Freeganarchy in the UK

While we're on about dumpster diving, I'm going to write more about it because it's a good thing and it could save your life one day son. I'm just looking out for you.

If you are currently in the dark about this subject, "dumpster diving," "freeganism" and "skipping" (allegedly? i have never heard anyone use this who hadn't just heard of the term from the internet which in my opinion doesn't count) are all terms which are used to describe, basically, finding a large supermarket (or other likely commercial property) waste receptacle and catapulting yourself into its dankest depths in order to reap its bounty, which is very often ... bountiful.




At the moment it seems to be that two or three kinds of people are freegans: kooky, eco-conscious "alternative" types who don't really NEED to get their food from a bin but feel they should or want to because of their principles; or the probably older, kind of frugal or simple-living people who have probably been snaffling things out of bins for generations and have made gleaning every scrap of use out of an item into a kind of art; and finally, homeless people and others who really just need to eat.

I guess I fall somewhere in between the first two categories. When I was a kid and my mother and I lived in Spain, she managed to (mostly) furnish our apartment and clothe us with stuff she found in skips -- bedframes, mattresses, a coffee machine, pots and pans, a toaster, some sun loungers, a pair of cowboy boots, and several gardening items just for starters. At the time I thought she was crazy because I was nine and I dunno, going through changes, but NOW I realise she was a total genius.

My own dumpster-diving initiation came last year when I was living in Austria with my friend Julia. She was involved in all kinds of hippy-dippy stuff, including dumpster-diving, and she lived right next door to a supermarket. The rubbish was kept in small rooms, which were accessible from both inside the store and the street -- if you had the key... which we did. I presume that once upon a time some anti-capitalist employee of the supermarket copied the key and passed it on to their similarly anti-capitalist friends and lo, modern freeganism in Vienna was born.

When I came back to England, one of the first things I did (priorities, people) was investigate my local dumpster situation. It was better than I hoped -- the bin was totally exposed, unlocked, unguarded, AND! Full, almost always, of delicious, nutritious, 100% cost-free no-catches TREASURE. It was magical. For instance, here is what Angry Busker came home with last night:

• 400g Lasagne (Ready Meal)
• 600g Leek & Potato Soup
• 250g Flat Mushrooms
• 12 Large Free Range Eggs (uncracked, with the lion stamp (vaccinated against salmonella))
• 6 Bananas
• 300g Pistachio Nuts (not out of date)
• Small Loaf White Bread, Unsliced (so keeps for longer!)
• 1kg Tub of Margarine
• 6 Small Kids' Yoghurts (Chocolate & Vanilla) (so fucking good)
• 150g Bag of Crisps
• One Pot Noodle (Chip Shop Curry Flavoured) (all Pot Noodles are vegetarian! i did not know this.)
• 2 Apple Pastries
• 350g Jar of Sliced Lemons (??? don't know what you'd use these for except gin & tonics)
• 3 x 1 Litre Cartons of Fresh Fruit Juice (Not From Concentrate) (1 own-brand, 2 more expensive fancy-pants brand)
• 3 x 330ml of Coca-Cola (to clean the toilet i guess)
• 7 Boxes of Bakewell Slices (only just out of date, which doesn't make sense because why would they go off JUST YESTERDAY after oh, seven months spent perfectly happily on an un-refrigerated shelf?)
• And a 200g Bar of Dark ‘Fairtrade’ Chocolate (come to mama.)

This is quite a good, useful haul. Sometimes we've gone down there only to find 24 billion tubs of melting ice cream and nothing else, or mostly tea bags, or olive oil, or just weird pastries and Valentine's Day cards. But all of the above could still be useful (especially the ice cream), right? I URGE you to try it. I promise that you won't get food poisoning as long as you have normal eyesight and a sense of smell. K? So without further ado...

TOP TIPS!, for those living in the UK anyway:

-- Big supermarkets usually guard their shit much too selfishly to make DD possible. In my town, for example, Tesco actually use BARBED WIRE and electric fences to protect their bins. Overkill. But smaller places can be great -- look out for big red "BIFFA" bins! 

-- Go at night when the store is closed if you can. This is probably common sense, but when you remember that a lot of big-name shops are open until late or 24 hours a day, it kind of narrows down your options a bit.

-- If you can do it without attracting too much unwanted attention, don't be shy about looking in regular everyday waste bins. There's an old woman in my town who does this all the time, in broad daylight, fishing out clothes, food, and other useful things with her walking stick. She is obvio::usly an HBIC but with a bit of subtlety and finangling it's possible to get good stuff from a normal bin without compromising your street cred, and if like me you have no street cred anyway, more's the better.

-- Sometimes people will see you and they might ask what you're doing. If you've already found some good stuff, just say something like "shopping" and offer them something. If they look like they might get a kick out of telling you off, probably just ignore them or play the "I'm just hungry and there's a lot of good food here going to waste" card. In the case of actual government officials or store workers or something, say you're looking for boxes or whatever other innocent thing you can come up with.

-- Read The Art and Science of Dumpster Diving. (It's free.)

I hope that you try it and get good luck! And experience the incomparable high of finding perfectly edible food that you'd normally pay crazy prices for, totally free. It's what you deserve for having to live in a society whose food retailers knowingly allow AT LEAST hundreds of thousands of tonnes of good food to go to waste every year. And that's just in the UK.

EDIT: I'll continuously update this entry with lists of the stuff we get from our dumpster, just for the sake of keeping a record (and, let's be honest, smugginess).

29.08.12 (Wednesday)

• 1kg Whole Barbeque-spiced Chicken
• 200g Fresh Unsmoked Salmon Fillets (we were initially a bit suspicious of both the salmon and the chicken, because they were well past the sell-by date, but cooked both very well and all seemed fine.)
• Gigantic Tub of Flat Mushrooms (must have been loose in the supermarket or something)
• 1,200g Chantenay Carrots
• 330g Steak Slices (pastry-type things)
• 350g Baby Leeks
• 300g Sugar Snap Peas
• 4 Seeded Bread Rolls
• Bag of 4 Chopped Corn Cobs
• 2 Large Avocados
• 26 Mandarins
• 6 Clementines
• 2 Belgian Waffles
• 100g Bag of Leaf Salad
• 2kg Apricots
• 200g Cherries