Quite by accident, I found the essay
On Dumpster Diving by Lars Eighner on the pages of Seagull magazine. The first lines of it captured my interest considerably, for as I hadnever read about dumpster diving or scavenging before.
On Dumpster Diving is a piece of large Eighner’s work called
Travels with Lizbeth
(1993), which was based on his ownexperience of homelessness.The author engages me by telling the origin and meaning of the term Dumpster Diver
, presenting his survival guide with specified rules and regulations. Dumpster is a trademark of garbage loading onto trucks system. Dumpster diving involves persons voluntarily climbinginto rubbish bins (dumpsters) to find valuables or simply useful items, including food andused clothing. Eighner writes that the life of a beggar traveling without any money opened hiseyes to the fact that all those containers with waste are real “supermarkets” for the poor, andthey are not only a source of survival, but also a depositary of high-quality and diverse food.Anyhow, there is a risk in eating such findings. According to Eighner’s experience, takingfood out of dumpsters should involve three simple principles: “using the senses and commonsense to evaluate the condition of the found materials, knowing the Dumpsters of a given areaand checking them regularly, and seeking always to answer the question, “Why was thisdiscarded?” Narrator advises to avoid such foods as game, poultry, pork, and egg-basedmeals. Soft drinks testing should be based on their fizzing vigorously. Being a scavenger, onehas to notice the least signs of visible contaminates. Notwithstanding the scavenger has noindemnity of self- intoxication. Later on Lars tells about “a predictable series of stages a Surname 2 person goes through in learning to scavenge,” in which disgust at the beginning gives way toindiscriminate acquiring of the