This post is rubbish

The first thing I did when I decided to move away from Saratoga Springs was to make sure that I found a replacement. There were cinnamon rolls, berry scones, and sticky buns of all varieties to be had, and I certainly wasn’t about to let them all go to waste. Actually, they were already waste. These aforementioned delicacies were all gleaned from the dumpster behind a local bakery. And that means that, yes, I am a secret dumpster diver.

This fact may be surprising to many of you who have been conditioned to view dumpster divers stereotypically as homeless people, or, worse, trendy, granola eating, tree hugging, patuli wearing, eco-chic hippies (thanks, Portlandia). I did find that Portlandia skit hilarious; it was shown to me, repeatedly, by several friends attempting to mock my diving habits, and so I feel the record really needs to be set straight: dumpster divers can be just regular people. Even Ruth Reichl, renowned food critic and former editor of Gourmet magazine, got her start in the trash. Living in a commune in Berkley, CA, one housemate demanded that it was their moral duty to shop the local trashes, to make sure that all regional, useable waste was never, well, wasted. In fact, this housemate had previously established household moral guidelines outlining the consumption of animal products as evil, but that changed the day they found a perfectly good steak in the supermarket dumpster.

Diving in Saratoga Springs was easy -- I lived on the main street and after dark we would just wander behind the main strip and surrounding neighborhoods, amazed at the goods available to us. The “we” I refer to is myself, Zach, and a few friends. The best night’s haul was as follows: two folding wooden chairs, as many fashion magazines as everyone could carry (note: big chain book stores do not return unsold magazines to the distributors, they simply rip the covers off and heave them out back), a hanging wall shelf, and two heaping bags full of bagels and pastries. The common misconception about diving is that you just collect a whole lot of shtuff, hoarder style. But, believe it or not, this haul consisted of items that we had actually been in search of. Dumpster diving in Saratoga Springs was so profitable that we could make shopping lists prior to our dumpster outings. Chairs for deck. Check. Shelf to hang over bathroom vanity. Check. Breakfast food. Definitely a check. And then there were so many other items that we stumbled across too. For instance, items left behind that evening included several thousand more magazines and literary journals (it says a lot for the industry I’m trying to enter…) many lamps, and a pair of backless chaps, tags still on. 

We weren’t necessarily diving because we needed to, though that is often a very real case. We did encounter several individuals who were certainly trash picking out of necessity, and even Zach can tell tales of a certain time in his life when around junior year of college he perused the dumpster outside of the local market and discovered an entire case of Krinkle Sticks, off of which he survived, almost exclusively, for the next 2 semesters. Please consult the website for advanced nutritional information on Krinkle Sticks, but assume that though you can survive on them, it’s not pretty. The Saratoga Springs diving, however, was a different kind of diving, a fancier version, and as my first experience, I felt rather spoiled. Ok, that’s a lie, my first dive was actually when I was 12 years old, serving as the lookout while my father crawled through my middle school’s dumpster, searching for spare computer parts. Needless to say, I was humiliated, but still currently use the sweet antique swivel chair he scored as my desk stool, a fact that he reminds me of constantly. In any case, Saratoga diving was fun, gainful, and actually quite well planned out. One of the couples we dove with was vegan, so we would research the ingredients that went into each variety of bagel at the local bagel chain so we would know exactly what variations could be gleaned successfully for the vegans and what ones we should leave behind for other pickers. It was a bit tricky distinguishing between the olive bagels (vegan friendly) and the jalapeño cheddar ones (not so vegan friendly, for obvious reasons) with a pocket flashlight, but we did our best, and rarely went home empty-handed.

