing than the crumbly, half-stale things on the top of my fridge. It wasn’t until I received such strong reactions against it from my friends that I decided I might actually be meant for this habit—or at the very least, that I should check out a trash tour and see for myself what this whole freegan thing was.
I went to the website freegan.info and signed up for the New York City-based events and discussion e-mail lists. Immediately, I began receiving a daily string of e-mails as the group organized meetings and shared news; their messages ranged from the chatty to the philosophical. One day it might be a call for volunteers to sit at a table at an activist convention. A typical e-mail might provide a link to a news article somehow related to trash diving.
The website freegan.info was founded in 1998 by Adam Weissman, a New York City-based freegan. Begun as the offshoot of a grassroots activist collective called the Wetlands Preserve, the site now serves as a network for freegans around the world, posting activities and news for each city’s local chapter. On the site one can also read manifestos, press clippings, and histories on the movement. Despite all this literature and activity, or maybe in part because of it, there isn’t really any clearly defined code to freeganism; there are many varying thoughts and beliefs among individual practitioners as well as varying levels of commitment to these ideals. In one of Adam Weissman’s statements, he attests that becoming a vegan came before his freeganism and further inspired his political beliefs. But the main emphases of the movement are clearly focused on minimum consumption of resources by reducing, reusing, and sharing, and on environmentalism. Weissman and other group members publicly acknowledge that it’s impossible to follow these beliefs to their fullest in this day and age, subsisting solely on the waste, their own urban gardens, and so forth. But still, they try to live as best they can in accordance with their anticonsumerist beliefs.
I had met Adam that fall at a joint lecture and film screening in Wil
liamsburg, Brooklyn, that he was giving alongside Heather Rogers, author of Gone Tomorrow: The Hidden Life of Garbage and director of a short documentary of the same name. The lecture was held at a small gallery space, and after the presentations, I briefly introduced myself over the buffet of freeganed refreshments. I explained that my blog was based on not eating out in restaurants, and he nodded appreciatively.
“Yeah, people ask me all the time, ‘What do you do when you want to go on a date? How do you take someone out?’” he said.
I laughed. I tried to imagine Adam in a restaurant, waving down a waiter. In baggy corduroys and a couple of layers of chewed-up T-shirts, Weissman cuts something of an effortless and completely unintentional re-envisioning of Chaplin’s famous “tramp” persona. The idea of him sacrificing his beliefs for the sake of dating just seemed preposterous.
A few weeks after signing up for the e-mail list, I opened an e-mail about a trash tour taking place that night. It was a mild spring day, and I couldn’t think of anything else I needed to do that night. I wrote down the meeting address, grabbed a couple of plastic bags that were around my apartment, hoped it wouldn’t rain, and headed out to meet them.
The moment Janet untangled the sturdy black plastic bag’s double knot, a pleasant, oniony aroma greeted us, as if we had just entered a bagel store in the morning. Yet it was ten o’clock on a busy weeknight in Murray Hill, and we were gathered around a pile of trash bags on the sidewalk. Inside the bag Janet held open was a cornucopia of multicolored bagels that had been baked that morning. It must have weighed ten pounds. Beside it were two more giant black garbage bags filled with more bagels. All had come from the bagel store that we were standing in front of on Second Avenue, which now had a metal grate over its facade.
With frizzy gray hair and dressed in comfortable slacks, a fanny pack, and sneakers, Janet Kalish looked to be in her midforties. She and Madeline Nelson, who was middle-aged and sporting similar, no-nonsense clothes, seemed to be leading this night’s tour. For some reason, I hadn’t expected I’d be meeting two middle-aged women this evening when I headed out the door, but then here I was, listening in attentively to their observations gleaned from much trash-going experience.
Bread, Janet explained, was by far the most commonly wasted type of food in this city. Every bakery that takes any pride in its baked goods must throw out any unsold products at the end of the day. All the hundreds of bakeries, selling crusty baguettes or rich brioches, Jewish challah or Italian foccacia—these all went into the trash. No matter the type of bakery, almost every one in the city practiced this tenet of the business: Never stock day-old bread. Hence, bread is the bread and butter of the city’s food waste.
Still holding open the garbage bag of bagels, Janet gestured to a French reporter who was standing near me: “I’m sure you know that in Paris, if you go to a bakery toward the end of the night, you’re picking through the last crumbs left on the shelf, maybe a croissant here, one last roll there.” The reporter nodded and scribbled. “But here the attitude is to always have fully stocked shelves.”
I looked at the bagels practically spilling over onto the sidewalk: There were cinnamon-raisin, poppy, plain, egg, everything, whole wheat, oat, onion, and garlic (which accounted for that strong and still-fresh aroma)—every kind, in fact, was represented. Janet went on to stress that so often, food was purposely produced by restaurants in extreme excess simply for appearance’s sake. A bakery knew it wouldn’t sell out of every loaf each day, but the look of a nicely stocked shelf was a lot more attractive to potential customers than a near-empty one. Who wants to grab dessert and coffee at a place that has one cookie left? That was the American sensibility. Maybe we ought to do what the Japanese do, and place rubber models of food in the windows of our restaurants and bakeries instead of the real thing, I thought.
