Dumpster Diving (Tips and such)

[Timwakefield]

More stunning than the dumpster-diving stories is the fact that there are now dumpster-diving white knights.

Only on BG!

[notorious bum]

Perfectly good fucking food =\= food with a little bit of mold or even =\= leftovers tossed with the rest on a new bag.
Neither of the two come close to perfect food in my book. Survival101 dont get sick.

You must have never had a friend who worked at grocery stores/restaurants before. You'd be amazed at how much non-expired, packaged foods, or good produced gets thrown out. Unless you've never struggled in your life, getting free food is a no-brainer. Food prices will never return back to reasonable for anyone thanks to commodities markets fuckery going on, if someone had a reliable source of freecycled shit, I'd be all over it.

I'm only interested in local farmer's leftovers for produce, though, the grocery chain's are just fuckin painted-over garbage with a shiny coat of wax. Infact, most countries with large markets commonly reserve their shares of leftover shit at the end of each day. The key is to get the food before it even reaches the dumpster.

[Bregor]

Unless you've never struggled in your life

http://rangerland.net/forum/style_em...goal_light.gif

[notorious bum]

going without internet and cable for a month doesn't count though lol

[dejet]

If your poor and doing this for food you better not have
A) Internet (30–80 a month and stuff that goes alongside it hulu($8 ) netflix($8 ) xbox live($4))
B) a cell phone from major carrier(min $120 for two phones), get a prepaid track phone... And use it for work only.
C) a car that is worth more then my 1999 cavalier.
D) a computer/laptop worth more then 150 that can do more then word processing.

I dont know if this is you but my main problem with seeing stuff like this is people dont want to give shit up and then look for free shit.

Most poor people will keep cell phones and shit, I mean a family plan is your months worth of food... You lose your job you lose your standard of living if you dont have money in the bank.

[Yugl]

I originally thought you guys were talking about asking people for items they're about to dump, but this shit is ridiculous. Especially, the food stories. You're risking your health (Which will ultimately cost you more than a pack of fruits) for this shit. You also have to be burning money on gas doing this.

[Headspace]

I'm about to move into an apartment that needs to be furnished.

I've thought about this but I can't fit that shit into my Cavalier and my girlfriend probably won't stand for used shit.

[Chrius]

We should stop wasting food in this country, I can't believe restaurants are throwing out slightly moldy food. Why don't they just keep it and sell it at discount to somebody who will sue them?

[The Stig]

lol the replies here are reminding me of a scene in the Coach Carter film with Samuel Jackson:

-responding to a contract that the kids has to follow-
Parent 1 - It says they gotta wear coat and ties on game days.
Parent 2 - They don't own ties! You gonna supply the ties?

Samuel Jackson - There's a Goodwill and a Salvation Army store less than two blocks from here. They got a box full of ties for 50 cents a piece.

Parent 3 - Yo, man, what you trying to say, huh?

Samuel Jackson - Oh, we too good to shop at the Goodwill and Salvation Army, is that it?

Parent 3 - Yeah, I ain't that broke.

[Cream Soda]

If your poor and doing this for food you better not have
A) Internet (30–80 a month and stuff that goes alongside it hulu($8 ) netflix($8 ) xbox live($4))
B) a cell phone from major carrier(min $120 for two phones), get a prepaid track phone... And use it for work only.
C) a car that is worth more then my 1999 cavalier.
D) a computer/laptop worth more then 150 that can do more then word processing.

I dont know if this is you but my main problem with seeing stuff like this is people dont want to give shit up and then look for free shit.

Most poor people will keep cell phones and shit, I mean a family plan is your months worth of food... You lose your job you lose your standard of living if you dont have money in the bank.

Hey now, I have D, but I don't have A-C, or electricity or water! (even though I haven't done this lol), but I've been able to eat on $29/month if I absolutely have to, so it's not a big issue for me. Go go Ramen

[Meresgi]

If your poor and doing this for food you better not have
A) Internet (30–80 a month and stuff that goes alongside it hulu($8 ) netflix($8 ) xbox live($4))
B) a cell phone from major carrier(min $120 for two phones), get a prepaid track phone... And use it for work only.
C) a car that is worth more then my 1999 cavalier.
D) a computer/laptop worth more then 150 that can do more then word processing.

I dont know if this is you but my main problem with seeing stuff like this is people dont want to give shit up and then look for free shit.

