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| Freedom From Want- Norman Rockwell |
Some days I want bacon. This time of year is the hardest. My mom makes the best turkey at
Thanksgiving and vegan substitutes have never quite fit the bill. This Thanksgiving I had hummus and a huge salad. My mom assured me that the apple pie was vegetarian. Thursday was not the hard day, though. Friday was.
I work for
Compost SC. It is an organization that I started and we gather food scraps and compostable matter so that we can compost them and then use them for soil amendment, all so that we can grow more food. We call it closing the food loop.
The problem is that, much like a leaky boat, there are a number of other little holes that we do not see in the food loop.
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to be clear, not me or my friend.
I didn't want to embarrass him or the business |
Friday morning, my parents and I went to get coffee. I ordered a bagel and my usual quad-soy-raspberry-no whip- mocha. Even though it is November, it was still warm enough to sit outside and there before going out to look at the world and watch people spend wads of money on Black Friday, was a man drinking coffee. He looked as though he had seen better days. He looked to be holding on to his black coffee to warm his hands as much as his insides as he sipped.
My dad warned me to put the butter on my bagel before it got too cool to melt the butter. I told him that I don't eat butter. I told him that I was working on becoming full vegan. My dad smirked. It was the same smirk that I had seen when I told him that I wanted to play the violin when I was 12. That same violin that sits on the wall of my bedroom and that I rarely pick up and for which I had only recently learned to read music. It was not a smirk that said he thought I was not going to do it. It was that smirk that said, "I know that you are going to do it. It will just take a while."
I was going to do it. It was going to take a while. I became a vegetarian when I was 16. Within a week I felt lighter and better. We were living in San Diego at the time and the options were plentiful. I could find vegetarian options all over the place and my mother was more than willing to cut back on the protein. I was always able to cook for myself and so when it came to making things just for me, it was pretty easy.
I started with just giving up meat, then eggs. Slowly it led to almost all animal products. Every day, it gets easier and easier. Some days, I crave bacon and it is difficult to find things that compare to what momma makes. I miss her mac and cheese and I miss the piles of bacon and sausage. Now, I have been a vegetarian a full third of my life and someday, I will be at a point will I have not eaten meat more than I have eaten meat or animal products. I feel pretty good.
The pats of butter sat on the plate and they did not melt. Every so often, the man who had seen better days would glance at the plate. I could tell that he was interested in the butter, but there was no real context to offer it to him and he seemed like he did not want to ask. If I had offered him a bagel along with it, that would have made sense. Just the butter though, was weird. With a look, I just pointed to it and he nodded. I handed it to him. My dad glanced back and we both watched the man place the wrapped pats of butter in a plastic bag and put them in his pocket.
He continued to look at me in an curious way. It was as though he was looking for a break in the conversation to say something to me. Even when my dad would pause, he didn't say anything; just looked at me. Finally, I returned his gaze and raised my eyebrows.
"You're that girl."
"I am a girl...I don't know if I am THAT girl."
My father, surprised that I was talking to the man behind his back, turned and asked in an imposing baritone, "What girl?"
Miles away from home, literally across the country from my home, I was behaving myself. I am sure my dad was waiting for stories of me passed out, drunk, on the floor of some bar. I was nearly sure there were no stories like that out here about me and I felt safe.
The man went on to say that he sees me all the time by the dumpsters. Rubber boots, sweat pants and hoodie at 3 or 4 in the morning. I am never hiding. I will often just stop, pick up our bucket of compost, throw it in my car and be on my way. The thing that I have always known about where every I am is that someone is always watching.
My dad gave me a look that asked if I still had my pistol and in an unspoken shorthand that we had developed from knowing me all my life, I nodded yes. I told the man yes aloud and felt a mild flash of red to my face as if he was about to ask me for my autograph. How would I sign it? Theresa the garbage girl?
I told him what I do and he asked me if I ever looked in the dumpster. I had to confess that unless I had a really compelling reason to look, I would not. It was never worth the queasy feeling that I would get to look. Every so often, I would see a bucket that was tossed in there. We always needed buckets. I never really looked in or dove.
I told him that I would sometime and he said "Tonight...Tonight is a good night." It was almost conspiratorial, as though he wanted me in a on a heist or something. I looked at my father and he looked at me, neither of us saying a word. I had the same look I imagine I had when I asked about going on my first date only this time it was a homeless man who looked to be in his 50's.
My dad looked at me as if to say, "Go ahead." I told him that I normally go out at 4 and that he and mom would be asleep at the hotel anyway. He gave me his exasperated wave that indicated that he knew that I had already decided.
I was trying to take some time off because my parents were in town. It was my first Thanksgiving not in California and if I could not be home then I thought I was grown up enough to invite my parents out here to South Carolina. To watch my mother putter about in a kitchen that was far too small and my dad constantly updating scores on his laptop from games in sports I had no idea about was a bit strange but we, for the first time, shared some bottles of wine and ate, mostly standing up.
Next year, it will be at my brother's house, with his new wife and their new child in Oregon, but this one was all mine and apparently, I had accepted a date from a homeless man and was going to spend a portion of it with him, dumpster diving.
Most of the time when I go out on these missions it is relatively solitary. Some days I will have help from other volunteers who are in the area. Just for some company as I go from place to place like a bee picking up pollen and nectar only this case, it is garbage.
