Different Towns; Different Methods

Different towns across the North America, Europe, East Asia, and Oceania and other economically booming regions throw away perfectly good food and/or other household products because of dates printed on the packaging, the packaging being damaged, or simply to make space on the shelves. The tragedy of this practice, aside from the waste, is the other people living in regions like the Caribbean, Sub-Saharan Africa, Central Asia, and other territories less integrated into the global economy could use these products, more so than the landfills that are consuming food, furniture, and other household goods.

I am traveling at the moment but this does not stop me from foraging from bins, dumpsters and other refuse areas around stores, strip malls, and shopping malls on the road. This is, in fact, how I feed jmyself as I journey across the United States. Some sites are lucrative, where the employees do little to hide the food they throw out, it is easy to spot, and realitively clean to pull from the refuse bins. Some places go to some effort to 'sabatoge' the food but in the end leave it manageable to salvage goods (as depicted in the photo above by the plastic bags containing pretzels and graham crackers). There are a few places to intentionally destroy the food when throwing it out by opening up liquids and pouring them onto the foods or breaking things. What matters is persistence and understanding the routine and nature of the store and local environment, which needs accounting for very quickly if one is on the road. 

One last concern regarding the people who do 'glean' or 'forage' or 'dumpster dive,' etc. There are those who are very poor and check these bins to subsist in the industrial countries. Poverty is an issue that was never dealt with wholeheartedly in the societies of the industiral world and continues to be a specter everywhere. Then there are the middle class kids, academics and activists who appraoch the bins for various nuances of social justice. Who has the right to take advantage of local economies of waste? This is perhaps a resource that needs better logistics in its distribution to people who need it, instead of a commons that is exploited by those who profit  and those who live day-to-day by what they find.