Most food that is found in the trash needs to be dug out from underneath the “real” trash. Things like wax boxes, plastic pallet wrapping, random papers and empty grocery bags; wire, coffee filters, soda cans. The good stuff is sometimes all neatly stashed in a spent broccoli box or packed in an empty onion sack, but this is rarely the case. Usually you have to dig. The biggest turnoff to digging is that you have to physically get inside the container and throw things around like a crazy person.

And yes, these big steel boxes stink. This can deter some people and make them think that it is the food itself that is the problem. The problem is actually that these dumpsters never (or rarely) get washed or steam cleaned, so the crap that sticks to the walls as the containers are dumped rots while “fresh” trash is piled in. Since the dumpsters are emptied a few times a week, encountering something that is really foul is pretty rare.

All that to say that I think that March 1st will be the official start of waste stream month, four full weeks of eating completely free. I’ll be in the trash more often than usual, and, since Lynn and Selena are willing to participate over at Trashy Gourmet, the results of the experiment might be different from last time around. I have been practicing coming up with some recipes, but I think that the staple for the month will be Everything and Anything Soup. Currently bubbling on the stove is a pot of yellow squash, celery, kale, tomato, broccoli, spring onions and bok choy taken from the latest round of scavenging.

Add to that a couple toasted bagels and some “expired” goat butter and were good for a lunch/dinner cycle for a few days. And don’t forget the dessert…

I’m picking March 1st because it will give me some time for my hand to recover from cutting it on the edge of a dumpster as I was about to jump in.

It doesn’t hurt as bad as it did. I just need to remember to wear gloves…

Sometimes when I find food in the dumpster I get really irritated. That usually happens after I get really excited.

Tonight I came upon an entire case of unblemished cauliflower – eleven heads of gleaming white goodness still in the box – thrown away in the trash at a store that shall go nameless. I was on my bike, so I could only carry eight heads in my basket. This was my first stop and already I was full… I had to pass up the potatoes, squash, cabbage, onions, garlic, mushrooms and tomatoes. I couldn’t find any good reason why the cauliflower was thrown away. A rare, but not unheard of find.

The cauliflower will make a great soup and also provide a reason to dust off the pressure canner in order to preserve most of the goodness for later eating.

The next stop was the bagel/donut chain that has the awesome policy of bagging their coffee grounds with their end-of-the-day food. Finding a good bag can take a bit of digging, but I found a great stash of bagels. I was in a hurry and didn’t notice the salt bagels until I got home. Salt bagels are the grossest thing ever made. This is weird coming from me since my favorite bagel is the Everything, which has a lot of salt on it.

I packed two grocery bags full of bagels, put one in my backpack and strapped one to the top of the cauliflower in my bike basket.

Nestled among the salt bagels were a few garlic, a few cranberry, a few Everything, a few whole grain…a sampling of all the greats. This is a taste of the daily waste in my city, enough to feed myself and several others for a week. With a couple more bikes with baskets, a small group could find enough food in a few hours to feed themselves for a month and not spend a cent on fuel.

This brings to mind another round of Waste Stream Week, or maybe we could go for Waste Stream Month. How about I get a few other bloggers to do this with me this time? Who wants in?

Leftovers. That pretty much sums up these last three days. And salads. Lots of salads.

Breakfast has been a really basic meal consisting of a few pieces of expired bread made into toast and coated with honey (the same that used to “house” a fly) and some free cherry jelly. Nice, sweet and filling for the morning.

When I get to work there is always a selection of bruised or ugly fruit from the previous day’s culling, so I usually pick one or two to eat for a snack before lunch. The last two days, lunch has been plain sandwiches – overripe tomatoes on expired sourdough bread.

Dinner on day three was a bit different as it was not 100% out of the waste stream. A Wilmington Star News reporter and photographer came over to do an interview and sit down to eat a local, foraged and scavenged meal. In order to satisfy one of those qualifiers, I defrosted some chicken soup from the freezer. That was the 100% local part of dinner. The chicken was from Grassy Ridge, the rice from Carolina Plantation and all of the veggies (potato, green bean, yellow squash, garlic) were from Black River Organic Farm.

The foraged part was some sassafras root tea. The scavenged part was the salad.

The lettuce was two days out of date. The carrots were a month out of date. The tomato had a bad spot. Same with the turnip, green pepper and zucchini. Dressing was Annie’s Organic French out of The Stash. Overall a very good meal and an interesting conversation about regional food systems, community and the general disconnection that most folks have from their food. Jessica over at Fresh Thinking was interviewed for the article as well, and we are both anxiously awaiting its publication.

Last night and tonight I had some leftover soup and some of the poorly packaged hot dogs I brought home Saturday night. To the usual salad fixings, I added some broccoli bits dug out of the bottom of a case that was emptied of its bunches.

I also found a nicely sprouting onion that would probably do better in the ground waiting for spring than hanging out waiting to be eaten.

