Living off the land
April 2025's challenge
I’m trying out a new type of post: my reflections on a completed 30-day challenge, still under 500 words. Let me know what you think?
For the last year, I’ve been experimenting with dumpster diving as part of my Gandhian lifestyle. It’s not to salvage material possessions—I do it almost exclusively for food. The US wastes nearly 40% of the food it produces, so I think Gandhi would approve of my stepping in at the last minute to save still-edible food from a landfill.
The challenge
What would it be like to “live off the land” and subsist exclusively on what I could scavenge? I challenged myself to do that for April. The timing was intended to increase the difficulty; I was visiting New England, far away from North Carolina and my regular grocery store route. The three basic categories of finds are:
damaged package (crushed corners, punctured, or something spilled on it);
past “XXX by” date (food can’t read a calendar); and
flawed sets (think egg cartons and bags of fruits and vegetables).
So much food
There were a few rough days in Massachusetts early on, where most chain stores had inaccessible trash compactors, but I soon got my bearings. After two weeks with friends (and kitchens), I spent a week driving back, really living off the land. Anything to be cooked was rejected and anything cold had a limited life. Still, there was so much food overall—I hope another dumpster diver collected from the cases of cheeses and other refrigerated products I found in Pennsylvania’s pre-dawn hours.
Arriving home to my kitchen, my cooking style was cramped for days without any butter. The problem was solved after finding three pounds of “cook now” bacon, its collected drippings good for weeks of frying steak and eggs. Regardless, once May arrived I promptly purchased a $4 pound of butter.
What I learned
This challenge stripped me of my role as an American consumer and made me totally subservient to the vagaries of what the land offered, much like our hunter–gatherer ancestors. Finding and preparing my own food took additional time, but the ability to do so and the resulting surplus strengthened my mindset of abundance.
What’s next
I’ve been doing various challenges for seven years, and I think I’d like to write down some short stories. In fact, the years of vegetarian life in North Carolina resulted from one of the first experiments, until “freegan” food displaced it. What would Gandhi think of the required moral balancing? That’s another story; I’ll still make new posts about his life and lessons and link to old ones, like today’s date in 1893, when young Gandhi got an education in racial discrimination.
Discussion question: Can you think of a time you wasted a lot of food?