Heh Heh... There's a NAME for what I do!
 

I didn't know that.

What is a Freegan? : freegan.info

Can't say I drop into that slot 100%, but... mostly.

I guess they got tired of being called hippies???

I like it. :)

In France more and more supermarkets are putting Javel (bleach ?) on what they are putting in the dustbin :mad:
Other one are organizing themselves to give to associations such as Restaurants du Cœur - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Denis.

I've even come across that here, in the middle of nowhere. The owners of one of my most "fruitful" dumpsters took offense to having their refuse recycled and actually started taking the time and manpower to open all food containers and dump soap water in them. :rolleyes: Duh, it's not like they're losing any sales cuz of my recycling- I wasn't gonna buy their stuff off the shelf anyway. :mad:

Aw, man, I was totally into that lifestyle. Heck, I would've signed up to write for the website. I used to joke that I was a "Nonprofit Organism". :) But where I live now, all the dumpsters are locked up in gated concrete sheds. Amazing really. It must be part of the commercial building code or something.

People used to put free things on the grass verge in front of the house but you dont see it much anymore.

I think its now illegal to do so.

One year later....

still scavenging, but not as often. Opportunities drying up with open bins being replaced by enclosed compactors. :mad: Should be the other way around... still hit the occasional jackpot though. The best one is our local gas station convenience store, which evidently doesn't move groceries and food items as well as it may appear. They'll toss out huge garbage bags full of, for instance, boxed cereals, potato chips, bagged pecans, individual sized juices, sandwiches, breakfast muffins, etc. as soon as they hit the "expiration date"... meanwhile the local food shelf begs for donations... :rolleyes:

C'est la vie!

I used to find adulterated food all the time as part of my job. We'd ask the companies what they were going to do with that food, which was unfit (and illegal) to hold for sale. They usually offered to "voluntarily dispose of it." We suggested they adulterate it so scavengers would not try to eat it. That's where the soapy water, or motor oil or bleach, gets poured on apparently good food.

Brother Frank may think it's a waste, but I hope he wouldn't have wanted to eat food with mouse turds and hair and urine in it, or grain with beetle larvae nestled comfortably inside the kernels. You can't see the bacteria that cause the cans to swell, or the meat to spoil. When in doubt, throw it out.

GDit, we've been through that already right? :mad: :rolleyes:

How "adulterated" can food be when it's packaged such that it'll survive 100 years?

How adulterated do you want it? How about adulterated with cancer-causing Red #3? How about adulterated with chopped up mouse ribcages in the spinach mill? How about being underprocessed by 2 minutes during the retort venting process? All of those foods end up in your 100 year packaging, looking perfectly safe to eat. Do you feel lucky today?

My cat eats chopped up mouse rib cages.

If he can do it, so can I. :thumbup:

You have a point. You shouldn't pay good money for food with chopped mice in it, but you aren't paying anything. :D You have to pick the mouse fur out of your teeth, though. And the next package may contain the carcinogen or the toxin.

And the same applies for that food post-inspection, hence the reason for recalls.

When the food on the shelves is 100% guaranteed safe to eat, then your argument will hold more weight. Until then, it's decidedly less of a risk, but still a risk, to eat ANY processed food.

Remember, as much of it as you find in the stores, there's probably just as much that you haven't found, and someone has already consumed.

The food I'm talking about WAS on the shelf, most of the time less than 24 hours from when I discover it! :rolleyes:

Let's assume the food on the shelves is 99.99% safe to eat. Now let's assume a significant percentage of the food thrown away is not safe to eat. Allowing for an unknown percentage that's just outdated and stale, or just outdated, some of it will be good. For argument's sake, I'll pick a number out of my hat - 25% is not safe to eat.

As Dirty Harry asked, "Do you feel lucky today, punk?" If I'm buying it, the cylinder will click on an empty cylinder 9999 times out of ten thousand. If I'm scavenging it, my odds drop to one in four. Which odds do you prefer?

