The day I ate trash

From the inception of Minimum Wage January, my friend Silvio and I have been excited about the idea of dumpster diving. Dumpster diving (also called urban foraging, garbage-picking, binning, trashing or skip-raiding) is the practice of riling through rubbish in order to find useful things like food or furniture.

Search online and you will find a community of committed adherents who are not doing it out of economic necessity. They talk in idealistic terms about our wasteful society and how carelessly we squander resources, and they congratulate themselves for reducing landfill and pollution.

Well, good for them, but I'm sure as hell not doing this again. For all the high-minded talk, it's hard to feel like you're doing noble work while tearing open garbage bags and trying to avoid the stench of rotting stuff just to find a loaf of bread that - yes - is still in its packaging, but has spent an unknown amount of time cohabiting with trash.

We found bread and nuts!

For the first hour we were epically unsuccessful. We toured the dumpsters of SoMa, hitting Whole Foods, Safeway and Trader Joe's, and found nothing. In retrospect we lacked good intelligence on the correct time to dive (nighttime?) and we probably would have had more success in a suburban environment with less dumpster security.

Eventually we found two packs of mixed nuts and a loaf of bread. High fives ensued. Feeling proud of our bounty, we returned home.

Yes, this was as disgusting as it looks

The plastic packaging around the nuts was dirty. I washed it and then ate the nuts. They tasted fine.

I haven't eaten the bread and I probably won't. The packaging seems flimsy and I have plenty of food that hasn't been near a dumpster.

So, what did we learn today?

Dumpster diving isn't particularly easy, it isn't particularly fun, and it makes you smell. According to the EPA, Americans throw away 33 million tons of food a year: one pound of food per person per day. That's very wasteful. Our bad. But somebody else can pick this up. Dumpsters are dirty and gross and I don't want to eat from them again.