It was freezing. Literally. The temperature was about 25 degrees and it felt like I could feel my breath freezing every time I inhaled and it made me cough a little. We met at a local supermarket and he directed me to park at the side, out of sight. I brought him a coffee just in case and I sipped tea. The temptation to pour it on me just to heat up was almost unbearable.
He looked around crouched behind a bush and through to the corral that held the dumpster. It was piled high with trash and nearly overflowing. In the corral were waxed boxes that once held produce. In the corner was a turkey. It was a whole wrapped turkey and perhaps something happened to it, but regardless there it was, wasted.
He blew into his hands and rubbed them together. Then he pulled the door open. Inside were boxes and in those boxes were lots and lots of food. There were cakes and cupcakes, brownies and sweets of all kinds.
The dumpster was filled with boxes and boxes of food. He said it was like this every holiday and that on regular days it was still pretty full. There were expiration stickers on each item that indicated the date. For most, they expired that day and not even really expired, but were just not sold. He took a bite of one many sandwiches and had a look on his face like he had not eaten in days. I asked him what kind it was and he said it didn't matter. He had not been starving he had just gotten past the point where he cared or was concerned about the taste of thing. His life had become about sustenance. The particular store we were outside of (I will not mention the name) was kind of a specialty place. They do not donate their compostables to us so I was not familiar with the outside. I went inside it nearly once a week or so for random things.
We ducked every time there was a passing car thinking that it might be the police. I began to wonder what that would look like. I wondered what my parents would say if they had to bail me out in the morning. Whether my father, a decorated military lawyer, would make a big deal about his little girl getting arrested for going through a dumpster full of wasted food. He would have a fit but somewhere in the back of his mind he would have loved it. Not only were they throwing it out, but they were going after people who were going to get it? I can understand the more conservative narratives. There are laws. People could get sick from eating something that was tainted. Or, something could happen to them while they were diving. Or, and this is pure devil's advocate here, they could see it simply as people would just wait to go through the dumpster at night rather than shop in the store. That is a far reach.
This was one of the leaks in the boat of the food loop. Not only was food being wasted, but animals had given their lives and died so that sandwiches and wraps could be made and disposed of when the concoctions we had made with their flesh was no longer appetizing through the unrecyclable plastics they were wrapped in. A whole turkey lay rotting in the corner, bound for the landfill.
My new friend loaded a duffle bag full of food. I asked him about the turkey and he said that there may or may not have been a reason it was tossed and it was too dangerous to take. Cooking it would have been a hassle in his living conditions anyway so he left it. We left the box full of beef and of course the box full of sushi and fish that had just hours earlier graced the shelves inside. The boxes and wraps of some of the things that he had taken simply said "Best By 11/28" as if as soon as the front door of the store was locked and the last customer was gone, the food went bad.
I began to wonder if I had any right not to eat anything with so much going to waste. Did I have the right to be picky when others are starving? It was their food and their right to do with it what they wished. I had always had a problem working in food service. I could not rectify people throwing out food that was good and that others would never get a chance to taste. High end, quality, artisanal were not a lot of words used in shelters I imagine. I could not bring myself to do it. At the end of the night just toss all that food.
There were boxes full of eggs and empty bottles of milk that had likely been poured down the drain. My friend found the remnant cans of a six pack of great beer. It seems that two of the cans had been crushed and opened so they threw the rest out.
There are a lot of layers to this whole thing but the overall thing that stuck with me is the notion that there are people starving, food being wasted, and those like myself who do not think that an animal should have to die to feed anyone. Mores or taste, it is all still there. Why didn't they take it to a shelter? Why didn't they at least compost the veggies?
I met with my parents a few hours later and I told them what I had seen. We took a drive around the city and we drank coffee and watched the sun rise together. They were renting a car and driving to Atlanta for the day to fly back to California. Before they left, I looked at my father and asked him what I should do. I wondered, what did all mean.
"That is hard to say, but you will figure it out."
"Will I?"
He looked at me and he smirked. That smirk that said, "I know that you are going to do it, it will just take a while."
It was a hard day for me as a vegetarian. I wondered if my vegetarianism is a luxury and though it is something that I consider, it is not the primary reason for me writing this. If I were homeless and hungry would still be a vegetarian? There were piles of food in there, but nothing with any protein. Some of the wraps had hummus in them and were stamped proudly as "vegan", and yes, I took a bite from one and added the remnants to the compost bin, but if I were on the street, the chances of coming across something like were few and far between.
I write this primarily because I have always been one of those people who wonders how others live and now that I have that peek I wonder more. I wanted to eat a sandwich with him out of solidarity. I wanted to find the animal that had given its life for that food and tell him or her that they did not die in vain and that if nothing else, some random girl somewhere took a bite out of respect (?) just to keep you from going into a landfill somewhere. I lost my appetite not because there was flesh, but more because it was going to waste. I lost my appetite because I was not hungry enough. This is something that it is going to take me a little while to wrap my head around.
The other day, one of our members finished working with some oyster mushrooms. If you do not know, it is a tedious and time consuming process. Spores and mycelium have to be cultivated and watched. Mold has to be battled and we have to worry about substrates, etc. Then one day...you have mushrooms. Lots of things are popping out of our gardens and it is great that a lot of people are going to be getting some really great food.
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