I expect tomorrow to be more of the same, although I did find some out-of-date tortillas and a dented can of refried beans. Could be a theme if I could ever find a decent avocado in the dumpster…

Breakfast was pretty much the same as yesterday; hot cereal, toast, honey and preserves. Lunch was leftovers from the previous night’s turkey and tomato sauce with some “expired” baby carrots, “expired” bread and a bit of goddess dressing out of a sample packet.

Dinner was pretty diverse as I had found quite a few crappy looking pieces of produce. I decided to make some steamed greens from a sad looking bunch of green kale. This went with a stir fry of potatoes, green pepper and garlic.

The potatoes were green and had sprouts, so in order to avoid any Solanum tuberosum poisoning, I trimmed the potatoes pretty deeply. There was still plenty to work with, and I managed to get rid of all the green and then some. Even though there hasn’t been a reported case of potato poisoning in the US in 50 or so years, there is no reason to mess around. The amount of solanine in one unpeeled green and sprouting potato is enough to cause some interesting problems such as paralysis, vomiting and fever. Peeling and frying a green potato reduces the amount of solanine to background levels in most cases. So with all that said, under no circumstance should you eat an unpeeled green potato. It only takes a few seconds to peel a potato even if all you have is a rock…

To the stir fry I added some beef hotdogs from a package that was not sealed correctly. The dogs were perfectly fine, it was just that the seal left too much play in the plastic and it seemed like the package was open. It wasn’t.

For another side, I had a butternut squash with a bad spot on the neck end. I just cut off the bad section…

scooped out the seeds…

and baked it skin side up in a baking dish with a 1/4″ of water at 350 degrees for 25 minutes. When it was done I just scooped everything out and ate it as is. As I said at the start, it was a pretty diverse meal…

Cricket Bread has become more than just a local food project. It has further influenced my ideology and ways of looking at what is going on around me. It has me looking closely at my neighborhood and the edges of my backyard; examining trees, wondering why one tree is loaded with pecans and the next tree is empty; looking at roadsides to see if I have missed something that is edible and flowering at this time of year.

I am also closely looking at the waste I generate on a daily basis. What can I reuse or carry with me to refill or use again? Is this pile of broccoli stalk trimmings from work still useful somehow, maybe in a stir fry or broccoli soup? Where is the edge between usability and garbage, and how can I walk that edge while still getting good nutrition out of out-of-date food or scraps?

For the next part of this project I will attempt to eat out of the waste stream for 100% of my meals for seven days straight. Whereas I usually incorporate some waste into my meals throughout the week, this will be a much more conscious effort to do so. Twenty-one meals starting this Sunday morning. I will document as much as I can, but since I don’t always have my camera with me I may have to rely on some detailed descriptions.

Wish me luck…

I have been dipping into the free bin at work quite a bit lately, mostly out of habit. I have also been going through the trash can and the compost buckets as well. In the past, I relied on the free bin and dumpster diving for my weekly meal planning. I am in a different position now, no longer doing much diving, but I still seek out free food just because I think it is necessary to maintain those survival skills.

The truth is, I don’t really need anything, but I still pick through the free box looking for something useful, basically something to rely on during the lean times. Most times the items are “slightly expired”, damaged in some way or labeled in a way such that we can’t sell it. In my own eating habits, I take into consideration that expiration dates are pretty arbitrary, and I have never had a problem with slightly dented cans.

The food – be it gluten-free pretzel samples, a dented coconut milk can or a jar of mayonnaise without its label – goes in my bike basket for the trip home, saved from filling a cranny in the landfill. At the store, staff are encouraged not to waste all this food that took so much energy to bring in, in a damaged state, yet takes virtually no energy to throw away, basically erasing all those calories. Just tossing the stuff in the dumpsters takes seconds and requires no thought on its final destination.

My friend and former collective-mate Will used to work for one of those big southern grocery stores, the kind of place where employees are forbidden by corporate rules from taking home any expired or damaged goods. Everything had to be thrown in the dumpster. Having no problem foraging in and eating out of that dumpster, we frequently brought home cases of various goods, many with no damage except for a splatter from a broken jar or burst can. So it was that we came into a lifetime supply of Texas Pete hot sauce, gallons of vegetable oil and more Hamburger Helper than has ever helped anyone. We were only after the noodles, but still…

Many other large grocery stores no longer have dumpsters. All their trash goes into a compactor and is one hundred percent wasted. Perfectly good food smashed to bits, never to fill bellies or even go into a compost pile. Hundreds of these stores compacting tons of edibles every year. With what we throw away every year, we could create some of the richest soil amendments we have ever seen and still fill plate after plate with decent calories. Yes, these stores donate to food pantries and other charities, but the waste they generate is still at a sickening level.

Maybe I have seen too much of the waste first hand, pulled too many bags full of still warm bagels out of the trash and into the night air, discovered too many pints of still frozen ice cream or cases of potato chips “expiring” the next business day. How can this practice be sustainable for the store or for the people working in it? Surely most of the items going into the trash could be simply diverted to staff on a daily basis. Hundreds of employees, many making minimum wage, would deeply appreciate a dip in the free bin. I know that I do.