Foragers find there is free lunch
Subculture fights against consumerism
NEW YORK - For lunch in her modest apartment, Madeline Nelson tossed a salad made with shaved carrots and lettuce she dug out of a Whole Foods dumpster. She flavored the dressing with miso powder she found in a trash bag on a curb in Chinatown. She baked bread made with yeast plucked from the garbage of a Middle Eastern grocery store.
Nelson is a former corporate executive who can afford to dine at upscale restaurants. But she prefers turning garbage into gourmet meals without spending a cent.
On this afternoon, she thawed a slab of pate that she found three days before its expiration date in a dumpster outside a health food store. She made buttery chicken soup from another health food store's hot buffet leftovers, which she salvaged before they were tossed into the garbage.
Nelson, 51, once earned a six-figure income as director of communications at
Though many of its pioneers are vegans, people who neither eat nor use any animal-based products, the concept has caught on with Nelson and other meat-eaters who do not want to depend on businesses that they believe waste resources, harm the environment, or allow unfair labor practices.
"We're doing something that is really socially unacceptable," Nelson said. "Not everyone is going to do it, but we hope it leads people to push their own limits and quit spending."
Nelson used to spend more than $100,000 a year for her food, clothes, books, transportation, and a mortgage on a two-bedroom co-op in Greenwich Village. Now, she lives off savings, volunteers instead of works, and forages for groceries.
She garnishes her salad with tangy weeds picked from neighbors' yards. She freezes bagels and soup from the trash to make them last longer. She sold her co-op and bought a one-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn, about an hour from Manhattan by bike. Her annual expenditures now total about $25,000.
"I used to have 40 work blouses," said Nelson, sipping hot tea with mint leaves and stevia, a sweet plant she picked from a community garden. She shook her head in shame. "Forty tops, just for work."
Though recycling clothes and furniture doesn't strike most people as unusual, combing through heaps of trash for food can be unthinkable to many.
One recent night, Nelson and fellow freegan Adam Weissman led a trash tour through New York for about 40 experienced and first-time diggers, including college students, a high school teacher, a taxi driver, and a former investment banker. One veteran handed out plastic gloves.
An employee at D'Agostino's supermarket in Midtown Manhattan had carried out the garbage minutes earlier. The clear plastic bags lining the gum-stained sidewalk bulged with bruised peaches, discolored eggplants, day-old poppy seed bagels, and imitation crabmeat.
Careful not to rip the bags and risk angering store managers by creating a mess, some unknotted the ties and sifted through the garbage with bare hands. The bittersweet scent of cilantro, bananas, and bread drifted into the air.
Two women who worked next door at a nail salon came outside and stared. A few first-time tour-takers stood away from the group, looking self-conscious.
"We encourage people who have never opened a bag before, just try it," Nelson told the group.
A few began filling backpacks and plastic bags with food that looked fresh enough to eat: heads of lettuce, tubs of party dip, baby arugula salad mix, avocados, shiny red and green apples, corn on the cob - mere scraps in the estimated 50 million pounds of food that New York throws away each year, including at least 20 million pounds that go to the poor.
D'Agostino's, Trader Joe's, and Whole Foods - freegans' most popular dumpster diving sites - donate edible food to agencies that prepare it for the poor, according to their spokesmen. But freegans and food specialists say a large amount of edible food still gets thrown away.
Supermarket officials say food found in their trash should not be eaten. "Food items are disposed of because they are inedible or not otherwise safe to donate," said Ashley Hawkins, a spokeswoman for Whole Foods.
The store's guidelines, Weissman said, might be unrealistic, adding that at home, people wouldn't throw away a banana with a few brown spots. 