by Mark Sundeen
In Eastern religions, begging has a whole different meaning. Hindu holy men called sadhus go door-to-door with a “begging bowl” that their neighbors fill with food. Ordained monks who live like sadhus are called sannyasis, from the Sanskrit word for “renunciation.” For Buddhists it is the bhikkus, which translates as “beggars” or “ones who live by alms”; for Muslims the fakirs, which translates as “poverty”; for Sufis the dervishes, from the Persian word for “door,” as in, the person who goes from door to door. In all these cases, the renunciates travel the countryside naked, or wrapped in a simple cloth. They often wear their hair in ropes and smear their bodies with clay and ash. They own nothing, earn no income, and survive entirely on the contributions of others.
Perhaps the most revered beggar of all time is Siddhartha Gautama. When he left his privileged Hindu home in 563 BC on the search for truth that would result in his becoming the Buddha, his only possessions were three robes, a razor, a needle, a belt, a water strainer, and a begging bowl. Giving alms was an act of exchange, not of charity. The purpose of begging was not to get food, but to humble oneself, to forgo one’s own pride and admit to being dependent on others. In doing so, the renunciate offered the community the privilege of giving, so that they themselves could take a small step toward nonpossession, the quest upon which the holy man had embarked. The beggar received his bread, but the giver received something as valuable—the opportunity to share. The Buddha forbade his disciples from saying “thank you” as they collected alms. To this day some monks acknowledge the exchange by saying, “May your generosity bring you peace and harmony.”
Far from being regarded as derelicts, sannyasis are afforded respect, as men who have renounced the material world for spiritual wisdom, which they share with the community that supports them. One notable adherent of sannyasa was Mohandas Gandhi, who declared, “I could not live both after the flesh and the spirit,” as he chose poverty and forsook pleasures like sex and cooked food, even salt. Westerners have long viewed such asceticism with admiration, or at least curiosity. In The Jungle Book Rudyard Kipling sympathetically depicts a sixty-year-old Indian civil servant who, after raising his family and succeeding in his career, “had resigned position, palace, and power, and taken up the begging-bowl and ochre-coloured dresses of a Sunnyasi, or holy man.” Even curmudgeonly Mark Twain, skeptical of American spiritualists like Brigham Young, was subdued into something like respect when he came across mystics in India in 1895. In Following the Equator, he wrote:
These pilgrims had come from all over India: some of them had been months on the way, plodding patiently along in the heat and dust, worn poor, hungry, but supported and sustained by an unwavering faith and belief. It is wonderful, that the power of faith like that can make multitude upon multitudes of the old and weak and the young and frail enter without hesitation or complaint upon such incredible journeys and endure the resultant miseries without repining. It is done in love or it is done in fear. I do not know which it is. No matter what the impulse is, the act born of it is beyond imagination, marvelous to our kind of people, the cold whites. There were “facquirs” in plenty with their hair caked with cow dung. There was a holy man who sat naked by the day and by the week on a cluster of iron spikes and did not seem to mind it. And another man stood all day holding his withered arms motionless aloft and was said to have been doing it for years. All these performers have a cloth on the ground beside them for receipt of contributions, and even the poorest of the poor give a trifle and hope that the sacrifice will be blessed to them. At last came a procession of naked holy people marching by and chanting, and I wrenched myself away…. The memory of that sight will always stay with me, but not by request.
There is simply no equivalent in modern Christianity, despite the fact that Jesus himself said, “Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God. But woe to you who are rich, for you have already received your comfort.” For centuries, renunciation was central to the religion. In fifth-century Syria, Saint Simeon the Stylite lived for thirty-seven years atop a tiny platform on a tower, fasting and making an endless series of genuflections. In the Middle Ages, European monks known as mendicants took up voluntary begging as a means of imitating Christ and expressing faith in divine providence. But the tradition did not last into the modern era, nor make the journey to the Americas.
