So, at least for right now, I am not broke. To signify this transition, I have stopped getting food out of my local food pantry. I can now no longer justify getting free food from there that other people are paying for when I am perfectly capable of paying for it myself. However, in a completely coincidental turn of events, I saw a documentary the other day about dumpster diving (about which I had become intrigued because I pulled a duffel bag out of my rich White neighborhood dumpster a few days before), and this has converted me to a semi-freegan. That is, at least part of my regular diet for the foreseeable future will be pulled out of a dumpster. So far I have eaten raspberry Greek yogurt and a bag full of shrimp. I live right next to a grocery store. I work right next to a different grocery store. Neither store locks their dumpsters. So far the thing that I have found most interesting about my two excursions to date is how much I would have paid for the food I’ve eaten if I had bought it. I never eat shrimp normally because holy eff, that stuff’s not cheap. And I buy cheap store brand yogurt. So it’s very possible I will start eating better out of a dumpster than I did out of my wallet.
Actually, this reminds me of something I heard on NPR a long time ago when they were interviewing Michael Pollan about his new book, In Defense of Food. He said that “food” (which he defines somewhat more strictly than people do normally) generally has one interesting characteristic that edible non-food does not: it rots. So, by this rule of thumb, a Twinkie is not food, but a tomato or a roast beef is. It occurs to me that food I am likely to pull out of a dumpster is much more likely to be FOOD than the stuff I normally buy, because I buy box pasta and that’s not going to expire until 2017 or something ridiculous, whereas the expiration date on the yogurt I had last night was January 10, 2012 (note that it was already in the trash January 5). So I wonder if I will also be eating higher quality, in addition to higher cost, thanks to this new-found foodventure. I also wonder how much I will save on my grocery budget.