I thought about my bread-baking experiments of earlier that year, and how much pride the city’s best bakeries and critics like Jeffrey Steingarten took in making the perfect loaf. I also recalled a passage about bread in Arthur Schwartz’s book New York City Food: “If, as food philosophers say, the gastronomy of a place can be measured by its interest in bread, then by that criteria alone New York City must be judged the world’s greatest gastronomic capital,” he wrote. He goes on to explain how heavily bread—of every stripe—weighs into our culinary landscape. I wasn’t sure if it was hypocrisy or pure clumsiness that so much of our favorite food was being left untouched, on these curbs, on a daily basis.
Arms dove into the trash bag as the group fished out their favorite bagels. I dug in and scooped out an oniony, poppy-flecked everything bagel (or was it only now “everything” because it had been rubbed against so many other bagels?). I resisted the urge to grab more only because I had just baked a loaf of no-knead bread that night. I always manage to end up with way too many carbs in my kitchen all at once.
“Did everyone bring plastic bags?” Janet asked the group. Most of the people around me indeed had. Only the reporter and her photographer shook their heads.
“No problem; I’ve got bags here for anyone who needs them. I just found this roll outside of a store, perfectly good,” she said, holding up a tube of perforated plastic bags, the kind you’d find in a grocery store produce aisle. “And thrown out, for no reason, I guess.
When everyone had finished taking their bagel picks, Janet carefully reknotted the bag. It was important to leave everything as tidy as you had found it, she said. From the looks of it, we’d hardly made a dent in that hulking bagel bag. Beside it, those other two trash bags hadn’t even been opened.
“We’ll leave the rest for the homeless. Sometimes they like to pick through these, too,” Janet said, giving the bags a last glance.
For our next stop on the tour, we walked a few blocks south to a small upscale grocery store. The store was closed, its dim lights exposing the aisles of gourmet food inside. At the curb in front lay our target—a disheveled heap of black garbage bags.
The group began tearing into the bags with a careful, yet determined dexterity that must have come from much experience. They would feel around the outsides first, then untie the top and take a peek in. I helped open one bag, which was filled with a variety of produce. Hands reached in from all directions around me, and one by one, fruits and vegetables were removed. Finally, I stepped back and surveyed what had come out of the group of bags so far. Along the sidewalk, the group had lined up a cluster of several decent-looking apples, some with bruises here and there. Many more spotted bananas were recovered, some good-looking pears, and several tomatoes, which looked wet on their surfaces, probably from condensation and being squashed beside something else, but otherwise fine. I was amazed to see bag after bag of prewashed mixed salad greens emerge from the garbage as well. The bags were sealed shut, and through the clear plastic, the greens still looked perfectly crisp. But the telltale expiration dates on their packages were one or two days past. Chatter floated around about what to set aside for the freegan group dinner the next evening. It sounded like the group was keeping all the salad bags for the dinner, and created a small pile of them in one corner. These were relatively expensive grocery items, I thought, and here were at least half a dozen of them going for free. I never bought these mixes myself, since I think it’s easy enough to wash and chop heads of lettuce, which are cheaper. How ironic, I thought, that the freegans would be feasting on these. I spotted Madeline looking on and asked her whether the salad mixes were a common trash find.
“Yes, we see lots of these,” she said. “They perish so quickly.” They also worked out great for group dinners, since there were so many vegetarians. A big bowl of green salad was a staple at nearly every meal.
We opened another garbage bag and removed a smattering of various foods: a package of corn muffins, a quart of yogurt (expired), sour cream (unexpired), a package of chocolate-chip cookies (my daydream was realized!), and some deli sandwiches in plastic containers, to name a few of the finds.
“Any
meat-eating freegans here?” somebody called out. The packaged sandwiches, which had most likely been made fresh that morning at the store, had cold cuts such as salami and ham stuffed inside kaiser rolls. A couple of guys in the group eagerly scooped them up.
“It’s less common, but some of us do eat meat, or will at least eat it if we see it being wasted,” Janet was telling the reporter. Since many freegans are vegan, though, they have little use for the meat and dairy products they find, even if they are still fresh. I looked at the sour cream container. The plastic was squashed in a little bit on one side, but its expiration date read that it wasn’t due to go to waste for another two weeks. Probably it was there because the container had gotten smashed.
It sounded like a no-brainer to me at first that the majority of dairy and meat found in a Dumpster was there for a reason—because it had gone bad. But I’d sure have no qualms about eating those leftover deli sandwiches. And when another apparently meat-eating freegan scored a package of sliced prosciutto, I had to admit that it looked pretty tempting. Was it still good? I guess that would be left for him to find out.
Janet held up the quart of sour cream. She began talking about the terrible conditions on confined dairy farms where the animals who produced the milk for it were kept, how they were separated from their mothers practically at birth, and the trauma that this caused for both mother and calf. She went on to describe the conventional milk cow’s unhealthy diet of cheap grains, when cows are meant to be pastured on grass.