To be sure, monks and nuns of the Franciscan and Carmelite orders still take a vow of poverty and are supported by donors. But these contributions are not collected on the streets. Nowadays alms can be given by credit card with a simple click at thefriars.org. Twentieth-century Catholics like Thomas Merton and Dorothy Day and her Catholic Workers strove to bring ascetic poverty into modernity. “We must frankly admit that self-denial and sacrifice are absolutely essential to a life of prayer,” wrote Merton. But these renunciates populate only the fringe of Christianity. We can’t imagine our monks or priests begging for food at our doorsteps; our charity for them stops at the Sunday collection plate.
While Suelo is not a monk and does not claim to belong to the ranks of holy men, he draws much of his inspiration from them. After a stint in a Buddhist monastery in Thailand, he briefly referred to himself as an American sadhu, and adopted a different take on begging. While his ethos prevents him from panhandling for money, he is willing to ask for food. Occasionally he goes to restaurants or bakeries and asks for leftovers. “Usually people are really nice. They are so glad they can give something. They smile. They go in the back and load up a plate. But sometimes I get, ‘Fuck off. Get out of here.’”
“Is that humiliating?” I asked.
“Sometimes it is. That’s part of the path, being able to walk away without reaction.”
When I asked why he didn’t wear a monk’s robes and ask for alms, he said that he didn’t think that religious people should receive more than anyone else. “The point is to lift everyone up in equality, to encourage people to help the bag lady or the drunk in the gutter as much as the Buddhist monk,” he told me. “It might limit my ability to get food, but that’s the concept of faith. It’s all inward. If I’m following the path of truth, then I’m not going to worry about food, and I’m not going to manipulate people into giving me food.”
The other reason he doesn’t beg a lot is that his conservative Rocky Mountain upbringing instilled a certain pride in not asking for help. “That’s been the hardest thing about this lifestyle,” he said. “I was always raised to give. More blessed to give than to receive. For the first couple of years it was really hard for me to admit that I was in need. I still find myself doing that. Someone will ask me if I’m hungry, and I’m really hungry, and I’ll say, ‘No, I’m all right.’”
Of course our society has means of delivering food to the needy that don’t require begging, primarily food stamps and nonprofit charities like soup kitchens. Suelo avoids them for the same reasons he shuns homeless shelters: the charity is not freely given. So without panhandling or the dole, how does he eat?
After our Qigong session as we sat outside the cave and watched the sun hover over the opposite cliffs, I pulled lunch from my pack. I had brought cheese and crackers and chocolate and an avocado. I watched Suelo closely. With all the talk about Jesus and ancient Hindus, I expected him to grind rice-grass seeds into flour with a mortar and pestle and then bake unleavened bread.
He revealed a clear plastic jar with an aquamarine lid that I recognized as the vessel for Skippy peanut butter. Instead of brown goop it was filled with brightly colored gemstones, red and yellow and orange and green. Crystals? He unscrewed the lid and extended the jar.
“Gummi bear?”
. . .
IN ALL MY visits with Suelo over the course of two years, he never appeared hungry or the slightest bit worried about where his next meal was coming from. Occasionally I cooked for him at my house or took him to a restaurant, but for the most part, he was the one feeding me. When I packed food up to his cave, so complete was his hospitality that I sometimes forg
ot to break out the grub. He had found his version of abundance.
To begin with, Suelo simply doesn’t eat as much as most Americans. On a long walk, he might eat a hunk of bread and a couple of mandarin oranges, and decline the cheese and cookies I wolfed down. He typically eats just two meals a day, and they are simple: rice, fruit, vegetables, bread, cheese. He eats some meat, but not much. In this way his diet more closely resembles that of the typical human than the typical American. Americans eat 3,800 calories per day on average, while the world average is about 2,800. Suelo’s diet puts him closer to a sub-Saharan African, who eats 2,200 calories a day.
