Trash to Treasure*

On Tuesday June 6th, David Gilles came to our class to speak about the organization Food Not Bombs. With him he brought a loaf of banana bread to share with the class and while it was a little burnt, it actually was not all that bad. Would you have eaten it though had you known the bananas had been removed from a dumpster behind one of your local grocery stores? As I ate my tiny slice, David shared with us just that…he had dumpster dived to retrieve the bananas he used to bake the bread, much like his frequent dumpster diving excursions to retrieve food for many of FNB meals. Did you know, “official surveys indicate that every year more than 350 billion pounds (160 billion kilos) of edible food is available for human consumption in the United States? Of that total, nearly 100 billion pounds -- including fresh vegetables, fruits, milk, and grain products -- are lost to waste by retailers, restaurants, and consumers”. And by contrast, “the amount of food required to meet the needs of the hungry is only four billion pounds, according to Food Not Bombs, which estimates that every year more than 30 million people in the United States are going hungry on regular basis”. Appalled by these staggering numbers, can anyone blame guys like Ozzie dumpster diving to help reuse perfectly good food for people who are starving?
As a class we discussed what makes things trash—more specifically, the reasons why we throw food away. Our list complied reasons such as: too small to save, inedible, too full to eat, use-by date expired, color change, smells bad, tastes bad, excess food. While some of these reasons seem legitimate, reasons like too full or having an excess of food seem like reasons of convenience. Think about your daily trip to the grocery store. While browsing the produce section how often do you see fruits and vegetables at their ripest moment (maybe even decomposing) on the shelves or less dramatically, how often do you see a large amount of fruits and vegetables with bruises or small indentations? I would say rarely. Thus, if it’s aesthetically not pleasing, to the dumpster it goes and such is life when it’s socially not appealing; this is the convenience of the grocery store. To keep use value higher than exchange value, it is much easier for a produce vendor to get rid of the really ripe or slightly bruised avacados for example than it is to keep them on the selves (even if they’re not bad yet); they no longer have the exchange value. In this case, one man’s trash (the produce guy) becomes another man’s treasure (FNB main entrée) and no one loses anything because perfectly good food was going to taste anyway.
While throwing things into the trash may seem like exile, the end of their social relationship, think about all the good foods rescued from the dumpster from people like Ozzie that help maintain the social relationships of those going hungry. Homeless people are FNB’s largest group of people seeking food and already their lives are exiled from the ‘norm’ of today’s society. Take for instance Seattle’s contribution to helping the homeless: In the past year, city and county workers have torn down encampments tucked away in greenbelts, shut down another meal program in City Hall Park, and corralled a number of other homeless meal programs, including Operation Sack Lunch, onto a lot under the I-5 overpass at Sixth Avenue and Columbia Street—nearly a mile from the halfway houses and shelters in Pioneer Square and outside the downtown ride-free transit zone”. Helpful no?
For more articles on dumpster diving, check out:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/24879628/
http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/Content?oid=592296&hp
Picture By: Ykravitz on Flickr.com