Most poor people will keep cell phones and shit, I mean a family plan is your months worth of food... You lose your job you lose your standard of living if you dont have money in the bank.

I have cable that I pay $10 for and internet which is the same. $20 month aint shit when it comes to food shopping for two people. Especially when we're talking about fruits and shit. Yeah I could go buy 400 boxes of Wegmanns Mac and Cheese but I dont really want to eat that shit and Ramen every single day. The amount of shit thrown out by some of these places is pretty crazy, especially considering they could just donate all of this to shelters via the Good Samaritan Act

http://www.usda.gov/news/pubs/gleaning/seven.htm

Yet ive seen a bakery just throwing out bread at the end of each night since they make it fresh the following morning (Not taking bread during summer out of a dumpster)

You're risking your health (Which will ultimately cost you more than a pack of fruits) for this shit. You also have to be burning money on gas doing this.

Yeah if you're eating crap that isn't packaged. Your trash at home is not representative of what a dumpster looks like for a grocery store, especially if that store doesn't sell food in a diner setting at all. Yes there is refuse, but there are also just boxes of shit tosses in there you can find. Gas isn't a big deal as the shopping centers around here usually house more then 1 store, the most gas you spend is the initial few times you go out getting an idea of what there is and when such and such stock is turned over.

[Eurell]

Dumpsters at grocery stores are fucking gross lol. They throw everything out in those, old broken eggs, the trash from around the store with leaky god knows what in them. I've never seena dumpster that has food put in it that doesn't have a fuckton of bugs pretty close by.

[Aksannyi]

I see people diving around here all the time, and I'm sorry, this is Florida, that shit is nasty and smelly in a matter of seconds after it's put out. Every time I take out my own trash I practically gag up everything I've eaten. I don't understand who in their right mind would want to touch anything that's been in a dumpster around here. Don't get me wrong, I am always short on cash and I love free stuff and I have a pick up truck that I would use to grab anything sitting on the side of the road that looks serviceable, but I wouldn't touch anything that's been in a Florida dumpster with a 50 foot pole.

It is also considered trespassing on private property here. So it's not really a good idea. I'll stick to craigslist.

[miokomioko]

Dumpsters at grocery stores are fucking gross lol. They throw everything out in those, old broken eggs, the trash from around the store with leaky god knows what in them. I've never seena dumpster that has food put in it that doesn't have a fuckton of bugs pretty close by.

The smell of the fluid that leaks out of the bottoms of grocery store dumpsters is worse than any rotting corpse.

[Eurell]

The smell of the fluid that leaks out of the bottoms of grocery store dumpsters is worse than any rotting corpse.

Its cool though. The ripped garbage bag the only slightly moldy food is in will keep out the smell of death.

[Moridam]

several years ago, a couple of my friends more or less lived for a full winter off of their pickings from trader joe's and panera dumpsters. certainly isn't a glamorous way to live, but they never had to go without a meal, and nobody got sick or injured, though i guess the cold temps probably helped in terms of preservation, too. from most of what i saw, you'd never know any of the stuff they scored came out of a dumpster unless you'd been told.

[Meresgi]

Its cool though. The ripped garbage bag the only slightly moldy food is in will keep out the smell of death.

You do realize the last thing they do at the end of the night at a store like Trader Joes is toss out the produce and other stuff right? So if you show up 2 hrs after close at night and find that shit and take it home it's not really that big of a deal. I mean I know some people actually root around in the dumpsters but I dont go digging down 4 days worth of trash, though usually it's emptied each day anyways.

[miokomioko]

Most stores that are filled with more community-aware people (like Trader Joe's and other 'organic'-focused grocers) that I have seen tend to set such items off to the side of their garbage because they know people wait around and dive for it and save people the indignation/filth of pulling a head of lettuce out of a pile of broken eggs.

[arus2001]

A couple years ago I was visiting friends in NYC. We got a big group of people together to go to a karaoke bar, and this one guy I sorta knew from college was talking about how he was squatting and dumpster diving pretty regularly. I was just left thinking, five or six years before that, we received the same education and had the same opportunities, relatively speaking. How had he fucked up so badly? Was it intentional? He did seem to have an odd sense of pride about his new way of life.

Eh, kinda speaks of education and (hopefully) hard work only going so far. There's still a luck element involved in finding good, steady work at a place you don't want to kill yourself at. Funnily enough, I guess the same could be said of dumpster diving.

[Qeomash]

Relevant: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iNBl70Mza_s#at=10