Apparently, we've both been very lucky, then. Thanks for your concern. It's been noted. Twice. Or more.

Lulz

Sentra ,
I can understand your points and , having been the victim of food poisoning twice myself I can also see the logic in your arguments.

Where I live the laws also require food to be discarded once the "use by" / "best by" date passes but I have seen these dates on sugar and salt too which suggests to me the legislation is more than a little off the mark on this one.

Frank's point , as I am reading it , applies to perfectly good food being "date expired" on Monday and discarded Monday might when it could be just as safely be taken to a food kitchen or where ever for immediate consumption on the Tuesday with no danger whatsoever.

Just my perspective on it all.

Pete.

dates an packages are typically a sell by date. One of the stores I shop at sells food on the last date of the sell by at deeply discounted rates (50-90%). Use by dates are set with a "guaranteed freshness" in mind. The assumption that 99.9% off food is good and a day later 25% has gone past good is a pretty wide assumption. If .1% of food is bad in your life when you buy 1000 packages of food 1 will make you sick seems like a pretty high % of hazardous food.

I am going to use Peter to illustrate my point. If he has twice gotten sick from food and he is ~30 years old(a guess given population distribution he is likely older, though he may be younger), subtracting the first 10 years of his life for not remembering times he may have gotten sick when younger. So for the last 20 years sick twice. that's once every 10 years. 10 years times 365 days times 3 meals a day times 3 ingredients (a swag) equals 32850 products he has been exposed to per 1 that made him sick. Peter has been exposed to 99.997% safe food or only .003% unsafe food. Given the buffer manufactures put into there sell by/use by dates I should think using found food from a frequently observed source would be pretty safe.

I am not likely to go dumpster diving even now that I figure it is way safer than I would have thought it would be. Mostly because I am not a bum, it violates social norms, and diggin in the trash for food seems...well trashy. I do definitely see a place for "expired" food in food banks and what not. It does not make sense to just fill landfills with food that could be used by folks that could use it.

Wait... was that... logic?!

I haven't kept any stats- maybe I could keep a "gas" "log" for my terlit???- on how often I've been sickened by food. It's not often, though, or I'd change my ways.

I don't think I've ever had food poisoning... but I've gone to work w/ the flu and never knew it until I was diagnosed several days later, so eh..

Yeah, it's like I've been sick but why? What do I assign the blame to? Touched a cootie on a door handle? Someone sneezed in my proximity? Ate something "bad"? The frequency of it is low enough for "bad" food borne illness to fall into the randomly caught category.

I recently met a group of squatters when I went to do a cleanout.

They moved out for the week I was there, and left no mess/damage, even a couple of them helped clean. I offered to buy them lunch for their help, but they refused, and said they "had plenty"... As soon as I was done, they moved right back in.

They weren't bad people at all.. not what you hear about when people say the word "squatter"... they were as kind as the house-sitters that you hire from professional services.

coulda been, still a few assumptions and guesses in there. Another thought is that a higher % of the food could be safe, while in the package then whoever prepped the food may have introduced a toxin. If that were the case then you could not blame the illness on the product. For all the bad press processed food gets (some of it deserved as naturally derived food is "healthier") it is pretty safe. Sorta like aviation, very safe but when something bad happens it gets broadcast everywhere.

I have yet to see how a dead grain fed cow is any less healthy than a dead grazed cow. They are both dead.

I believe I read somewhere that you're statistically more likely to get hit by lightning than to be involved in a plane crash... though that was in the late 90's, and could have changed drastically, given recent circumstances.

Per capita, Air transit is still less likely to kill you than driving.

So you guys are eating out of the dumpsters? I am looking into doing a little research on the "live on minimal stuff" strategy.

The scariest thing about flying is the drive to the airport. Really there is a lot in aviation that can bite you, it's all about identifying hazards, reducing and mitigating risks, and making informed safe choices.

