Bin raiding team with food items retrieved from supermarket bins in York - left to right: Santiago Parilli, Ursula Wild, Jo Barrow, Robin Lee
It's 2am on a bitterly cold winter night, and my friends and I are nervously looking over our shoulders in an exposed supermarket forecourt. As certain as we'll ever be that we're alone, one of us clambers over the fence that protects the back lot and disappears on the other side. We pause, nervously silent, listening for footsteps. There's a click and a squeak; our friend opens the gate and we slip in.
We pull on our gloves and head to the bins by the shop. We try the first one: locked. The second is locked too. We head to the third, breath held, and pull at the lid. It's stacked high with casually discarded food: pâtés, grapes, bacon, bars of chocolate, curries - it was all there, if a little the worse for wear and, legally speaking, unfit for human consumption. We unfurl some bin liners and, quite literally, dive in.
My friends and I have been living off bin food for more than two years. We're students, so the quick and easy access to seemingly limitless and varied free food is too good an opportunity to pass up - and it's changed our lives. Somehow, with no time, barely any cooking ability and little money, we've been feeding ourselves better than we'd ever have been able to if we'd stuck to the usual student staples of eggs and bread-with-stuff.
A couple of years ago, some older students told us about one particularly middle-class supermarket in town, which had easily accessed bins. The first trip, slipping in between a gap in the fencing, was terrifying.
Bin-raiding is illegal, so if you get caught skipping a fence, there's no easy way out, except to explain politely and hope the nightwatchman is feeling kind and doesn't call the police.
Despite the risk of arrest, though, it was always worth it. We'd find food that exceeded our most aspirational fantasies: king prawn jalfrezis, luxury sandwiches, macaroons, all manner of exotic fruit, butter croissants... in short, we were horribly spoiled.
All at once we found ourselves eating like kings. Well, actually, we still ate like students, but suddenly the component parts of our bizarre meals were top quality. So, rather than eat a basics-range cheese toastie after a night out, we'd grill a Camembert and dip (relatively) fresh bits of baguette into it; instead of bacon sandwiches, we'd have salmon and fried quail's eggs for breakfast.
Cooking with bin food forces you to be rather more creative with the ingredients you find, and we mostly did pretty well with it, but the trouble was that even with the best food stocking our cupboards, we still only had the average student's ability in the kitchen. So, while we did very well with the gourmet ready meals and snack food, occasionally we were defeated. We once found several bin-bags' worth of ripe bananas and, desperate not to throw any of them away, racked our brains for days for innovative ways to eat them. The worst was an attempt to create banana fritters, but we really just ended up with a warm, sticky banana flavoured mush. We eventually dipped them in chocolate and froze them all, in a delicious nod towards Arrested Development.
The best thing about bin-raiding (apart from the free food) is the communal aspect it brings to living with other people. When you forage together, you eat together. We have cupboards and shelves full of food to which anybody can help themselves, and we celebrate a particularly decent haul by having feast nights, where we cook up a bizarre buffet of what we've found and all eat together.
Those who condemn us for eating from bins often do it without realising the scale of the food that is wasted by supermarkets on a daily basis, and the fatuous reasons for which some of it is thrown away. The food we eat is perfectly fine; you just need a basic knowledge of food safety in order to avoid getting sick. We've even eaten mussels and prawns from the bins, without ever getting sick ourselves. Quite often perfectly good food ends up in the dumpster just for superficial packaging damage.
There are unwritten rules most bin raiders abide by (oh yes, there are lots of us). The most important is never to take everything in the bins. I will never forget the guilt of seeing people who clearly needed the food much more than we did rooting around after we had been raiding the bins empty for weeks. Another is to leave the bins as you found them (if slightly emptier) - there's no way the supermarkets aren't aware that people live off their waste, yet they let it slide if you don't mess up their back yards.
Being confronted with the daily reality of perfectly edible food being wasted, in a world where starvation remains a very real threat to so many people, makes the idea of living on food from bins much more preferable to participating in the culture of waste that prevails in the rest of our society. It's rare that being ethical ever tastes quite so delicious, and I'm not planning on giving it up any time soon.
I've been known to dumpster-dive to fill an empty stomach. At one campground there were some military and cadet camping trips put on by the local base. They had a big truck trailer parked there for weeks stocked with boxes of rations and other supplies. I ended up with lots of that stuff. Someone had cut their way through the latch to get into the trailer.. can't tell you who, but feel free to guess. Anyway I lived off ready to eat military rations for months. All summer, much of the fall. I didn't have to buy food. When I wanted fresh produce I foraged for wild berries, apples, and garlic mustard. Sometimes I ate mussels and crayfish from a river for some fresh "wild game". Overall, I was eating quite well for not having to pay for anything. At the end of the trips they threw out a bunch of extra food and I recovered it from a dumpster after opening it to look for empty alcohol cans and bottles to return, which lasted me about another week.
There's a certain store I like to check the dumpster of. Often it's loaded with expired food and often a lot of the expired or close to expired food from that store ends up in the local food bank. It doesn't bother me that the food's expired. I exercise judgment - if something is rotten, don't eat it. Expiry dates are often sooner than they need to be for caution's sake, plus my immune system is good so I'm not worried about a little bacteria; I just hope not to get any rancid fats since once I decided to trust some flaxseed oil that was turning with a big meal of 100% peanut butter and had a vomiting fit and felt really sick for an afternoon. It was kind of funny. I basically passed out right beside the pile of puke and woke up because a squirrel jumped off my leg to it to eat it. There were a few of them enjoying it, not caring that I was lying just a few feet or bit more away. I guess they could tell I was basically reduced to scavenger meat for the afternoon and in no mood to try to catch squirrels. Last time I climbed into that dumpster I made off with 2kg of bacon, some pomegranites, and a whole bunch of tangerines. I've also gotten some omega 3 eggs. There were non-food products in there too, including mosquito netting. I've thought of walking around the store and damaging the packaging of certain things I want and then raiding the dumpster for them at night. I actually haven't done this but the idea is enticing.