by Cathy Erway
“And in the end, after all that, this cup of sour cream is here, in the trash,” Janet concluded. She plopped the carton disdainfully back with the stash of food finds.
A few people still picked through the last bag. The strained looks on their faces led me to believe it didn’t hold much that was good. Janet stood back and surveyed the row of produce on the sidewalk, frowning. She announced to the group: “So this happens to be a rare, slow night for Dumpster diving. Usually we come away with a lot more food than what we’ve seen here tonight,” she said.
The reporter’s photographer was snapping away, taking shots of people holding their favorite food finds. A girl with an apple proudly posed before him. I eyed the food on the curb, wondering whether there was anything I wanted. My eyes were suddenly drawn to a familiar shape: a small head of garlic. I picked it up. It felt firm and fresh, though a few of its outer cloves were missing.
“Take it!” Madeline urged when she caught sight of me inspecting it. “We’ve got plenty of them.”
I slipped it into my tote bag.
Moving along, we stopped next at a Dunkin’ Donuts just a few doors down. I wasn’t particularly thrilled about this stop. Fried dough coated with sticky syrup is not really my kind of food, free or not. Then again, I was starting to feel a little hungry right then. Does eating freeganed food from a place like Dunkin’ Donuts count as eating out? I wondered. Nah, I immediately decided. And certainly not on the sidewalk at ten o’clock at night.
The bright neon storefront was still open. Late-night customers streamed in and out with coffee cups and crumpled white bags bearing the chain’s pink-and-orange logo. just outside, a small cluster of black garbage bags had already been laid on the curb. I was amazed at how invisible we seemed to passersby just then. The whole time we had been scavenging the trash at the gourmet grocery, I’d notice passersby glance our way every now and then. It was nearing ten o’clock, and many people looked like they were dressed up to go out for drinks or dinner. (By comparison, we looked more like bums, toting around a granny cart filled with trash, getting twisted in our plastic bags.) I didn’t see a single person stop to look at us for longer than a second before walking on by, their culture barely brushing against that of the freegans.
The first bag we opened was filled with doughnuts and muffins. Most were sticking together in an unsightly fashion—a lot of the doughnuts were frosted—but the plentiful munchkins inside the bag looked just as intact as they would have on the store’s racks. Two of the girls on the tour began collecting these. They’d be good as dessert for tomorrow’s dinner, someone suggested. I thought about taking a few to pop in my lunch bag for tomorrow. Sure, the glazed ones wouldn’t have quite the same chewiness as they had today, and the cake doughnuts would dry out to hardened nuggets. I watched the girls handpick the munchkins and drop them one by one into clear plastic bags. I declined taking one for the moment, lost suddenly in a sharp memory.
The summer between my junior and senior years in high school, my three best girlfriends and I made three remarkable discoveries. The first was that we could pull back and crawl underneath the wire mesh fence of the town swimming pool for a clandestine midnight dip. Second, we possessed a feminine attraction that could turn older guys into our minions for almost anything—giving us rides, getting us beer, and other shenanigans. My best friend, for instance, was five and a half feet of Indian American diva, with extra-long wavy hair that framed her curvy features. Our nights were filled with adventure. In something of an antecedent to number two, our third discovery that summer was that the Dunkin’ Donuts in downtown South Orange gave away free doughnuts just before closing at eleven P.M.
I remember the first night we walked into the Dunkin’ Donuts store a minute before eleven oclock. We had gone in only to use the pay phone, which the lone store attendant had kindly let us use even after he explained he was about to close the shop, taking the cash drawers out of the registers. After one of us had finished the call, we turned to face the glowing, fluorescent racks of doughnuts. Collectively, we seemed to be wondering, “Are you going to eat that?” as we stared longingly at the treats. The store attendant in the white paper Dunkin’ Donuts hat followed our stare for a moment and smiled.
“Lemon filled, blueberry cake, chocolate frosted,” we began calling out.
“Boston cream, a French cruller, apple streudel.” We didn’t really want all that many doughnuts, I guessed, but the idea that he was giving them to us completely free was somewhat thrilling.
