by Cathy Erway
I also asked her what kind of obstacles she encountered with trash diving as a lifestyle, aside from the chances of getting arrested (which were slim, according to her, as people were usually glad to see things thrown out going to use). She confided that some people are all too quick to insult her: “I’ve been treated like the food I have is harmful or disgusting, that going through the trash is somehow offensive, or that I’m doing this to develop a cool image. When people are afraid of not fitting in, they can quickly decide why the risk isn’t worth taking, or immediately become critical. But if I’m confident without being preachy or insistent, people realize there’s nothing to get excited about.”
On the plus side, the unforeseen advantages of trash diving far outweighed the disadvantages, to Sam. Aside from just food or clothes, Sam felt like she had gained something a lot greater.
“Making a list and buying what’s on it makes me feel bored and dead, like I’m wasting my time. When I find things by chance and improvise, I feel natural and alive. Not knowing what the groceries will be this time around is fun because I learn about new ingredients and recipes,” Sam wrote. “I’m proud to look down and see that I’ve made or found everything I’m wearing, or to invite people over for a feast that didn’t cost anything (including the dishes, dish soap, filtered water, furniture, lightbulbs, and in the past, booze!),” she concluded.
I couldn’t have thought of a more justified finale for our e-mail correspondence on the subject than that last sentence. Needless to say, I was extremely humbled and impressed by Sam’s will and creativity.
Being a frugalista, a freegan, or just a hobbyist trash diver might not be for everyone. But obviously, there are unique and great advantages to it for many. I could relate. I’m always one to use up leftovers to plan my dinners around, thinking first about what needs to be used up in the kitchen before deciding what to cook. That didn’t seem so far off from what Sam did with the grocery store Dumpster (plus, it sounded like she lived nearby a particularly fruitful one). People in less prosperous times and places have been innovating with leftover and just-about-to-expire foods since the beginning of time, and traditional leftover dishes have a way of being some of my very favorites, too. These include cured meats, soups, fried rice, breakfast congee, panzanella, chilaquiles, or even nachos. What did it matter if it was left over from your own kitchen or the city’s stores? I also never bought greeting cards or wrapping paper; I much preferred to make these things out of scrap paper or fabric. With a little skill and style, this is essentially what the frugalista lifestyle is all about. I’m not sure how cool any of my little DIY projects actually look, but perhaps that’s not the most important part.
All told, I guess I could imagine myself being a freegan or frugalista like Sam. If only it were a little more ingrained in my repertoire, my community, my experience (especially the clothing part—I barely know how to sew). If these circumstances had been different, and if my foodie obsessions could be kept a little more at bay, then I wonder if I would have started writing a blog called “Not Buying Food in New York.”
Savory Bread Pudding with Salvaged Vegetables
This comforting casserole is a great way to use up extra scraps of not-so-fresh-looking vegetables, like partially squashed tomatoes or bruised zucchini and mushrooms. It’s also great for using up stale bread. In this version, I added some crisp bacon for flavor, though this is optional.
(MAKES ABOUT 6 SERVINGS)
4 eggs
2 cups milk
1 tablespoon fresh thyme
1 teaspoon salt
¼ teaspoon cayenne pepper (optional)
Freshly ground black pepper to taste
4-5 cups stale bread (any kind), cut into 1-inch cubes
¾ cup shredded Gruyère or Swiss cheese
3 strips bacon, cooked crispy and crumbled
2 scallions, both white and green parts, chopped fine
4-5 cups washed and trimmed vegetables, such as broccoli florets, halved button mushrooms, chopped tomatoes, chopped asparagus, and chopped zucchini and summer squash
Preheat oven to 350 degrees. In a large bowl, whisk together the eggs with the milk, and add the thyme, salt, cayenne pepper, black pepper, and bread pieces. Let soak for 15 minutes. Combine the rest of the ingredients in the bowl. Transfer to a greased 9-inch x 12-inch casserole and bake for 45-50 minutes, until top is lightly browned and a fork inserted into the center of the casserole comes out relatively clean. Let cool 5-10 minutes before serving.
Almond Custard Tarts with Leftover Muffin Crust
I used the leftover chocolate-chip muffin that I freeganed from Dunkin’ Donuts to create a rich tart shell. Any leftover muffin should do the trick. Add a little melted butter to the crumbled muffin mixture if your crumbs are very dry and stale.
(MAKES 4 TARTS)
1-2 leftover muffins, crumbled
1 tablespoon cold water
½ cup sugar
2 cups whole milk
4 egg yolks
1 teaspoon almond extract
Fresh berries (optional)
Preheat oven to 375 degrees. In a bowl, break down the muffin into crumbs. Add the water and combine evenly with your hands or a spatula. Mixture should be moist but not stick together in one ball. Press the mixture with your hands or a spatula firmly against the sides of four ramekins. Place the ramekins on a baking tray and bake for 10-15 minutes. Let cool completely.
