A Free Course Dinner

Free grub-all this came from a bin!

Pam Caulfield hits the back alleys of Bournemouth to go bin scavenging and finds the grub is wheelie good.

It’s half past six at night and whereas most people are tucking into their dinner, I’m rummaging in a bin at the back of a supermarket for mine. It’s bitterly cold, I’m hungry, loosing hope and beginning to wonder why I am doing this. I’m not a tramp and can afford to eat but instead I’m trying out the lifestyle of a new movement called “freeganism”.

It’s made up of people who are actively protesting against over consumption in society by not contributing to waste. They buy as little food as possible, salvaging as much as they can from skips behind supermarkets, cafes and other shops. It’s not the homeless driving the campaign but business professionals, who take the message very seriously. Accountants, writers and IT consultants are all getting involved, driving around in their Audi TTs, wearing pin-striped suits during the day and donning woolly hats and gloves to scavenge bins by night.

They call themselves “freegans”, a combination of “free” and “vegan” and are sometimes known as “dumpster divers”, a term originating from America, where the movement began. I’ve joined two of them and we’ve been searching behind shops in Bournemouth since 5 o’clock but haven’t yet found anything.

Ashwyn Falkingham, 21 from Sydney has been living this lifestyle for two and a half years and Ross Parry, 46 from Melbourne has been freegan for over twenty years. Despite not being used to the freezing cold weather and our lack of success so far they remain high spirited and seem to be enjoying their first bin scavenge in Bournemouth. We head to Iceland. Opening one of the bins lets out a mouldy stench but Ash and Ross seem immune to it. They lift out some bags, shake, poke and inspect the contents through the clear plastic. Nothing.

Then, just as I’m at the verge of going in the shop and buying a pack of biscuits we hit the jackpot. A suspiciously heavy black bag reveals a pack of sealed rump steaks and three bags of ready cooked chicken. The sell by date is today but they are a few days within their use by date and still cold, probably only just thrown out minutes before at the shop’s closing time. It’s as if all our dinners have come at once.

Ash digging food out of a bin

“It’s hard when you don’t know an area but once you go out a couple of times, you know where to look and you can get loads of stuff,” says Ash, who’s managed to afford a round the world ticket and a laptop thanks to his freegan lifestyle. It’s also given him and Ross the chance to carry out their Christian voluntary work all over the globe.

Earlier we’d spent half an hour searching for the bins at the back of LIDL’s in the town centre. We followed the freegan rule of not trespassing and finally found a fire door left open in the multi-storey car park. There stood a huge bin, a beacon of hope in an empty car park. It was too tall to look into and as I was preparing to turn back, Ash undeterred by its height, leaped straight in without a second thought. Disappointingly he found no food but did manage to pull out a roll of cream carpet to fit out the back of their van.

Now we were in the high street of Winton because smaller shops, unlike major supermarkets tend not to lock the bins away. Perked up and motivated by our last find we head to the back of a small Waitrose, where a line of six bins wait for us like an outdoor shopping aisle. Opening one up, it’s almost as clean as the interior of the actual shop and the produce is just as easy to find. I’m surprised the bin bags aren’t labelled for our convenience. “It’s just like grocery shopping but faster, cheaper and much more fun,” says Ash, pulling out some organic ciabatta bread.

We find a wealth of food from organic eggs, all in date and none of which are broken, to marinated artichokes. Ash and Ross are like excited kids choosing pick and mix from a sweet shop. “This is surprising,” says Ross, sniffing a bag of vegetables to see if they’re ok. “Often we find employees have opened a jar or broken eggs in the bags to stop us taking things.”

The biggest discovery is a whole bin bag full of sealed six packs of white rolls. They look as if they haven’t even touched the shelves. The packaging says they’re a month out of date but they aren’t even slightly mouldy. We calculate that the wrong date must have been printed on these perfectly edible rolls so they had simply been thrown out. It’s likely that not even employees could take them home due to tight health and safety regulations. They’re good enough for us so we take the whole bag as it is.

We are carried away now, picking out sealed packets of roast ham, cherry tomatoes, salmon and asparagus pie and Crème Caramel desserts. This is fantastic, I’m thinking, getting all this upmarket food for nothing. We could eat like kings. Bang! A door opens at the back of the shop. “Quick,” Ash whispers as we grab it all and frantically start stuffing it into old carrier bags. I feel like we were doing something wrong but we are not shop lifting, all of the food is in the bin. We’re too late and get caught by a Waitrose employee. My heart’s racing and my cheeks are red hot for the first time this evening with embarrassment. On seeing us, the lady just smiles and, apparently used to dumpster divers, says “As far as I’m concerned, no problem.” We’re all relieved, grab a few more bits, gather everything up and head back to the van.