The attendant snapped open one small white paper bag after another, filling them with our picks. We pointed and deliberated behind the counter. By the time we were finished choosing, he’d given us at least one of every single type of doughnut left on the shelf. We’d cleared the racks down to the last dozen pastries. The attendant seemed to have somewhat limited English skills, but we left that night carrying several bags filled to the brim with doughnuts, and it wouldn’t be the last time. He waved and smiled as we walked out as if we’d done him a favor instead, still holding the frosting-smeared waxed-paper sheet in one hand.
Yet as I smacked through those sticky, sugary, sludge-covered morsels of dough on those triumphant binges, something was nagging at me. Surely the rest of the world’s Dunkin’ Donuts didn’t have a few hungry teenagers attempting to consume their day’s surplus. Nor did the rest of the world’s bazillions of eating establishments, like the other bakery that was probably closing up shop, too, next door to our gold mine of a Dunkin’ Donuts.
“Anyone want some munchkins?” one of the girls called out to our tour. “I think I’ve got too many.”
She shook her clear plastic bag briefly, sending its contents into a flurry of powdered sugar. Oh, for good times’ sake. I reached forward, and she placed a munchkin in my hand.
I looked down at the bite-sized powdered thing in my palm. Cinnamon. Instead of eating it, I was suddenly filled with an acute and irrational sense of hatred for this nostalgic binge treat. It barely weighed an ounce. Really, it was no more than a millisecond’s worth of cake dough, burped out of some machine, deep-fried in processed oils (then trans fats, before the chain’s decision to move to non-trans fat oil in September 2007), and rolled around in powdered sugars. Maybe it was filled with a nanosecond’s worth of drop-dead-red high-fructose corn-syrup goop dimly related to jelly. Or maybe it had food color and artificial cocoa flavor in the dough to make it “chocolate.” And now it was landfill padding. I found myself hating the cutesy way in which it was advertised as a doughnut hole: presumably a leftover scrap created from the process of making regular ring-shaped doughnuts. Because it wasn’t. Unlike the way I might have seen it as a teenager, none of this was kitschy or cute to me anymore. I gave my doughnut hole away to someone else in the group and wiped my fingers on my jeans.
As people were finishing up choosing munchkins, I wandered over to another trash bag. It had been opened and picked through a bit already. Inside was an endless-seeming concave pile of Dunkin’ Donuts muffins, croissants, and more doughnuts. Streaks of glossy red syrup were visible on nearly all of them, as if a jelly-filled doughnut had spontaneously combusted inside. I picked up what looked to be a chocolate-chip muffin lying near the top. It didn’t look so bad. I had suddenly lost my appetite, but I figured I could find some use for it later on.
At the end of the cluster of Dunkin’ Donuts trash, a final bag lay unopened. Now, with the experience under my belt of feeling bags that were suspiciously full of bread, I put my hand against it and felt a firm, round orb of bread inside.
“Bagels,” Madeline declared, summing up the packed plastic bag’s contents. “But,” she said, with knowing wryness, “we all know that Dunkin’ Donuts bagels aren’t that good.”
So we left those behind.
With that final stop at Dunkin’ Donuts, I called it a night and rode the subway back to Brooklyn. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to make it to the group dinner at one of the members’ apartments the following night, a Fri
day. I wouldn’t go on another trash tour for a long time after that, at least not with an organized group. But all the ideas that were brought up over the course of that night’s tour were on my mind vividly in the weeks and months that followed.
The first thing I did when I got home was make dessert. The chocolate-chip muffin I’d brought back was crumbly after having ridden with me in my purse. After peeling the paper liner from the bottom, I placed the muffin in a bowl and broke it up some more, to coarse crumbles no larger than ... wait a minute, “a pea.” That was one of the frequent descriptors you’d read in pastry recipes, in the instructions on how to cut butter into dry ingredients. The muffin was so greasy that it clearly had plenty of butter or some sort of fat in it already. Normally, with a basic pie-pastry dough, one would roll it out and then line it against the sides of a baking dish. I took out my oven-safe ramekins. Instead of rolling out the muffin crumbles, I pressed them against the inside of two of the ramekins. Most of it stuck. Some fell off, a little. But with a little more pressing, I was able to form a somewhat uniform crust all around the sides and the bottoms. Now, what to fill them with?