Whisk sugar, milk, and almond extract together in a saucepan. Scald mixture by bringing it to a boil. Turn off heat. In a bowl, lightly beat together egg yolks. While beating, add a small spoonful of the hot milk mixture. Gradually add a few more spoonfuls to the eggs while stirring. Mixture should be smooth and not lumpy. When about ½ cup of the milk mixture has been incorporated into the eggs, pour the egg mixture into the saucepan with the milk. Cook over medium heat, stirring occasionally, until the custard has thickened to a point where it coats the back of a spoon when dipped in. Pour custard into the cooled tart shells. Refrigerate about 3-4 hours until set. Optional: Top with (foraged!) fresh berries for serving. And don’t forget to save the egg whites for an omelet.
CHAPTER 6
From the Land URBAN FORAGING 101
All good things are wild, and free.
—Henry David Thoreau
After my trash dive with the freegans I kept abreast of their activities around the city—actually, I couldn’t help it, as my in-box was flooded daily with announcements and updates. I didn’t take another trash dive that spring of 2007, or at least not a full-scale trash dive with a group of freegans. But I did begin to notice the garbage bins outside one small bakery that had recently opened up down the street from me. I wondered what could be found inside them. That place had the best baguettes in the neighborhood. It was tempting. But I felt a little bit awkward about doing a solo trash dive there, as my neighborhood was always bustling with people, often young families with kids and baby strollers. I didn’t want to be too conspicuous going through the trash in front of my neighbors.
I settled instead for the next best option: a bagel shop in my neighborhood regularly sold large bags of day-old bagels and other baked goods, a steal at $1 for half a dozen. I’d buy these bags and often freeze the bagels immediately (slicing them in half first so that they’d reheat in a toaster nicely), saving one or two of them for more immediate eating. I felt like I was doing the local business a small favor by paying them for their surplus goods. I also appreciated the fact that they sold them at all and wanted to support that. Plus, there are a million and one uses for leftover bread—it can become bread crumbs used to stuff or coat things in a thousand different ways. I discovered a lot of them that spring.
It was late spring when I received an e-mail from the freegan event list that caught my attention. It was announcing a foraging walk in Prospect Park led by an expert in wild edibles, Tim Keating. It sounded right up my alley—and the park was close to my home. Eating stuff plucked from the wild was something I knew rel
atively little about, though of course I’d heard of it being done before—wild raspberry bushes in the countryside, a honeysuckle blossom that could be sucked on, that kind of thing. I hadn’t heard of anything edible in the natural environs of New York City before, though. I read the rest of the event’s description:
“As a longtime urban forager, Tim will show how foraging common wild plants in the city parks can not only provide fresh and healthful greens but can play an essential part of a freegan lifestyle. Rather than focusing on edibles that are uncommon and hard to find, the plants highlighted on Tim’s walk are those that are very common and readily available in large enough quantities to supplement one’s diet. During the walk, Tim will also discuss the mythology of the forager in relation to the dominant cultural paradigm,” it summarized.
I rode my bike into Grand Army Plaza that Saturday morning and pressed my brakes when I spotted a small cluster of mostly young folks standing around as if waiting for something. I recognized Madeline Nelson standing cross-armed among them, in cargo shorts and sneakers. She gave me a smile as I pulled up with my bike. Aside from her, I knew no one else of the ten or twelve others in the group, who looked around my age.
A few people began to question why our guide was running so late. It was already ten minutes past the scheduled meeting time.
“We run on anarchist time frames,” Madeline said to no one in particular, checking her watch. “It’s always a little bit late.”
Another minute or so later, Tim Keating arrived and began the tour. He apologized for running late and led us onto the paved path to the park. No sooner had we followed him for five paces than he stopped to introduce us to a plant.
“Here’s a plant called common plantain,” Tim said, pointing to a cluster of tall weeds.
He went on to say that the plant, which had thick, light-green stems and large, floppy leaves like an elephant’s ears, was a good detoxifier and source of vitamin K. No relation to the larger relative of the banana, though. He passed around a branch and explained as we took a leaf to sample that it was best blanched before eaten, because it could be a little tough by late spring.
A longtime environmentalist, Tim directed the nonprofit organization Rainforest Relief when not promoting urban foraging. He’d spend months in the Amazon each year for work and research. Tim was a compact, densely built man who looked to be in his mid- to late thirties, with close-cropped grayish hair and pale eyes that could be intense when he spoke. Dressed casually in jeans and a muscle T, he looked like the kind of guy whom you could trust if he were strapped to your back while you were jumping out of a plane.
“I hope you like bitter greens,” he warned us after we had each tried a taste of the common plantain, “because that’s what we’re going to be finding a lot of now.”
Bitter greens, however, seemed to be just fine with everyone in the group. Maybe a generation ago this would have been different. But the national palate has softened in recent years to bitter greens. Arugula is strikingly bitter, and it’s a favorite for fresh salads among gourmets. Broccoli rabe has become a darling in Italian restaurants and recipes. Many of my friends and foodie acquaintances agree that it’s the vegetable’s strong bitterness that makes it special and places it above its mild cousin, plain broccoli, in the taste lexicon. Another thing that distinguishes these two vegetables, broccoli rabe and arugula, is their steep price tags.
