Day 3 and Day 4 (Part 1) of Freeganism

Putting together this blog entry has not been without its difficulties-- I should take this time to entice the less observant of my limited readership with the appearance of some buttons you may view to your immediate right.
These buttons are so you can tip me. Like a waitress, bartender, your regular entertainer... Writers are very much in league with them. You can choose from one of 4 selections to ascribe my worth. If you're feeling particularly generous and itching to donate rather than tip me, please don't hesitate to message me.
I am writing from Day 4 as a freegan and I am beginning to feel as though I am walking a fine line between freegan and freeloader. As much as I am finding access to free foods a-plenty, I feel like not all of it is necessarily generated from the excesses of society. I've only felt the need to go on one dive so far, although I am hopefully diving again later tonight for some goodies.
I have a mad craving right now for some soda (something I don't regularly ingest) and for a pork sandwich from Philippe's. A mere bus ride away, but days away for me.
Day 2 ended up being surprisingly successful and soon I will have the time and resources to post up photos from these victories.

Day 1 (Part 2) And Day 2 of Freeganism

Last night, I eventually worked up the courage to ask for some help from seasoned dumpster-diving friends and after a surprising number of positive responses and then some let-downs, my friend Davey came through and volunteered driving his mom's truck out with me. He had brought along some bins (protecting the rest of the car from smelling remotely of dumpster) and one of those 5 gallon paint buckets to use as a stool and in the dark of a Monday night, headed out to a series of grocery store dumpsters to find a disappointing array of sludge and unusable trash... at first.

The first thing I notice as we hit up dumpsters one and two is that sometimes the grocery store's dumpsters are not in plain view and are even made unreachable death-traps by being located on some slope and enclosed in 10 foot fences. Some cities, as it turns out, are particularly diligent about locking up their trash.
I had heard a horror story about unfriendly cops arresting divers and kept an eye out for the fuzz.

Failure after failure after failure we opened bins to find absolutely nothing at all and conceded that Sunday nights are perhaps not the best bin-raiding nights-- that there existed some coordinated night all supermarkets scanned their produce.

We decided to hit up a certain grocery store once again after their employees had (hopefully) finished their shifts to hop over a small wall and take our chances on our way back home. We finally had something.

I am currently sifting through some baby and regular-sized zucchinis and cherries, plums, lemons... a full, unharmed loaf of bread. Conceivably enough to sustain me for at least a day.

Day 1, y'allz! (Part 1)

Thanks to the abundance of overhanging fruit trees and belated birthday lunches (thanks, Dad)... I haven't had to do a dive yet, but I am planning on diving either tonight or tomorrow. We'll see what I haul in! I have a good feeling my experience won't be anything like this:

First video blog, hurrah!

Hello all, here is the first video in a series of more to come. You get to hear my sick voice! It's all uphill from here, eh?






http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2011/01/newport-beach-police-will-arrest-trash-can-scavengers-under-new-law.html

What the heck IS freeganism?

Are they homeless? Isn't it unclean? Why the hell are these kids digging in dumpsters?!

'Splain Yo'self

Why 7 days? Why not a month? A few weeks?
Do you have any idea how many diets are out there!? I have at least 7 lined up for this project so far and I don't want this project to last the rest of my life. I think 7 days is a fair amount of time to give me an idea of what it would be like to continue on with it if I chose to. I will follow a diet from Sunday 12:00 AM to Saturday 11:59 PM.

Will you be taking breaks in-between diets? If so, when?
I decided it might be a good idea to return to my baseline after each diet to get a more accurate reading on what the diets are doing to my body and how they are making me feel. After every diet, I will return to how I eat normally-- which is, not constantly fretting about what I am putting into my mouth-- and continue on with the project the following Sunday. A week off in-between. Sensible?

Are you really going to follow a lifestyle for a week, not just the "diet"?
A lot of diets ARE a lifestyle. I can use freeganism, which is the first "diet" I am undertaking, as an example. In freegan mode, my days will center around a very hunter/gatherer approach to my next meal. What I find fit for consumption, I will most likely have to eat. I think we like to forget how central food is to our lives and how the search for it took up the majority of our energies until not very long ago-- subsistence farming is still being done today and is experiencing a resurgence, even in urban areas. I find I savor and enjoy my food much more knowing where I got it from, how it was raised, and if I put effort into my meal. Freeganism is just going to remove money out of the equation. I am going to give each and every diet a complete go of it-- from purchasing ingredients to describing my difficulties cooking within the boundaries of the diets. People on these diets don't visit restaurants for every meal and a lot require preparation that is so complex it might take an entire day to feed myself. I will also use the word diet in the very general sense of what I put into my body.

Aren't diets to lose weight?
The diets I have picked are not structured to be the kinds you lose weight from but I expect a fluctuation in my weight is bound to happen. I am not going about this to lose weight, and again, I am returning to my regular eating habits between every diet to return back to my baseline. Most of these diets purportedly help the body in many ways, but weight is not what this experiment is about.


Do you have any questions for me? Leave them as comments below.

Wait, really?

If you're anything like me, you've wondered what your life might be like if you made the decision to adhere to a diet. You've debated whether or not it would really be all that hard and if your life would suddenly be consumed by it, or if relatives, friends, or lovers would look at you funny if you turned down that slice of pizza because you're only eating things that are green. You've thought about whether such a diet actually makes you feel more energetic or pale and anemic. You have begun to dabble in the lifestyle, visiting nearly empty restaurants catering to a picky clientele and have no idea how you'd begin to replicate the success at home.


If you are the individual this very niche-y blog is catering to, you are probably happy to have found me. I am going to be, for a week at a time, undertaking the incredibly arduous journalistic effort of chronicling my experiences of being the oddball who only eats green things. This!... and other potentially more extreme diets that you've probably only seen on television documentaries. As these documentaries are good at pointing out, it's rather hard to find someone on one of these diets who isn't some zealous supporter you get embellished answers out of.

I'm looking at you, PETA.


I am a cook from a background of greater cooks than myself. I worked at Le Cordon Bleu as a lowly administrative liason to admissions and loved being in an atmosphere where the motto was "more butter and more garlic can make anything taste great" and the most valuable thing you carried with you was your knife set. I am now occasionally taking on the challenge of co-chefing at HM 157 and the Altadena Urban Farmer's Market. In between teaching cooking lessons and preparing to cater events, I am also in the pre-production process of creating a vegan cooking show.


The experiment begins on February 6th with Freeganism.