I quickly got started on making a basic vanilla custard. In the meantime, I turned the oven to 350 degrees and stuck the ramekins inside to crisp up the “pastry” a little. By the time I was done whisking together my basic, milk-and-egg-yolk vanilla custard, or pudding, the crusts had been taken out of the oven and had cooled down a little. The custard would take several hours, however, to cool. Getting sleepy, I filled the ramekins with custard up to the rims of the crust, covered them with plastic wrap, and let them chill in the refrigerator the rest of the night.
The next day, I came home with some fresh berries. I topped my vanilla-custard, chocolate-chip-muffin-crusted dessert with a few raspberries and spooned it up. It was divine.
Could I become a freegan convert? I agreed with almost everything people were saying on the trash tour and was astonished to find that it did seem more than viable to live off of grocery store rubbish, and fairly well at that. Freeganed food isn’t always stale or low quality, I’d learned. That head of garlic I took from the trash outside the upscale grocery? I used it to the last clove. Nothing was amiss about it—actually, it was a lot fresher than many bulbs I’ve purchased. But for me, there were a few problems with the freegan lifestyle. I loved to cook new things. And when I had an idea for something to run home and make, I wouldn’t want to be limited by what options were in the trash that day.
Reliance on availability, I realized, was something that freegans by nature had to fully accept. Instead of the changing harvests of the year (pre-global economy), their food choices were determined by sell-by dates and happenstance. Yet through my encounters with freegans, both on the tour and at the lecture, it didn’t seem as if anyone was too bothered by the types of food they found or didn’t find. This would be my biggest challenge if I were to become a freegan—not being able to choose what I cooked and ate. Plus, I was already giving up restaurant food, let’s not forget.
Overall, I got the sense that few of these freegans were “foodies,” like myself. I’m sure there are plenty of creative freegan chefs out there, eager to take a skillful shot at cooking the “secret ingredient” found in the Dumpster that day in some imaginative way. But still, he or she would have to have a substantial amount of will or tolerance. And what if you couldn’t find salt or pepper?
“I know—I never cook on the stove anymore. I use the toaster oven to cook everything these days,” I’d overheard Janet confide to another person on the tour, smirking secretively.
To be sure, I had gone trash diving in only one city, New York. There are active freegan communities all over the globe, in Europe especially. I once received an e-mail from a reader of my blog who described a trash tour he went on with freegans in New Orleans. They’d shared a giant feast the night after the tour, and he’d been fascinated, and eager to share the discovery.
My friend Matt had been less impressed with a group of freegans he met in Cleveland. They’d identified themselves as vegans, even though Matt had witnessed them eating both meat and dairy products that were found in the trash. Matt found this hypocrisy intolerable, arguing that some of the most important tenets of veganism had to do with nutrition, and a rigorous belief in the more healthful diet of plants-only eating. Indeed, to many vegans, it is important to abstain from meat for more than waste-conscious reasons. Plus, when it came to actually cooking the meat, my friend said these freegans had been clueless. They’d botched cooking a whole, frozen turkey, and had haplessly boiled the sack of gizzards they found inside its cavity while it was still in its plastic bag.
Because of this run-in, Matt tends to see freegans as lazy people, freeloaders of the more responsible, paying society, who are all too willing to compromise their values to subsidize their personal needs. I don’t agree with the generalization; however, as I found with the Dunkin’ Donuts munchkins, there are some things that I simply do not want to put in my body, rescued or not. And with any activist or political group, there are bound to be tagalongs who might care more about their self-image than the movement’s true missions.