Eating less has a long history in all religions. Moses, Jesus, Buddha, and Mohammed fasted regularly as a means toward purification and humility, as did modern spiritual leaders like Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. Catholics fast during Lent, Jews during Yom Kippur, Muslims during Ramadan. Mormons are encouraged to fast the first Sunday of every month. Buddhist monks typically eat breakfast around six, lunch at noon, then only liquids for the rest of the day. Although the practice has a variety of meanings, its general purpose is to focus less on physical needs and more on the spiritual realm. Suelo has incorporated this belief into his daily life. “Sometimes I get anxious that there won’t be food today in the dumpster,” he says. “But then I think it doesn’t even matter if there’s not. I could go for a couple of days fasting and I’d be fine. In fact it would be healthy.”
Whatever food Suelo eats, he must procure. First, he forages. He digs for onions, nettles, watercress, wildflowers. He gathers pine and cedar needles to steep in boiling water for tea. He picks and dries mulberries from shade trees in town. He picks apples and peaches from abandoned orchards, rolling and drying them into fruit leather. Other parts of the country provide more bounty. He survived a month on the California coast on blackberries, kelp, fennel, sea pollen, and mussels. The mussels he threw onto a campfire until they cracked open like pistachios.
Over the years—both before and after quitting money—Suelo has tried his hand at harvesting live animals, with mixed results. He learned to spearfish in Alaska and lived for a few months on mostly salmon. But he has never been much of a hunter. He doesn’t own a gun or a bow, and he doesn’t trap. In the Arizona desert he chased wild javelina bare-handed without success. He does, however, occasionally find a dead mammal, usually roadkill. “I found this squirrel freshly killed on the river road,” he wrote on his blog. “It had an acorn stuck between its teeth when I found it, plus about 14 acorns stuffing its cheeks!” He prepared the squirrel by skinning it, gutting it, and boiling it in a pot over a fire, more or less the method recommended in The Joy of Cooking. He fed it to his friends, and posted their photos of themselves nibbling the miniature carcass online. “Their looks of contentment say it all!”
Rodents notwithstanding, the Utah desert simply does not provide enough food for living off the land. In any case, Suelo would prefer to eat other people’s excess than to harvest additional plants and animals. “I don’t feel good about going in the canyon and hunting when there’s enough food in the dumpster,” he says.
Suelo’s primary source of food, then, is what others have thrown away. Americans send 29 million tons of edibles to the landfill each year—that’s 40 percent of our food. Much of it is over-the-hill produce: brown bananas, moldy berries, bruised apples, and wilted lettuce. But even more is perfectly good food, some still wrapped in plastic, that has merely reached an expiration date. Suelo gathers boxes of cookies, cans of corn, and packages of bacon that hours earlier would have sold at full price. He finds nonperishables like rice and flour and beans. In addition to the dumpsters beside grocery stores, those behind restaurants are often a good bet. Bakeries discard whole loaves at day’s end, and pizza parlors chuck a lot of pies.
One day I set out with Suelo to gather food. Unlike begging, which in America is largely seen as degrading and pathetic, forcing the beggar to reveal his vulnerability to others, dumpster diving is slightly subversive, almost like stealing, a means of surviving by your wits. But success is not as simple as it sounds. Some fast-food chains instruct their employees to soil all throwaways with dishwater to discourage scavengers. And then there’s the question of trespassing. To whom does the garbage belong? The property owner? The collection contractor? Or the public? A bin in an alley allows room for legal interpretation, but many markets keep their trash under lock and key, or sealed away in a loading bay. The supermarket dumpster we are raiding is inside such a cavernous room; clearly it sits on private property. But Suelo knows from experience that the rolling doors are kept open during business hours. “Just walk in there confidently,” he advises. “Like you have a purpose. Nobody will bat an eye.”
The next thing to know about dumpsters is that, unless they’re full, they’re hard to access. This one is five feet tall, five feet deep, and eight feet wide. We hoist ourselves up and rest our hips on the lip, then lower face-first toward the food, maintaining precarious balance by kicking our legs in the air. It’s a vulnerable position; a gentle nudge behind our knees from a passerby would topple us into the container. What’s more, after sixty seconds of dangling face-first into the heap, the blood is pounding in my ears and temples. We dig through the heap of refuse, heaving vegetables and bread loaves over our shoulder. The smell is sour and treacly. When finished, I pump my legs and push up from a bag of trash until I am upright, then slide back to earth. Some divers choose to climb into the dumpster. Then they can work in stealth and uprightness. However, being inside a trash bin creates its own set of anxieties. No longer are you merely picking trash; now you’re in it. Escape is more difficult. And claustrophobic types fear that someone will walk by and shut the lid.
