One of the first times I dumpstered was with a slightly crust-punk boy at a community house. It was 1 or 2 in the morning, and we had exhausted YouTube's supply of awesome gun videos. Previously I had only met this person, Neal, at one of my FreeSkool shooting classes, and we hadn't really spoken beyond me commenting on his AK-47 tattoo. He had just finished showing me how his brother taught him to knife fight, and after pseudo-slashing me a few times and a couple cups of that house's endless supply of hot coffee, we were wired with a house full of sleepy people.
"Let's go eat donuts out of the Krispy Kreme dumpster!" he suggested. Well, sure! "The only rule I have about eating from the Krispy Kreme dumpster is that no Krispy Kremes leave the dumpster." Fair enough.
So we drove down to the west side of town and jumped in. The thing was so full that when cars came close, we have to double over in order to get below the rim. We tore through boxes and discovered an entire bag full of still-warm donuts. We were a giggling mess, taking single bites of cream-filled sugar bombs and throwing them over our shoulders. It was there, on top of an approximate metric ton of powdered sugar that I really noticed Neal...but that's an entirely different story of trash-can romance. After all, this isn't a blog about dumpster make-out parties. And besides, that came much later...
My point is that "Neal had a point". A lot of the food that goes into the trash really should just stay there. I am guilty of loading up on junk food, now more than before. I could never justify buying bags of potato chips, cookies, or large bars of chocolate, but to see them lying helpless and perfectly edible in some lonely trash can...well, sometimes I just can't help myself.
I came across this brilliant article in The New York Times that had some really amazing figures. The whole "Americans are fat" tag isn't exactly news, and perhaps nothing in this article is surprising, but it sure as hell is depressing.
I think one thing to remember about having any kind of specific dietary classification is how to retain the lifestyle while remaining healthy. As the article points out, "it is possible to be overweight and malnourished at the same time." When I became vegan about 5 years ago (I am no longer vegan or vegetarian) for health reasons, I found myself actually gaining weight. There were a couple of factors at work here. First, the products sold in stores as substitutes for animal products have ingredient lists about 8 inches thick, and are often high in calories and fat. Also, a lot of really unhealthy foods are surprisingly vegan, like Oreos. Second, I found myself paying much closer attention to food. The whole world was filled with new food, and new recipes to tinker with. I ate a lot more, period, because I thought about food all of the time.
Now, as a Freegan, I sometimes find myself stretched between two places. I think about my food more often, but I don't always have it. And when I do have it/find it, it's often junk. Literal trash. Dumpstering yields a lot of carbs. There is always so much bread in the garbage that it has become a joke between dumpster-divers. (Bagels especially enjoy the limelight of these conversations). So far I haven't noticed any changes in my weight or health. I try to keep myself as balanced as possible. And I really do believe in the power of a multi-vitamin every day.
Sometimes I hear people commenting on how living on society's scraps is unhealthy and unbalanced, and sometimes it probably is. But my argument is that most of American eats more garbage than I do. When I "shop" knee-deep in plastic bags, it's easy for me to choose "slightly bruised apples", "whole wheat pasta" and "bags and bags of vine-ripened tomatoes" instead of the "box of shattered cookies", "smushed up Twinkies" and "slightly tampered-with bags of cake frosting"....especially when my cargo space is limited. At the grocery store, items and displays are specifically designed to entice you into throwing them casually into your shopping cart. "Oh what the heck, frozen pizza is on sale".
Being inside grocery stores makes people hungry. That makes them buy more food. Being inside a giant compactor with sticky walls and a puddle of goo on the bottom doesn't exactly make every item of food scream "take me home with you!" It's just simple logic.
On the other hand, if you're hungry enough, you can eat just about anything. And a heavily-packaged box of cinnamon buns can seem much more appealing than a dented and slimy yellow squash, even if half of it is clearly salvageable.
