[Sca-cooks] Freegans

Laura C. Minnick lcm at jeffnet.org
Fri Nov 2 14:33:45 PDT 2007


At 07:42 AM 11/1/2007, you wrote:

>Freegan = if it's free, you eat it.  Dumpster divers eat a lot of 
>free stuff, most of it very good stuff.  Some places, like Panera, 
>will even go so far as to separtate the good food products (stuff by 
>law is too old to sell but is still good stuff) from the general 
>trash.  Other places, like Whole Foods make a policy of destroying 
>all their excess and damaged foods and locking it up with cameras so 
>that folks can't get to it easily.  There are a lot of places that 
>produce or package organic foods and cheese places that are fairly 
>open to the freegans to visit their bins, even to the point of not 
>watching as folks haul off truck loads of stuff.
>Olwen

When I was a kid, we lived next to a working farm for awhile- they 
had cows, goats, pigs, chickens, ducks, and a cranky old cockapoo. 
Every day or two, they'd take the ratty old truck down the hill into 
town (13 miles) to the Albertsons, where they'd fill the trash cans 
in the back of the truck with discarded produce. The Albertsons had 
the produce set aside , and if I remember right, they weren't the 
only ones who picked of the discards. So they'd come back, trundle 
the truck past our little house to the bard where the pigs were. 
Feeding the pigs was great fun, especially if you could bonk them on 
the heads with an apple or something. Or throw something out and 
watch them fight over. Anyway, my mom and the farmer's wife and some 
of us kids would take a sack down to the truck, because the 
Albertsons was notorious for selling only perfect produce, so we'd 
pull things out of the cans with just a small bruise or a cut, or 
sometimes, nothing we could see at all. So the good stuff we kept. 
The rest went to the pigs. And while we lived there we ate pretty 
well- lots of good produce.

The funny part though, was when my brother Josh was about 4, and in 
Sunday School one day, they told the story of the Prodigal Son, 
complete with the Son being reduced to eating the food that was given 
to the pigs. Josh couldn't see what was wrong with that and said so. 
After all, _we_ ate the pigs' food...

I didn't envy my Mom's task of having to explain that to the rather 
straight-laced, suburban Sunday-School teacher...

'Lainie
___________________________________________________________________________________
"It is our choices Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than 
our abilities."  -Albus Dumbledore

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