Food reclaimed from the trash, from Alex Mallis's film Spoils.
Last month we featured an article on foraging in Prospect Park for food (read: living like a rabbit) that casually besmirched Dumpster diving as an inferior means of procuring free eats. If trying to determine which berries and fungi in the wild won’t seriously disrupt your digestive system or poison you is a little too much work (hey, it worked for the guy from Into the Wild, right?), then maybe selecting the edible parts of pre-screened throwaways may be the way to go.
Dumpster diving is nothing new, particularly for fans of counter-culture literature from the 60’s and 70’s. Steal This Book by Abbie Hoffman endorses it among other survival skills for “Amerika,” but filmmaker and inveterate Dumpster diver Alex Mallis has repackaged diving as a different sort of political act in his new film, Spoils: Extraordinary Harvest. Read the rest of this entry »
Dealing with Coke can pay off
If you’ve ever spent your working hours navigating a gray cubicle maze or strangling yourself with clothing hangars at a retail job, just about anything seems like a valid career alternative. Even, we’ll admit to daydreaming, joining those guys who pick bottles and cans out of your apartment trash every morning. Fresh air! Exercise! The thrill of the hunt! Maybe it’s a little messy, but we had to look at dead bodies at our last newspaper job, and you can’t turn corpses into nickels. Walking to work one day, the two of us wondered whether those humble trash pickers are really laughing their way back to McMansions in Jersey. So we decided to find out for ourselves. Read the rest of this entry »
A TJ's Dumpster haul (bag included).
Thanksgiving’s upon us, and we can practically taste the stale-bread stuffing and just-expired eggnog. You too can learn how to turn refuse into a festive holiday meal by joining the Freegans of NYC tomorrow (Wednesday, Nov. 25), for their guided tour of borough’s most fruitful bins. You’ll collect some forsaken feastables and learn the best ways and means of salvaging trash treasures. Ever seen those darkly-dressed, bicycled people loitering in front of Trader Joe’s around closing? That could be you!
Not all Freegans look the Dumpster-diving part (some are quite well-dressed, indeed, coming from work and all). But all take the ideals of frugal living and elevate them to a life-philosophy. Followers of the faith refuse to spend money (either on anything or just on food) in protest of consumerism, current means of production, or simply out of necessity. Read the rest of this entry »
Photo by Stefan Tonio
I never really decided to spend only $8,000 in one year—it just sort of happened. I didn’t even realize the extent of my thrift until tallying up my income on the eve of March 15. When you take the amount of money I brought home (roughly $13,000) and subtract the amount I had thrown to the black void that is private student loans (roughly $5,000), combined with the fact that both my checking and my savings accounts were more or less empty on January 1, it was pretty simple math. Read the rest of this entry »
New York artist Justin Gignac's trash is also his treasure.
File this under “I can’t believe I didn’t think of this first, how do I rip it off?” In the tradition of turning cat hair into jewelry and other sustainable craft ventures, New York artist Justin Gignac has introduced the ultimate recycled craft: garbage. Customers can purchase a transparent, sealed cube of bona fide New York garbage — labeled, naturally as sculpture. While he started selling them streetside for $10 nearly a decade ago, they now go for five to ten times as much and ship all around the world. Read the rest of this entry »
Food reclaimed from the trash, from Alex Mallis's film Spoils.
Last month we featured an article on foraging in Prospect Park for food (read: living like a rabbit) that casually besmirched Dumpster diving as an inferior means of procuring free eats. If trying to determine which berries and fungi in the wild won’t seriously disrupt your digestive system or poison you is a little too much work (hey, it worked for the guy from Into the Wild, right?), then maybe selecting the edible parts of pre-screened throwaways may be the way to go.
Dumpster diving is nothing new, particularly for fans of counter-culture literature from the 60’s and 70’s. Steal This Book by Abbie Hoffman endorses it among other survival skills for “Amerika,” but filmmaker and inveterate Dumpster diver Alex Mallis has repackaged diving as a different sort of political act in his new film, Spoils: Extraordinary Harvest. Read the rest of this entry »
Dealing with Coke can pay off
If you’ve ever spent your working hours navigating a gray cubicle maze or strangling yourself with clothing hangars at a retail job, just about anything seems like a valid career alternative. Even, we’ll admit to daydreaming, joining those guys who pick bottles and cans out of your apartment trash every morning. Fresh air! Exercise! The thrill of the hunt! Maybe it’s a little messy, but we had to look at dead bodies at our last newspaper job, and you can’t turn corpses into nickels. Walking to work one day, the two of us wondered whether those humble trash pickers are really laughing their way back to McMansions in Jersey. So we decided to find out for ourselves. Read the rest of this entry »
A TJ's Dumpster haul (bag included).
Thanksgiving’s upon us, and we can practically taste the stale-bread stuffing and just-expired eggnog. You too can learn how to turn refuse into a festive holiday meal by joining the Freegans of NYC tomorrow (Wednesday, Nov. 25), for their guided tour of borough’s most fruitful bins. You’ll collect some forsaken feastables and learn the best ways and means of salvaging trash treasures. Ever seen those darkly-dressed, bicycled people loitering in front of Trader Joe’s around closing? That could be you!
Not all Freegans look the Dumpster-diving part (some are quite well-dressed, indeed, coming from work and all). But all take the ideals of frugal living and elevate them to a life-philosophy. Followers of the faith refuse to spend money (either on anything or just on food) in protest of consumerism, current means of production, or simply out of necessity. Read the rest of this entry »
Photo by Stefan Tonio
I never really decided to spend only $8,000 in one year—it just sort of happened. I didn’t even realize the extent of my thrift until tallying up my income on the eve of March 15. When you take the amount of money I brought home (roughly $13,000) and subtract the amount I had thrown to the black void that is private student loans (roughly $5,000), combined with the fact that both my checking and my savings accounts were more or less empty on January 1, it was pretty simple math. Read the rest of this entry »