Here’s the thing about diving for food: it’s not gross if you maintain certain standards. Truthfully, there are a lot of products in the grocery store that I wouldn’t put in my body even though the FDA has assured me that it’s a-okay (cheese from a can isn’t cheese!). Pretty much I apply the same rules to dumpster shopping trips. Fruits and veggies with delicate rinds or skins I usually prefer to buy locally or organically because the harsh pesticides of mass production simply cannot be rinsed off and are then consumed with these varieties. Therefore, applying diving logic, if you wouldn’t eat a peach soaked in pesticides, don’t eat one soaked in dumpster funk either. If you found a whole watermelon in the can, now that we can talk about. Most importantly, like any life situation, use common sense. For the most part, any food we gleaned was wrapped. No garbage soup was served at our place, Portlandia friends, just fine, packaged goods. Some items were wrapped from the store – breads or pastas just passed their expiration dates, or pre-bagged produce such as tomatoes and apples. And then there were the baked goods. This was the ultimate act of karmic kindness: one of the local bakeries bagged all day old pastries separately from any other trash, and left the bag either next to the dumpster, which was sometimes a problem if we didn’t arrive early enough and then had to fight off a raccoon (like I said, maintain standards; I would not eat that off a raccoon), or in the dumpster, but placed carefully on top of all the other assembled trash. So, when I realized I was leaving Saratoga, leaving behind a huge deficit in the dumpster-pastry-eating population of the town, I immediately sought out a replacement. And I found one. To be honest, I don’t even remember the woman’s name, because I met her only once -- a friend of a friend. She was just a few years older than me and had a two-year-old daughter, and they had just moved to Saratoga Springs when her husband was relocated for the Navy. She admitted she was doing her best to get her daughter out of the house everyday and to search out exciting activities, but she was working with a very strict budget and it was a bit hard. I knew immediately they were perfect. I picture them still walking home hand and hand each evening with sticky fingers and lips and huge smiles.

I believe that I will soon be fired. But I thought you were the best breakfast waitress/toilet scrubber there ever was? you might ask. True story. I will be dismissed from my post, however, because every morning, after clocking in, mind you, I begin my shift by digging through my bosses’ trash, holding up salad containers, tuna tin cans, and yesterday’s newspapers, and shrieking, “What is this?!” And they always hang their heads in shame. I clean toilets all day, so do you really think that hiding the paper, that should have been recycled, under a layer of eggshells and fresh coffee grounds, which, by the way, should be in a compost, is really going to deter me from reaching in there? Wrong. And this routine happens daily, because there is a trash service that comes once a week for pickup, but recyclables have to be driven separately to the dump.

There have been several trash rumors circling throughout town. I don’t mean filthy gossip; I mean actual, household, garbage. In case you haven’t heard, the scoop is that the town of Brewster is considering repositioning its landfill usage fee from a once-a-year dumping permit purchase to a pay-as-you-pitch policy, with free recycling. Currently, the one-time-sticker fee treats all resident taxpayers as subsidizers. The pay-when-you-throw plan will essentially treat the situation as a utility, and thus the biggest users will pay more. That sounds relatively appropriate when you compare dump usage to other utility fees -- you use more, you pay more, that’s how the electric bill works, that’s how the dump will work. Not surprisingly, however, this purposed switch is causing panic for the larger users, who will likely end up spending more with the new system than they do currently, and whether or not they deserve to do so is a mute point for the purpose of this post. An article run recently in the local newspaper suggests that the town is considering the switch as an incentive to make residents more loyal to recycling products that often end up in landfills due to, well, let’s say lack of interest. So, regardless of how you feel about increased fees, or the price of organic foods, or the fact that you are paying an employee to rummage through your trash and insult you (guilty) pretend for now that money is another issue and all you and the Brewster DPW care about is Mother Earth.

