posted by Freegan Chef at 12:16 PM
very inspiring and very funny! i feel like i was on a top secret mission!
Interesting idea...not sure I'm going to try it though. I'll pass it on ;)
A girl friend and I spent most of one summer traveling from one remote hot spring to another in western Canada. We were dumpster diving along the way. We would pick up hitch hikers and had them pay for gas in return for joining our hot spring tour - which included meals. When passing through a city we'd drop them off and then go "shopping". They could never quite figure out our choices - such as 9 quarts of ricotta and a giant bag of Danish rolls (discarded due to expiration dates). We'd mumble something about "sales" and most of them were quite happy to tag along.
At the time my VW split window bus had two logs for bumpers, a wheel mounted on the front with a cow skull attached AND no starter. So we always had to park on "retro-grade" so that we could attain "warp speed" to kick start the engine. At a major Safeway the dumpsters were large open topped containers set in a sunken loading bay so trash from the store could be brought out by the wheel barrow full and just dumped over the loading dock down into the containers. We parked the van at the top of the incline leading down to the containers, grabbed some bags and headed down to do some "shopping".
The selection of items on "sale" that day was particularly good. We had loaded up a few bags and were about half way through the dumpster when were heard a shriek and saw one of the head fraus from Safeway peering down at us. She was fairly stout, of German descent, and looked well scrubbed. She disappeared and soon returned with a posse of younger employees armed with jugs of Clorox. Starting at one end of the container they wended along the edges and over the top dousing the remaining harvest and chased us out the far end. So we grabbed what we could and loaded up the van.
Once we were back in our seats, the righteous gang had assembled in an open part of the sunken bay, directly down the incline ("retro-grade") from where the van was parked. One lad in front, with his arms akimbo, shouted up to us - referring to the cow skull on the spare - "is that one of your dinner guests?". This was met with an general round of snickers from his co-workers. I took the emergency brake off and silently started to glide towards them. Their jaws dropped and then didn't know what to do for a moment. Then they dashed to the far end of the bay where there was a ladder that lead up to the loading dock and back to the store. There was general chaos as they all tried to get up the ladder at once.
I kicked the van into gear, backed out of there and sailed off into the sunset...