Food Not Bombs shares free vegan and vegetarian meals with the hungry in over 1,000 cities around the world to protest war, poverty and the destruction of the environment. With over a billion people going hungry each day how can we spend another dollar on war?
Part of the FNB philosophy, at least here in Toronto, is to source good food that would normally go to waste via dumpster diving on a regular basis. For the record we only actually looked into three dumpsters out of the six or so locations we visited last night. Some of the places were the back of fruit market stores.
It was such an eye opener, and rather disturbing, to see the amount of food being wasted. For example there was one store that had three tall stacks of boxes filled with punnets of strawberries all gone bad. I was told that sometimes the divers would go through each individual punnet to pull out still-edible fruit, but that’s a laborious process and last night they felt the effort would outweigh the benefit gained. Cost-benefit analysis applied to dumpster diving – I liked it!
Here are some lessons learnt from my intro to dumpster diving last night…
1. Do not actually dive into dumpsters – you don’t want to risk getting cut by nasty things
2. Discard anything that has torn, ripped, or cut packaging. Also leave any fruit/veg that has browned i.e. rotted.
3. If you detect any bleach/chemical smell stay away! A lot of businesses are now adding bleach to their discarded items to deter dumpster divers due to potential liability (should somebody get food poison from eating something they got from a dumpster and sue the company). Really bad idea from the businesses and not enviro-friendly at all, but I can see why they do it.
4. Be respectful and clean up after yourself. This will ensure that business owners don’t have negative feeling towards you or other divers in general. In fact, the crew I was with had already established relationships with some of the business owners in the Annex so they had no problem with the divers coming back time and time again.
5. Take only what you can use, and leave the rest for someone else.
It was sad to learn that one chain supermarket in particular had hidden all their green bins and set up bright lights (where there once were green bins that the divers would frequent) as a way to prevent any food being taken. The sad thing is we can only assume that all of the produce is being wasted because companies like that tend not to send the fruit and veggies back to their sources. I have some hope that the food is being donated to worthwhile organisations like Les Tablee Des Chefs (“Cooking For Life”) who work to redistribute surplus food.
The last dumpster we went to was a treasure chest of still good baby spinach, apples, super-sized cherry tomatoes, okra, beans, bananas, and a whole bunch of other goodies. I picked up a pack of green beans for myself. Everything else I donated to FNB. Some folks were going to take the food home, prepare and/or freeze it, and then take it to the FNB cooking and serving session on Sunday.
I also got a great food tip from one of the more experienced divers. I asked him what to do when I have more greens than I know what to do with and he suggested… green smoothies! A good Smoothie is 60% fresh fruit mixed with 40% green leafy vegetables.
For those in Toronto interested in helping out at the weekly Food Not Bombs cooking and serving, it’s tomorrow (Sunday June 20) at Soybomb. Cooking starts at 11am, and serving goes until late, and they need volunteers to help clean up afterwards also. More info on facebook.
Check out Toronto Food Not Bombs on Facebook and/or the Food Not Bombs global website which has great info about the movement.
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