Dumpster Diving: Arrest-able Offense?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KUfuxiSO8Yw 

Urban WWOOFer: Can a city dweller aspire to ideals of permaculture?

The idea of permaculture is to turn the waste created within a system to the nutriment of something else.  Everything is in the same circle; nothing is linear.  (Nothing about this is new; it just  is based on knowledge that was discarded and how has to be dug up again from our past.)    Applied to New York life, is this at all possible?  


In a big city, people tend to live in a matrix of dependencies.  While big-bad New Yorkers are certainly individualists, nobody in New York is anywhere close to self-sufficient.  Nobody has sufficient garden space to feed themselves, let along garden space with uncontaminated earth and enough direct sunlight.  People rent and cannot alter their homes freely (thus rooftop gardens, water catchment systems, beehives and chicken coops are not necessarily easy additions) have strict city codes to follow.  How do we even begin to think about the ideals of permaculture?  Well, viewed as an ideal to strive for rather than an absolute, you can absolutely adapt it to the reality of New York.  The idea of permaculture is to turn the waste created within a system to the nutriment of something else.

- Dumpster Diving.  Not only will you save money and become a more inventive cook, you are diverting from the waste-stream!  Food in the landfill=> anaerobic decomposition=>bad.  Food in my belly with scraps in my compost=>very, very good!

- Support a local market.  What you do not dumpster, you can purchase from a local health food market.  They make more of an effort to get local food than Whole Foods or Trader Joe's (nearly impossible on a Whole Foods scale), and you know that you are supporting small-scales and local business owners.  You may pay a little more...but dumpster diving supplements it.  :-)

- Purchase from a local farmer through farmer's markets and community supported agricultures.  If you cannot produce yourself, at least you can help support someone locally who does.

- Kitchen Compost.  Vermiculture and Bokashi systems are extremely easy to set up and extremely easy.  I had my vermiculture bin under our kitchen counter for four months without a single roommate realizing. Honest.

- Public Transportation.  Ditch the car, ditch the taxi, and jump on the train!  One of the best class equalizers there is: everyone spends the same $2.25 to sit on the subway, everybody arrives at the same time, and everyone must share the same space.

- Biking.  Public transportation is great, but get outside and be your own power source!  Buses and trains will still be running, but you won't have to turn on a elliptical machine over the weekend to stay healthy!

- Utilizing Craig's List, Freecycle, second-hand stores, and the furniture that people put out on the street for grabs.  Who needs Ikea?  There are plenty of already made versions of everything that you need--furniture with stories are always better than Chinese assembly line produced furniture, anyway.  Same for clothing:  New York has fabulous second hand stores.

- Entertainment.   Make use of the daylight hours and outdoors!


That was a short, non-exhaustive list.  I'm sure I will have more to come.

Urban WWOFer Dumpster Diving: Oh, the Bounty!

Bounty from Day 1

 
Detailed account of first night's plenty:
- Six sushi packages
- two boxes of assorted brownies
- one almond cake (had a second, but gifted it to another man at the dumpster)
- two trays of dark chocolate dipped fruit (also had a third, but gifted it to the man at the dumpster)
- at least two dozen onions, apples, oranges, peppers, and avocados
- two packages of raspberries
- package green beans
- box of spinach
- box of lettuce mix
- head of lettuce
- hummus
- chopped onion
- two packages of tofu dogs
- Mexican bean dip
- three bananas
- two boxes black eyed peas

I couldn't possibly eat all of that!  I could hardly carry it.

I took a tiny fraction of what was available; that almond cake I chose out of dozens of cakes, and those fruit trays were three out of a bag full of them.

I had loaded up with dessert at Citarella (upscale grocery store) and then stopped at The Food Emporium.  By the time I had finished there, there was no chance I was going to make it to Trader Joe's six more blocks up (always promising dumsters!)  Conveniently, that night they were throwing away a perfectly good handheld grocery basket.  I filled that, filled the basket on the back of my bike, and stuck a few things in my backpack.  At this point, another man had stopped to do his dumpster shopping, and I blew him away with my dumpster generosity.  "There is so much tonight!  Look in here; I found tons of apples!  And take one of these bean dips...Oh my gosh!  You should see all that there is down the street!  It's a long walk without a bike.  Here:  take a cake and some dark chocolate dipped fruit..."  Because our arms were so full and I could not possibly balance everything for ninety blocks on my bike, he helped me carry my basket and I joined him on the train back home.

Sigh.  Of course there is excitement over what I find, but there is always an equal amount of disgust.  The day I have to start buying all of my food will be an exciting day...because it will mean that the world--particularly the US--has stopped throwing away such an absurd amount of good food (according to a 2011 study, about 1/3 of global food production is thrown away or uneaten annually http://www.fao.org/fileadmin/user_upload/ags/publications/GFL_web.pdf ).

Bounty of Day 2

Two nights dumpstering Citarella alone I got over $250 dollars of food in packaged cakes, cookies, apple loafs, and sushi.  $250.  And that was just what was labeled.  And what I could carry.

That's right:  dozens of biscotti and two carmel apples!

This weekend, I gave two of the biscotti.  I'm not ashamed.  

I would never have dumpstered on a third day after all of this (my cupboards are teaming!) but it was a special occasion.  I was on my way home when my friend Nate--a opera singer who I met at an Upper West Side dumpster--texted me.  "Lots of summer squash, bread, and sushi at UWS Whole Foods!" he wrote.  I was with my roommate who said, "I wouldn't mind some summer squash..." so I made the trip.  I was too worn out to clean up a third night of four roommates' worth of trash on the kitchen counter,  so no third picture documentation.  :-(

I invited Nate over that night.  He took a bag full of desert, limes, and sushi.  He brought me a surprise container of butterscotch.  Sharing is caring.