Ash and Ross tell me they have had problems with employees in the past. Ash once found a leather belt in a skip but the manager of the clothes store demanded that he give it back, saying it was his belt and Ash had no right to take it, despite the fact the man had thrown it out.

As Ross and Ash lie out a platter of food, I realise their message is right – we are being too wasteful. They certainly are having their cake and eating it or as in this case, freshly baked double choc chip muffins salvaged from a previous rummage behind Co-op. “We never really buy any food and we’ve never been ill,” says Ash. “Occasionally we have to buy rice because Ross has gluten intolerance but then again we found ten kilos of it in a bin the other week.”

The Nation could save itself a fortune if they followed in the freegans’ footsteps. The average household spends £2,340 a year on food shopping and it is estimated that £450 of that is wasted. Fare Share is a charity distributing excess supermarket food to the homeless. Alex Green, the director of marketing and fundraising says Britain’s become obsessed with use-by dates. “People have lost touch with their natural instincts about food. The best way of telling whether something’s gone off is just to smell it. However, I think buy one get one free offers in shops haven’t helped by encouraging a culture used to wasting food.”

He doesn’t think the freegan lifestyle suits everyone. “From a political stance freeganism is useful to us because it allows the debate of wasted food to go ahead and makes people more aware of us,” he says. “But there is a worry if vulnerable people are encouraged to start dumpster diving. It is a very dangerous thing to do if you are a homeless person.” Food, such as raw meat found in skips requires some kind of heat source to cook it, which may not be available to the homeless. “It is the middle-class that can afford to make that choice. If they want to jump in a bin and make an omelette out of what they find then that’s fine but I wouldn’t do it.”

There are some who have depended on dumpster diving as a way of surviving. “Peter”, who didn’t want to reveal his identity found himself in financial difficulty when his wife left him to live in France and took his two children.

The 44 year-old from Northwich went into depression after he found that she had been cheating on him and had turned his friends against him, saying he had beaten her. “I tried to commit suicide when she told me that she was leaving me,” says Peter, “I had driven to a deserted spot and rigged the car with a length of hose and lay back in the drivers seat waiting for my life to end.....I did not know that cars fitted with catalytic converters were not as deadly as I thought!”

He had to claim Job seekers allowance after a neck injury prevented him from working but the payments stopped in March last year. “I was in arrears with the electricity and gas companies so I was eating porridge oats made with water heated up using a blow torch.”

But then he started diving for food in supermarket bins after realising that reduced food in stores was often thrown out before its use-by date. “After Christmas was the best time to find produce,” says Peter. “With end of year stock takes in most stores, they were throwing good stuff away and I was able to eat some healthy food at last.”

He makes money by salvaging computers from skips and repairing them to sell at car boots. Not spending any money on food means he can afford to pay his bills. “I was so cold since September and I had three showers in the space of three months. It’s not something I want to go through again. Skip diving has changed my life.”

Fare Share wants to expand its network of distribution centres to help more vulnerable people like Peter, so they don’t have to hit the streets to find food. Fare Share has six depots in the UK, working with businesses to pick up excess food and deliver it to the needy. In 2005, they provided 3.3 million meals, feeding 12,000 people a day on food that otherwise would have been wasted. The charity works as much as it can within health and safety regulations. “We can pick up crates of sandwiches from a supermarket and within hours they’ll be in people’s bellies,” Alex Green says.

Charities such as this could be the solution for tackling mass waste in Britain but Ash has his doubts. He says, “Fare Share are making a big difference to people’s lives but it doesn’t detract from the fact that supermarkets know they’re still overstocking their shelves and won’t stop doing it.” Fare Share admits that they need more resources but Alex Green says that no freegans have ever volunteered to help them. “Surely if they wanted to put across their message helping us would be the best way of doing it.”

Ash(L) and Ross (R) with the booty in the back of their van

They may not be feeding anyone apart from themselves but the freegans have made me think twice before chucking out perfectly good food just because the packaging says I should. Sitting in Ross and Ash’s van, it’s like Steptoe and Son’s yard, packed with all kinds of rescued goods but I can’t help thinking this lifestyle is not for me. Ross asks “At what point would you be prepared to eat the food; when it’s full price on the supermarket shelf, when it’s marked down in the reduced section or ten minutes later when it’s in the bin outside?”

I see his point; there’s nothing wrong with the food we’ve found and I’m not afraid of eating it myself. But would I invite friends over for a dinner party and tell them that the rump steaks they’re tucking into had, only a few hours before, been lying in the bottom of a bin outside Iceland? Probably not.

Interested in freeganism? Try these sites:

Freecycle

Dumpster World

More articles on freeganism:

Dumpster diving

The Sell-by Foragers

Scavengers harvest sell-by date booty

Freegans

A good blog:

David Rowan (from the Times Magazine) on freeganism