“The important thing about a lot of these greens, especially if you live in the city, is that they’re detoxifiers. They have a lot of chemicals that help your body fight against all the smog and city air,” Tim went on.
Next, he identified a patch of dandelion. I remembered helping my father pick them from the lawn as a child. Their long, sharply serrated leaves grow in petal-like clusters around the yellow dandelion flowers, which appear for a few weeks each year in early spring. They’re easy to spot, these familiar-looking weeds that grow in the cracks of sidewalks from here to Sydney. Like arugula, they were also enjoying the embrace of haute cuisine as a salad green. Just as they were popping up in nature, dandelion greens were appearing on more and more menus that spring. These are biologically identical plants to the wild version that we were now picking in the park.
“It’s really the same thing they have at the Union Square Greenmarket?” someone in our tour group asked. “I just saw them there going for three-fifty a bunch.”
Tim nodded. The woman shook her head and began collecting more.
It’s funny how leaves, when you don’t know what you’re looking at, seem to blend as one on the ground. Once my eyes were reacquainted with the dandelion’s shape, I could pinpoint them immediately, tucked amid the grass and other weeds. I began filling my plastic bag with them.
“Poor man’s pepper,” Tim said, pointing to another plant in the same patch just outside Grand Army Plaza. “It tastes really peppery, which is why it got its name. Kind of like arugula,” he said.
An appropriate name in more ways than one, I thought. I took a leaf that the person standing beside me passed to me from a bunch that Tim had plucked for the group. The leaves had sharp, spiky teeth and very faint hairs on their surface. Most leaves of any plant have fuzz if you look close enough, Tim explained. I would find this was true throughout the tour, though I suspect that the more prominent fuzz on the poor man’s pepper is one reason why this plant didn’t become an overnight sensation in the culinary world. Once my front teeth bit down on the leaf, I detected a grasslike sweetness at the tip of my tongue. The leaf felt silky in my mouth, very thin and delicate. As I chewed some more, I could see what Tim meant—it was pleasantly spicy, like a kick of black peppercorn.
“Yum,” I said, and passed the plant to the next person.
“These should get a lot more bitter as the season goes on; same with most of the plants we’ll be finding here today. So they’re best to eat now. Otherwise you can cook them,” Tim added.
While people busied themselves picking sprigs of the plants they’d just learned about, I found a moment to ask Tim a question.
“How do you usually cook these plants?” I asked.
“You probably can cook them a lot of ways. Like, you could just cook them with some garlic, like broccoli rabe or something,” he said. He shrugged. “But with ones like this, the common plantain, or other big leaves, I usually just cook them into tomato sauce, eat them just like that. I’m sure you can do a lot more with them, but that’s just how I usually do it. Maybe you could make a stuffing with some of them. I’m not sure.”
Clearly, Tim wasn’t claiming to be a culinary expert. I thanked him, and as I gathered more of the three plants we’d tried so far, I began imagining what other uses I could put them to.
“Someone just asked a good question,” Tim said, addressing the group. “How do you cook these? Well, you can just eat them without cooking, like the really young, tender greens, which we’ll hopefully find lots of today, or you can boil them or saute them on their own, or with garlic. If anyone else has any other suggestions on how to cook them or serve them, please feel free to share.”
The rest of the group looked around at one another and gave a few shrugs before going back to collecting greens. We were a bit of a quiet group that day, considering the fact that most looked like young and opinionated activists. When he began the tour and introduced himself, Tim had taken a hand count of how many people had done wild foraging before, and only three or four hands were raised. Perhaps everyone else was as content as I was to just soak in all the new knowledge.
“Also, on how to store them,” Tim continued. “These greens usually keep for a couple of weeks or more in your crisper. I still have a big bag of them at home. The reason for that is because what you’re taking home has just been picked today, instead of the chard, or whatever you get at the grocery store, that was picked who knows when and traveled however far before.”
I grabbed a bunch of poor man’s pepper leaves and added them to my plastic bag before the tour moved on. We followed
the path farther into the park and eventually made a stop at a tall plant with long green leaves that seemed to resemble the plants people might hang from the ceiling in their homes. But it was not the leaves that Tim had stopped for. This was a very common plant called burdock, but the edible prize jewel was underneath the dirt, its root. The burdock root is also known as gobo in Japanese cuisine, where it’s a popular delicacy, and it has a mild, woody flavor and a texture like that of a potato. Once again, another haute-cuisine food find, free and plentiful.
Tim explained that the burdock is a biennial plant, so it takes two years to complete its full life cycle. At one year, the burdock’s root is the edible delicacy gobo. There is also second-year burdock, which is much tougher and not considered very good for eating. By then, the large leaves of the plant have sprouted two-foot-tall stalks, so it’s easy to tell which plant has a first-year or second-year root beneath it. He used a trowel to dig up one plant. The root emerged, along with a hunk of earth and miniature roots that came off in showers. Once Tim had shaken it relatively free of dirt, he held the small, carrot-shaped root for us to see. Compared to the rest of the plant, it was tiny. Although it wasn’t commonly eaten, the rest of the plant—its large leaves and crisp stems—was also edible, he explained.