Maybe it comes from a long history of being a miserly, tightfisted kind of gal (when I was kid, I would let my parents hold onto my $1 allowance, then wait until I could collect a massive sum), but I have absolutely no problem eating garbage.

That's right. I eat from the trash. From time to time, when the mood strikes.

When I was in college, at the end of every semester, students leave huge piles of crap they didn't want in "Free Piles," and I would gleefully dig through it to find things I could never afford and probably shouldn't have worn -- a ratty Ralph Lauren tank top! Purple velvet DKNY pants! FREE!

After college, when I was doing that whole "I'm going to work part time to follow my dream of being the world's first famous female drummer/comedian" thing, I didn't even have money to spend on a crappy couch from Ikea. So my furniture came from the curb, or the digital equivalent: the Free section of Craigslist. The rush of getting clothes and furniture that I didn't pay for was like a really moral version of shoplifting. Clearly, I was headed down the dark path toward dumpster diving.

But really? It's not so bad.

Click here to read how Emerald scores perfectly good, unspoiled free food.


My first real foray into dumpster diving came more from necessity than from any real desire to muck around in what I imagined would be gigantic metal containers full of slop. I moved in with friends in super-expensive New York City after being fired in my old town with almost no savings, in the midst of a gigantic recession. Fortunately, though, I still had my trusty car. I'd heard about freeganism and the dumpster-diving legends of finding unsullied packaged goods in fancy grocery stores. My ol' beater and the Internet were all I needed to maintain what I had decided to call my "austerity budget."

In the middle of the night, sneaky like bandits, my boyfriend and I drove out to a popular grocery-store chain famous for its cheap eats and prepared snacks, having heard that they were particularly good for dumpster diving. (The store's policy is to double-bag prepackaged food before being put into the dumpster.) We didn't know if what we were doing was legal, we didn't want to bump into any employees, we just wanted food. And food we got.

Like Halloween, But With Brie

That first trip provided us with a glorious bounty that never we'd never quite equal. We returned home with loaves and loaves of bread, mountains of fancy cheese, veggie burgers, vegetarian sushi, and fresh-cut flowers. It was like all the expensive things I would never buy in a store had suddenly been given to me for free -- pastries, gigantic containers of biscotti, spinach dip and eggs. Loads and loads of organic eggs.

Most grocery stores have hard-and-fast rules that food must be tossed after the expiration date, and the dates have to err on the side of caution, so they're rarely spoiled. Or, if the packaging is messed up -- one cracked egg or a crunched corner on a box of crackers -- it often goes right in the trash.

I know what you're thinking -- I'm the grossest person alive. But it was January, and it was actually colder outside than it probably is in your freezer right now, so food-borne illness was not a big concern, especially since I wasn't about to eat any dumpster meat. In fact, the biggest health problem I had came in a rather unexpected form -- after two months of living almost exclusively on packaged foods, sandwiches and cookies, I had gained close to 10 lbs. At the same time I only spent 10 dollars on groceries each month, so that was a compromise I was willing to make ... for a while.

A Dumpster Is a Sometime Thing

Once the weather got warmer outside, I became more wary of having to eat food that had been sitting around unrefrigerated all day, and I thankfully found myself getting more work so that eating garbage food was no longer that attractive an option. Throughout the year, my BF has expressed a nostalgic desire to go back out there and take a peek, to relive the thrill of finding a bag full of brie, or boxes of mostly-good clementines. It's a desire to which I have always replied something along the lines of "It's 92 degrees outside, imagine how hot it is in that steel container? Do you want to die of food poisoning?"

Still, the weather is getting colder outside, and as I'm sitting at my free-from-Craigslist desk, typing on my hand-me-down computer, I look over at myself in the slightly cracked mirror I found on the sidewalk, and I think, Free waffles would be great for brunch this weekend. I wonder what's in the dumpster. Soon. So soon.

Emerald Catron is a frequent Lemondrop contributor who lives in New York. She does not advocate dumpster diving, knife fighting, writing on drunk passed-out friends and other things that are fun but can get you in legal trouble.