Then there are people like Sam Gerlach. Sam plays the cymbals in a riot marching band called the What Cheer? Brigade, based in Providence, Rhode Island. My brother is also in the band, and I’d seen her several times when they came to play in New York. My first impression of her was, Wow, there’s a really stunningly pretty new cymbalist in the band. During shows, like most of the band members, Sam wore face paint in warrior-like streaks or glitter around her almond-shaped eyes, and her clothes looked like they’d been hand stitched from various pieces of fabric to create form-fitting, raucous ensembles. Several months later, I was chatting with Chris and another bandmate, Mindy, who happened to be Sam’s roommate. Mindy mentioned that Sam basically subsisted off of the Dumpster behind a major supermarket in their Providence hometown, and the middle rack of their refrigerator was constantly filled with food that she’d freeganed and was communal for the rest of the roommates. There was always Brie for some reason, according to Mindy, and lots of nice cheeses in general. Hence, the middle shelf was handy for snack food, or for entertaining guests. She offhandedly referred to Sam as a “frugalista,” a word that had previously been unknown to me. I looked it up immediately and chanced upon a recent William Safire article from The New York Times Magazine. “A person who lives a frugal lifestyle but stays fashionable and healthy by swapping clothes, buying secondhand, growing own produce, etc.,” frugalista was defined in the dictionary. Sam apparently also freeganed all her clothes, and if they didn’t fit, she sewed them to fit both her size and her sense of style.
I wrote an e-mail to Sam the same day, asking whether I could pick her brain on freeganism. An hour later, she wrote back:
I must mention ahead of time, though, the importance to not “blow up the spots” is really high. That’s one huge beef people have with the NYC trash-picking tour (which I’ve gone on with friends and enjoyed): they name spots and post photos online, and it leads to stores getting so annoyed or worried that they make throwaways inedible before they throw them out, and then no one can rescue/ eat them. But otherwise, a chance to talk about myself and my self-righteous beliefs? I’m in!
Then she added a link to a recent post she put on Instructables .com about how to fix a specific problem with Dell laptops that had previously not been covered online, obviously proud of her handiwork.
Frugalista is the word that William Safire, longtime columnist on etymology, wished had been named the Word of the Year for 2008. It was inducted into the New Oxford American Dictionary that year, and he painstakingly dissected its genesis in his column. He traced its origins to a 2005 article in the Palm Beach Post, and it was picked up by a Miami Herald blog written by Natalie Mc-Neal called “The Frugalista Files.” The blog is still in existence, frequently updated with posts on lifestyles and topics that could be deemed “frugalista.”
Getting back to S
am, though: She told me that she began trash diving as early as high school. Growing up in Rhode Island, many of her peers were into it, too.
“These days,” Sam wrote, “I go trash diving less for political outspokenness than to just get a few nice, extra things in my fridge to share with my friends and roommates. It’s a bit like going shopping—except, of course, I’m not spending any money.”
When I asked her if she had run into any trouble with the law, since trash diving is, after all, illegal, she said no. In all these years, she hadn’t ever felt as if she was in danger of being arrested.
“I don’t go too often with big, bawdy groups like I used to when I was younger. I think this is inviting trouble, and attention—from the store owners, the police. But that’s their aim, to make their mission heard, and I still respect that,” she wrote.
I asked Sam a few other questions in my next e-mail, wanting to get a better sense of how she started trash diving, and what she thought of it as a whole. I received in return a generous, thoughtful response.
Sam’s trash diving days had begun in the high school cafeteria. When friends kept throwing out half the food they’d purchased for lunch, Sam, who always brought her lunch from home instead of buying, was disconcerted by the waste. She began asking her friends if they were going to finish their lunches, and eventually they started giving her their uneaten portions of food instead of throwing them out. Pretty soon, she was ending up with far more food at lunch than she needed.
In Providence, where she grew up and still lives, Sam says it’s pretty common for people to display unwanted items on the sidewalk for others to take. Recycling goods throughout the community is seen by a lot of people as positive, or at least more “normal” than in other parts of the country. Sam also hasn’t purchased a new piece of clothing since she was in eleventh grade, and she is going on twenty-six. Much of her clothing comes from swaps with friends; some of it is found in the trash; and occasionally she’ll buy a secondhand item, which she then alters to fit. “It’s a mix of avoiding waste and not liking the way clothes are sold,” Sam wrote. “Most seem designed to have limited ‘shelf life’ by responding to trends, plus they all fit awkwardly and cost too much.”