One Person's Dumpster Is Another's Diner

Day One

No coffee, no beer. The significance of those words sank in with each heavy footfall that took me past my regular Starbucks on my way to the subway.

It was only Tuesday morning, and already I was having second thoughts. Three days of eating only food recovered from the garbage might have been excessively ambitious. Two years in the city have solidified my habits into those of quite the little consumer. I could already feel a bad mood encroaching. I needed my caffeine.

But my breakfast that morning -- a toasted onion bagel, a banana and a Greek yogurt, all recovered from garbage bags the night before -- was a step up from my usual oatmeal. And the anticipation of the lunch I was carrying -- a still-packaged Starbucks egg salad sandwich and another banana, also the products of last night's dumpster dive -- sustained me, for now.

The guided "trash tour" I'd participated in the night before left no doubt that this three-day experiment was a doable feat. If I'd had more hands, I could have gathered a week's worth of food from the garbage left on the sidewalk outside D'Agostino's, three Gristedes, and a Dunkin' Donuts. (Dunkin' Donuts tosses everything every twelve hours, according to an employee.) On top of uncountable loaves of bread and bagels, leaves of lettuce and slightly brown bananas, treasures that turned up included black-and-white cookies, ginger root, beets, Lunchables, and scallion pancakes. According to Madeline Nelson, who looks like your favorite librarian and dumpster dives for most of her food, dumpstering once a week can fulfill about 85 percent of your grocery needs. Twice-weekly dives can cover 90 to 95 percent. She didn't need to come out to the trash tour, because a friend recently stayed at her apartment, and as a thank-you gift he dumpster dove her fridge stock-full.

But she was there anyway, chatting and digging, offering around the orange peppers she found, stomping her feet to stay warm. Freegans are a sociable bunch.

There is an organized group of freegans in the city, called freegan.info after its website, which draws between seven and twenty-odd members, ranging in age from teens to seventy-year-olds, to its various events. But there is no knowing how many freegans there are city-wide, or nation-wide, or worldwide, because the term freeganism is a broad belief that covers a broad range activities. If you've found a bookshelf on the street and taken it home, well, you're sort of a freegan.

Freeganism (a conjunction of "free" and "vegan") is the philosophy that participation in our capitalist economy makes a person complicit in the exploitative practices that are used to create consumer goods. One freegan defines the term as "living beyond capitalism," which can involve any number of practices: urban foraging, hopping trains, volunteering in lieu of working a paying job, repairing things like bikes and clothes instead of buying new ones, squatting instead of paying rent.

Leia Jools, 22, does many of those things. She and her boyfriend are on a "rent strike," Jools explained as she ate blueberries out of a container from the D'Agostinos trash. In other words, they are refusing to pay to live in their Bushwick, Brooklyn apartment, a tactic that Jools predicts will work for about eight months. The last time their landlord saw them in court, she says, "he looked like he was going to cry." Jools doesn't work for a living, which leaves her plenty of time to bike around looking for promising garbage piles. She was a raw vegan for awhile, which was fortunate, since she had no gas with which to cook. Now she is paying for electricity, after a stint in the dark, because she uses her apartment to build and repair bikes as part of a freegan bike recycling workshop.

One or two of the foragers at the trash tour appeared to be homeless, and not interested in chatting (although being homeless and freegan are not mutually exclusive, as is commonly assumed). They wolfed down a sandwich or two and then wandered off into the night. But the majority were brimming with culinary gusto. Shrieks of "Mushrooms! I found mushrooms!" sent a middle-aged woman scuttling over garbage bags. When a Gristedes employee yelled somewhat disdainfully, "I hope y'all here digging through the trash have enough respect to close the bags back up, cause otherwise the rats come through!" Nelson simply reminded the group to re-tie the bags. Everyone seemed cheerfully indifferent.