I must remember to resist these temptations. Over the last decade, Americans collectively gained over one billion pounds, and it’s those living just above the poverty level who appear to be gaining weight most rapidly. The effects of this epidemic of obesity are not only the obvious health problems and costs associated with medical problems. They expand into the environmental and economic categories as well. It's estimated the the extra weight of passengers has cost airlines over a quarter of a billion dollars in jet fuel each year.
Animals tend to eat more when there is more food available. Give a goldfish too many fish flakes and it will eat itself stupid. Humans are basically no different.
"If humans are genetically programmed to put on weight whenever they encounter plenty, it would seem that by this point virtually everyone in America should be fat. Meanwhile, several million years of hominid evolution can’t explain why it is just in the past few decades that waistlines have expanded." The result of our excess and easy access to cheap, fatty food is what’s known as the “mismatch paradigm.” The human body is “mismatched” to the human situation. “We evolved on the savannahs of Africa...we now live in Candyland.”
As an example, "today, soft drinks account for about seven per cent of all the calories ingested in the United States, making them “the number one food consumed in the American diet.” If, instead of sweetened beverages, the average American drank water... he or she would weigh fifteen pounds less."
But terrible food has been cheap and available for a long time. Why is obesity suddenly becoming so much more of a problem than ever before? Further according to this article, only recently have portion sizes started to get out of control. I was noticing a few weeks ago how coffee cups in thrift stores from the '60s seem to be about 6-8oz. in capacity. Now they are twice that. A lot of this out-of-control portioning can be blamed on a man named David Wallerstein, who, in the 1960's owned a movie theatre, and realized that he could get more business by simply increasing the bucket sizes of his popcorn. Even when the popcorn was a week old, people who were given the larger buckets still ate proportionately more than the people who were given small buckets. Later, he started working for McDonald's on the board of directors and suggested the same thing. When people argued that the customers could just buy another bag of fries, Wallerstein explained that no one wants to look like a glutton, so they weren't going to do that. To make the customers spend more, the portion sizes went up.
I'm pretty convinced this man is pure evil. He preyed on the simple fact that human beings are kind of dumb, and rely on the portions given to them to determine when to stop eating. Some experiments conducted a few years ago (the same as the stale popcorn one) proved this. The researchers gave two groups of people some ingredients (dried pasta and jars of sauce) to people to take home and cook. One group was given very large portions and jars, and the other were given smaller portions. The "larger" group not only prepared 23% more, but they ate it all. Similarly, some people were given bowls of soup. Some of the bowls "magically" refilled as the person ate more and more and more. 73% more than the people who had regular bowls of soup.
Today, so many of us eat in front of a television or computer screen, gobbling down our meals quickly in between our "to-do"s. When we don't take time to experience a meal (taste, smell, feel the texture), and we eat it faster. And since it takes about 15 minutes to register a full belly, we end up eating more without realizing it. I've eaten many large meals and barely even noticed because I was absorbed in something playing out on a screen in front of me. Too much sensory input like that and the food is simply calories consumed en masse.
One of my goals with my house-bus project is to train myself away from distractions like that, and learn all over again how to carefully and slowly prepare and enjoy meals (among other things). I want to be more mindful about what I gather and put in my body, and if I do decide to indulge, to try to take Neal's advice and not let it leave the dumpster. I highly recommend this article for an eye-opener on the problems with obesity and portioning. It's another reason to be more anti-consumerist and boycott the corporations that are slowly suffocating us with our own biology for the sake of a few dollar bills.
I think the reason obesity rates have gone through the roof since 1997 is that Clinton changed the standards for what was obese that year. Overnight I went from a regular kid to an obese one.
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I also found it surprising that eating at free buffets counts as freeganism. This isn't food that's being discarded, it's food that's prepared for a specific purpose.
Freeganism is a protest about anti-consumerism, not entirely about waste. I'm sure there are people out there who only eat from dumpsters, but other ways to protest capitalism and consumerism include stealing and damaging/discarding items to find in the trash later.
ReplyDeleteI'll talk about stealing soon.