So, why is this article being given space on this blog? Because one of the easiest ways to eliminate refuse is to think about the intake: food. To become a more responsible pitcher, you should become a more conscientious eater. Much of our household trash is dictated by the edible products that we bring into our homes. Unless you’re plucking it from your garden, chances are that food came with some sort of packaging attached -- a box, a bag, a tag. When in the grocery store, try to choose products that will leave you with the least amount to toss afterwards, or with packaging that can be recycled in full. Vegetables often have little or no packaging, perhaps just a tiny label, and any peels that aren’t eaten can be recycled in the compost heap. You should start a compost. Buying a loaf of sandwich bread every week leaves you with frequent plastic bags, and those weird square plastic clasp thingys to send to the dump. Purchasing flour in bulk is cheaper, offers more opportunities for recyclable packaging, and it's fun to bake bread! (Ok, not everyone wants to bake bread, but if you buy bread from a local bakery instead, chances are you can scoot out with a beautifully fresh loaf, sans polypropylene outer coating). Many grocery stores are now offering cash back for bringing your own reusable bags with you to the check-out counters, and don't use paper napkins when you can purchase beautiful, cloth, washable napkins instead. Sidenote: cloth napkins make wonderful hostess gifts for all occasions. Growing items yourself, or purchasing them from the local farmers' markets is also a way to cut down on pesky packaging that could add up when it comes time to chuck. For instance, as a general trend, meat purchased from your local farmer is usually wrapped in less environmentally offensive packaging than the unruly styrofoam trays that display meet in the main markets. I can’t resist pointing out one final equation: consuming mostly fruits and vegetables, and purchasing local foods, will not only make your carbon footprint a bit healthier, it might make your body healthier too.

There are several websites that demonstrate that living less of a trashy lifestyle is not only entirely doable, but can be quite enjoyable. Some of the sites that take trash to an extreme, are in fact, wildly informative, and entertaining. Not to mention the couple that produced only one bag of trash in a full year tells you, in detail, what ended up in that bag, and why. And I have to draw attention to a restaurant that happens to be my very, extra, absolutely, favorite café, and that doesn’t even have a trash can available to patrons. The establishment asks instead that you pile all of your “trash” into a dish tub and the staff takes it from there, the unsaid messaging being, we’ll decide if that’s trash or not, thank you very much, but in the kindest way possible. That means that the obvious bottles and cans are recycled, but so too are the straw wrappers that have been absent mindedly pinched into tiny balls, and shredded napkins stuck to plates that so often just get scraped into the garbage are redirected to a compost heap. They are voluntarily handling their patrons’ trash, and we’re all better customers because of it.

The intention of this post is not to actually get myself fired (I think I’m safe, no one else really wants to clean all those toilets), nor to ignore the fact that is does take some time and effort, and money, to make a trash-friendlier lifestyle, nor to pretend that extenuating circumstances do not exist, I know. Last year, Zach and I renovated an old school bus into a small caravan, and between demolition and construction, I am certain that  we generated more than a bag of trash. We also learned that I am amazingly adept at ripping out bus seats… So, acknowledging that we would be sending a chunk of junk to the landfill, we did make a commitment to recycle in other ways. The majority of our additions to the bus -- wooden floors, wall insulation, the front door -- were all either given to us, or purchased from individuals who had it laying around, or who had over-purchased supplies for their own construction projects. We also installed a waste-vegetable-oil system onto the bus, hoping to offset trash expenditure by fueling our adventures with other people’s used fast food grease. Also, when you drive with waste-vegetable-oil, your vehicle tends to smell like french fries, all the time, which was really just an added bonus to this recycling project.

There are certain garbage scenarios that are real, severe, and are currently causing mass panic in the face of the new, possibly more expensive, trash policies. For instance, if I had a toddler still in diapers, then I too would be deep in the midst of devising a scheme to eliminate my need for disposable diapers without requiring that I rinse out cloth diapers 8-10 times a day. But I do think that by taking baby steps towards our goal (no pun intended, shockingly), and starting out with one theme, such as food, we can learn a bit more about our relationship to our trash. Somewhere between the extremes of just trashing everything and only buying things that come in glass jars and allowing your toddler to run naked through the neighbor’s yard, I think there is a happy trash medium.