gateway to dumpster diving

Every semester, I help the GEO out with the TA orientation- it's where I joined the union, and I kind of believe it's the only place it makes sense to recruit new members. If people are going to join and be active, they're probably going to do it right away.

And on the first two days of the TA orientation, the university hands out boxed lunches to the TAs. Really nice boxed lunches, with little dishes of pasta salad to accompany the main sandwich, dessert, breadsticks, apple pieces, etc. Too big, really, for most people. They come in little rectangular white boxes.

With hundreds of TAs eating all in the same place, the usual classroom trash cans aren't equipped to handle all those rectangular boxes. So the TAs stacked them up on top of the trash cans. Not even IN the garbage! I started opening the boxes and discovered that almost every person had thrown SOMETHING away! And most of the food was in sealed packages inside white paper boxes. There was no wetness or grossness, because each person had carefully put the food back in the box before stacking it on top of the trash can.

Really, it would be a sin to throw away all that perfectly good food when there are starving children in the world.

I netted two pasta salads, two cookies, three bags of apple slices, and a large handful each of mini Snickers bars, breadsticks, and little containers of peanut butter. Oh, and a Welsh rarebit sandwich that was still wrapped and clearly untouched. Those things are good. Actually, the person who pitched the sandwich appeared to have eaten nothing at all out of the lunch except the mini candy bar.

OK, so I might have gone down just a bit below the rim of the trash can, but it was a slippery slope. This is how freegans are born.