Not so much on my side anymore, but yes, we both have, and I personally would again. I've gotten food from dumpsters and throwaways that I can't afford when it's on the shelves, even when I was making $25+/hour.

When's the last time you had prime rib cuts, veal cutlets, beef/bacon filets... every night for 2 weeks?

I dunno about you guys, but those beef/bacon filets are like $5 for 2.5 or 3oz... and I can eat 2-3 of them with veggies on the side. There's never been a time I could/would afford that, but if it's free, who am I to turn up my nose?

And not walking the wrong way through checkpoints in airports... [heckle heckle]

Pretty crazy. You know they weren't sneaking anything in there as it don't take a rocket surgeon to get something past the winners at the booths.

Heck the airline gave my wife and her friend both boarding passes with my wife's name on them and the TSA officer verifying ids missed it when my wife's friend handed them her id and my wife's boarding pass. On another flight I was found with a single round of ammo, troubling thing was that I had gone on 6 trips with that bag as a carry on after I had used it for a range bag (they and I had missed the round 11 times going through security)

I just don't fly.

It makes my arms tired.

Tricky.

Sort of off topic but 'sorta' along the same topic : At my job, we throw away tons of products each year that have virtually nothing wrong with them.
For example, one that comes to mind was this tool box :

http://images.lowes.com/product/6936...6945601283.jpg

Do you know what was wrong with it ?

Get this ... there is a built in radio within the tool chest. The customer returned it because the antenna broke.
( a typical radio antenna attached to the back with four screws. )

Rather than have the company ship a new antenna, our genius bosses decided to get store credit on the chest. Since the cost of shipping the chest ( $ 1898 ) back to the merchant would have been greater than the cost of scrapping it, it was destroyed without so much as grease mark it.
When I walked back to receiving, the guys were smashing it with a hammer and spray painting it. Lowe's policy is that a product that is still good has to be destroyed so that it can not be used again. This is to prevent any underhand theft.

Such a shame what greed has done, that it has to come to this.

I called corporate about the matter, and the environmental department manager there seemed genuinely concerned about it. As he pointed out, there is also a 'fridge built into the chest that should have been drained of gasses before disposal.

In years past, as I have opened the compactor, I have seen all sorts of horrible things that have been thrown away, such as mowers filled with gas, paints, muriatic acid, .... I have to wonder how many times that people can do something like that without starting a fire !!

Yet another thing that comes to mind was an entire truckload of roses that came in. They were marked wrong and thrown away only hours after arrival .

If someone is scheduled wrong and the plants go a few days without water they go into the dumpster.

My grandfather used to work for Alcoa. He recalled them disposing of all sorts of things in to the bay, such as vehicles filled with gas and oil, batteries, poisons ... you name it.

It's no wonder that Calhoun County was rated as the most toxic place in America just a few years back. ( And my parents grew up drinking that water ..... say .....I wonder if that s why I'm so crazy ! )

O.K. back on topic. Sorry Frankie

I've always wanted one of those boxes... it's one of my dreams of grandeur, though. I know I'll never need it, but why the hell not?

As for the idiots beating on it, at least it helped them to not go beat on someone else after work... *wink*.

That's... just... heartbreaking! :(

P.S. People are stupid.

I like your attempt to quantify the risk, but some of your assumptions are incorrect. The risk of food poisoning is much higher than you think. This Wiki article puts it at 30% of the population each year, even in industrialized countries. 76 million cases in the USA every year, resulting in 325,000 hospitalizations and 5000 deaths. 2.1 million deaths worldwide in 2000. Those are frighteningly high figures. Peter and Christ and Frank are either incredibly lucky, remarkably careful, remarkably tough, or are under-reporting their illnesses - likely attributing food poisoning to "flu" or indigestion.

I didn't link most food poisoning to commercially packaged food, because most of it comes from mishandling food in the home.