Abundance and scarcity

How a freegan is living off the fat of society

By YOUSSEF RDDAD for Murphy News Service

At an obscure hour of the night, Matt Guildmeister rolls up to a Little Caesar’s. The lights are dim in the store, but the aroma of garlicky, cardboard-scented pizza lingers in the air. He heads to the back of the building hoping to find an unlocked dumpster with something good inside. Sitting on top of the closing crew’s nightly toss out is an over-flowing bag of not-so Hot-N-Ready pizzas.  Guildmeister hoists the bag and takes off – no different from any happy customer.

For most Americans, the thought of someone digging through trash for a meal conjures the image of desperation or homelessness. But for some, diving into a dumpster is a lifestyle, one that actively rejects the extravagance of consumer culture. Freeganism, some call it. Freegans dive the dumpster for a cause. They are on the edge of a capitalist society and surviving off its wasteful trimmings.

“I hope I get arrested for doing this sometime,” Guildmeister says, drawing his arms back and pointing to an imaginary courtroom. “That way I can get on the grandstand and put society on trial and say, ‘Look at all the things you waste.’”

As Americans, we produce enough food to almost feed ourselves twice each year. But nearly 15 percent of Americans don’t have access to nutritious food. In fueling themselves on a heavily discarded carb-diet, dumpster divers are the offspring of our waste woes and give an eye-opening perspective how some surviving off the fat of the country in scarce places.

Indeed, Americans and U.S. businesses toss out 141 trillion calories a year, enough to supply over 1,200 calories a day for every American. According to Natural Resource Defense Council, 40 percent of all food is destined for the dump. The amount that is rescued and recovered by dumpster divers is unknown, but note that all food creates organic waste in landfills that produce prodigious amounts of greenhouse gases.

Dumpster divers like Guildmeister, who says he often goes out on dives with his five roommates, have regimented schedules and know where to find unlocked dumpsters. Wearing a pair of tattered jeans and solid pair of work shoes, he sets out at night behind bakeries, restaurants, grocery stores and cafés. In the dank back alleys of these places, he designates dumpsters for different foods: a pizza dumpster, a bagel dumpster, a coffee dumpster and a super-secret Odwalla juice dumpster in St. Paul that only a few know about.

Grocery stores usually dispose of the misfit fruits and vegetable that are more ugly or de-formed than their perfectly symmetrical cousins that line produce shelves. Vegetables that look like a failed genetic experiment or that have a blemish. For freegans, mutated produce is a gold mine.

Nick Staples, 27, says he used to frequent grocery stores that would give away ugly produce to feed his pet rabbit. “It took me a while to realize that I could eat it too,” he said.

A large part of America’s waste problem stems from misconceptions about ‘sell by’ and ‘best before’ dates. The Federal Department of Agriculture (FDA) does not require food companies or stores to print an expiration date. Caving to consumer concerns over freshness, entire cartons of dry goods, juices, produce, meats, eggs and dairy are often scrapped because of an arbitrary deadline. Food shelves and discount grocery stores often take in foods past these deadlines.

During his daylight hours, Guildmeister works at a food shelf where he is surrounded by boxes upon boxes of turned-away produce twice a month. He often walks away most days with a few bags of vegetables that add some important nutrients to a high-carb dumpster diet.

“I’ll sometimes call up some people and say, ‘Hey I have this,’ and they’ll say, ‘I have this,’ and we’ll meet up and get a soup going,” Guildmeister said as he nibbles on a large spring onion that had been donated to the shelf.

Dumpster diving is also an outgrowth of food deserts that have developed in urban areas, where the everyday corner store sells ready to eat, chemical-laden processed foods in place of fresh greens.

“Calories are cheap now, but nutrition is expensive,” said Jerry Shannon, a geographer at the University of Georgia who blames food deserts on the great migration of wealthy Americans to the suburbs. In recent years, young professionals have moved back into cities, giving rise to upscale grocery stores catering to the tastes and pocket books of urbanites with disposable cash, Shannon said. Someone like Guildmeister doesn’t fit this demographic.

“We usually hit up Little Caesar’s because it’s the most bang for the buck,” he says referring to the caloric density of the low-end pizza chain’s food.

But excavating dumpster to liberate unwanted food can be dangerous. Even with good food, there might something else lurking within, like animals, broken glass. Food left out in a baking dumpster can become a toxic breeding ground for illness.

The FDA recalled 94 different food products last year that saw over 18 million pounds of contaminated food destroyed offsite. Bill Marler, who runs the largest law firm that represents victims of food-borne illnesses, says dumpster divers might be exposed to infected food if there is cross contamination when stores throw out non-recalled food that was on a shelf near tainted products.

“Once you throw that stuff in the dumpster, you have no obligation to the consumer,” Marler said.

Marler has represented hundreds clients who have gotten food poisoning that caused irreparable damage, including organ failure. In 2014, almost 25 million pounds of food were tainted with e-coli, salmonella or listeria, a bacterial infection that has a 30 percent survival rate, Marler said. Grocery stores take precautions with this, often throwing out entire truckloads of food in the event of a recall.

Nothing Guildmeister does is illegal. Anything thrown into a garbage bin becomes public domain, according to a ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court. After police suspected California resident Billy Greenwood was dealing drugs in the late 80s, police searched through his garbage to uncover drug paraphernalia. This allowed police to enter Greenwoods home where they found his stash of cocaine and weed.

Greenwood claimed the police needed a warrant for his trash. The high court ruled that trash is not private property. Most freegans consider the ruling to be the bedrock for protecting their rights to rummage through refuse.

Yet while Guildmeister’s excursions tend to be quick and dirty, the business of pulling into the back of lot of a closed restaurant during the obscure hours of the night may attract some attention from the law.

“I was hitting up this Arabic shop one night and the police came and threw me up against the wall,” Guildmeister said, adding that it was the only time police have become forceful. The officers let him go after he awkwardly explained he was there that night to score some pita bread, not loot the cash register.

Reporter Yussef Rddad is studying journalism at the University of Minnesota.