{"id":17959,"date":"2014-09-24T16:46:10","date_gmt":"2014-09-24T20:46:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/wordpress-367309-1145705.cloudwaysapps.com\/?p=17959"},"modified":"2014-09-24T16:46:10","modified_gmt":"2014-09-24T20:46:10","slug":"dumpster-diving-for-food","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sustainablog.org\/articles\/dumpster-diving-for-food\/","title":{"rendered":"Dumpster Diving for Food: Would You Feed Yourself this Way?"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/a><\/p>\n I’ve mentioned the idea of dumpster diving for food to a number of friends and family members, and tend to get similar reactions from most of them: either “ick,” or “that’s kind of low class, isn’t it?” But when I see pictures from Rob Greenfield’s “Food Waste Fiascos,”<\/a> or get other reminders of the fact that we waste 40% of our food along the supply chain<\/a>, it strikes me that we’re really dealing with both an economic and a moral issue: fresh, edible food just gets tossed… regularly. In that context, dumpster diving becomes an act of recovering value, as well as a means of addressing the hunger still prevalent in the US and other parts of the developed world. Activists like Greenfield, and organizations like Food not Bombs<\/a>, not only insure that food doesn’t get wasted, but also highlight this obscene waste.<\/p>\n NPR’s “The Salt” blog<\/a> featured yet another of the folks creatively bringing to light the amount of food we throw away. I read about Maximus Thaler last Spring when his short-lived project The Gleaner’s Kitchen<\/a> was getting some press coverage. Thaler’s plan was a “restaurant\/grocery store” stocked with nothing but dumpstered food. \u00a0His landlord, unfortunately, didn’t share his passion, and shut the Kitchen down after just a few meals. The spirit of the project lives on in a new cookbook A Curious Harvest: The Practical Art of Cooking Everything.<\/em><\/p>\n Like Greenfield, Thaler’s experience totally undermines the reactions I’ve received to the possibility of dumpster diving for food: he tells writer Alison Bruzek that he’s never gotten sick from eating dumpstered food, or even found rats while diving, and that while running the Gleaner’s Kitchen, all of his own meals came from dumpstered food. Furthermore, he’s collected some pretty appetizing pictures<\/a> of the food that’s come out of the trash. He offers practical tips for the newbie dumpster diver, and well as the philosophical underpinnings of why he does what he does.<\/p>\n