The bounty is as varied as it is rich. Here’s what Suelo and I harvested that day:
6 loaves Pepperidge Farm bread
2 bags bagels
1 bag white potatoes
4 russet potatoes
1 box organic strawberries
2 packages raspberries
2 packages blackberries
1 grapefruit
7 packages sliced mushrooms
1 onion
1 squash
27 ears of corn
The quality of a dumpster’s loot often reflects the neighborhood. Suelo’s best scavenging was in tony Mill Valley, California, where he and a friend struck gold in the bins behind organic bistros and gourmet boutiques, feasting on lemon-drizzled hummus and roasted pepper panini. “We were eating high on the hog,” he says. “There’s so much good food in Marin County.”
Much of what Suelo eats is simply given to him. Plenty of people invite him to dinner, or ask him to house-sit and help himself to whatever’s in the fridge. He arrives at potlucks with whole loaves of bread and decent-looking fruits and vegetables. When he first quit money, he would often volunteer to work without asking for food in return. But after a couple of episodes in which he wound up dizzy and weak-kneed, he began asking for food in exchange for labor. It’s the closest he comes to actual barter.
And then there are organizations that happily feed Suelo. A nonprofit farm called the Youth Garden Project in Moab holds a monthly “Weed and Feed” where volunteers spend a few hours pulling thistle and bindweed, and then are served a dinner largely from crops grown on the premises. Suelo swings a hoe at Sol Food Farms, a private farm with no paid employees, where a handful of volunteers are reviving an abandoned orchard and fallow fields with tomatoes and greens and cucumbers. In exchange for their labor, they take a portion of the harvest. I wondered if this wasn’t barter—something Suelo refuses, as it violates the principle of giving without expectation of return. I asked the farm’s owner, Chris Conrad, how he compensated Suelo.
“I tell him to take as much as he wants,” Conrad said with a shrug. “But I don’t even know if he takes it, to be honest. I don’t keep track of that kind of thing.”
The most reliable source of Suelo’s nutrition in recent years was a volunteer-run free meal p
rogram that served lunch in a Moab city park 365 days a year. Each day, a rotating crew picked up leftovers from restaurants and school cafeterias, then served a hot meal to whoever came. Over the course of three years, without any government or church sponsorship—without even a permit from the health department—Free Meal served thousands of lunches. Suelo went nearly every day, occasionally staying afterward to wash dishes. It was a pretty festive event: a combination of the grizzled homeless men you’d find at a shelter, along with transient young rock climbers and backpackers, and office workers who stopped by on their lunch break—people who would never visit a food bank. The group’s mission was not merely to feed the hungry, but also to prevent food from being hauled to the landfill, and in the process take the stigma out of eating free food.
“Free Meal is not classist or hand-down like your classic soup kitchen or welfare program,” Suelo has written. “It is hand-across. Folks from all classes and needs and no-needs show up and sit down together for food that would otherwise be thrown out.”
While Suelo appreciated the free food, what really brought him back was the community. “We crave community and friendship, but we want to have our own stuff,” he says. “We don’t want to be that way but we’re addicted to our own isolation. A lot of it has to do with shyness in our culture. You have to overcome that. When I think about Latin America, there is a communal land tradition. The community goes out and harvests, and everyone works and celebrates and has fun. You can see people crave it here.”
. . .
AT DUSK ON a cold night, Suelo and Phil, the apprentice and Qigong instructor, strike out in search of bananas. Suelo wears a black hoodie and backpack, with his hat hanging from his neck. A friend who lives on the other side of Moab has captured seventy pounds of bananas from a dumpster and sent word: get them while they last.