For dumpster divers, one man’s trash is another man’s dinner.
Studio art junior Mick Tresemer said he goes dumpster diving for food about twice a week.
“I feel better because I’m not spending money, and I’m not hurting the earth,” Tresemer said.
He has been diving for about a year and has gone more frequently starting last semester. His roommates introduced him to the practice, he said.
“I lived with people that did it and I was a little sketched out at first but then I finally went out with them and ended up with a lot of non-perishable food, like granola bars," Tresemer said. It got me hooked and it got me thinking about how much money gets thrown away.”
Tresemer said he feels a lot of good food is simply tossed out and that he often finds bread, produce and even dairy products, but sometimes he discovers rarer items.
"The best thing I ever found was two full cases of Bagel Bites that were still frozen. They lasted for weeks,” Tresemer said.
When Tresemer goes dumpster diving, he usually searches with one or two friends and that their adventures hardly do any harm to the environment, he said.
“It makes a very low impact," he said. "First, we ride our bikes there. And secondly, companies don’t have to produce any more food for us. And there’s no extra packaging or manufacturing."
And in addition to the low impact, Tresemer, who described himself as a bit “anti-economy,” said a huge benefit of dumpster diving is not spending money.
“It’s great to sit down to a meal and say, ‘I didn’t pay for any of this,’” he said.
Tresemer said on a recent trip to Austin, Texas, he noticed a lot of people dumpster diving.
“I saw tons of people dumpstering down there – everything from Jimmy John’s to this bakery that had tons of cookie dough," Tresemer said. "We ended up making about seven batches of cookies.”
But Tresemer doesn’t just go diving for food – he said he goes to dumpsters in construction sites to look for materials for his art instead of going to a hardware store.
He also doesn’t always eat all of his finds himself, sometimes serving friends without their prior knowledge.
“I usually don’t tell [my friends] until after they’ve eaten it,” Tresemer said.
No one has gotten sick or thrown up from food that he has given them, and sometimes his friends give him weird looks but that sometimes others will get used to the idea, Tresemer said.
Danny Terlip, electrical engineering senior, is a friend of Tresemer’s who also goes dumpster diving.
“I dumpster dive to reduce my impact on the planet because the stuff I take out of the dumpster isn’t part of the system anymore,” Terlip said. “If I can feed myself on stuff that’s been taken out of the equation that was going to a landfill anyway, then it’s out of the whole consumerism picture.”
Terlip said he first became interested in dumpster diving out of curiosity.
“I worked at a grocery store and I saw what was thrown away,” Terlip said.
While some people may think that diving for food is gross, it’s also not quite what people may think, he said.
“Most of the stuff we find is still in the box in the package," Terlip said. It’s not like we’re eating trash infected with maggots."
Andrew Custis, multidisciplinary studies senior, said he hasn’t been dumpster diving in a while, but that he used to go every two to three weeks.
“It’s an adventure every time,” Custis said.
Custis said dumpster diving is definitely hit-or-miss.
“Sometimes you wouldn’t find anything, but you never know until you go,” he said.
Like Tresemer, Custis said he had to warm up to the idea of dumpster diving before he went the first time, and that reactions from friends were similar.
“At first, some [of my friends] thought that it was disgusting but then some of them started doing it later,” Custis said.
Dumpster diving is allowed in most places, but some areas post signs discouraging the practice.
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Bubba 2 years, 10 months ago
Just don't go dumpster-diving for Co-Eds on Campus Corner at 2:30 a.m. Someday an aspiring filmmaker will document the zombie-like horror. "Dump of the Dead"?
-Bubba