Features

With food prices sky rocketing, Oscar the Grouch gives dumpster diving a try.
People are getting hungrier. It’s becoming more difficult to walk into a supermarket and buy food, and alternatives are becoming more attractive. At the OUSA Food Bank, they’ve noticed a recent upswing in students asking for food. This could be for a few reasons, explains Rosalind, a Student Support Services Employee: “Food prices, more students knowing about it, even the fact that students spend their money on other things”. The latest food price index shows an increase in food prices of 5.5% in the last year, higher than the increases in student loan living costs and the minimum wage. The increases are being felt. The beloved $3 lunch, which has astonished generations of second years with its price and quality compared to hall food, has recently had to start charging an extra dollar for dessert.
 

Students aren’t the only ones feeling the food pinch. As New Zealand goes crazy over KFC’s latest piece of fried obesity, the Double Down, the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations estimates 925 million people suffer from chronic hunger worldwide. This has multiple causes including global warming (increased drought) and attempts to cure it (using crops for biofuels) and the recession and what caused it (financial speculation in food markets has caused price increases).

 
While much has been made of the amount of people dying of obesity while so many go hungry, equally paradoxical is the quantity of food we throw out. It has been recently reported that Kiwi households throw out around $750 million worth of uneaten food every year.
 

So if households throw out a lot of food, do supermarkets and food suppliers do so as well? Greg Roberts, the manager of Gardens New World, insists there are alternatives to throwing food away. “Obviously you have to be proactive and throw it out before it goes off, but in our produce section we have a deal so that any left over food goes to feed animals.” Luke Schepen, speaking for Progressive Enterprises, gives the same view: “Obviously we’d rather sell food than throw it out. So stores will mark down prices as they reach the best-before date.” They also have deals with charities such as the Salvation Amy.

 
This is in contrast with anecdotes from people who have another alternative to buying food: dumpster diving. My favourite story is of a bunch of students who threw a party when they found one full of cask wine. So with two conflicting views, our only option is to check for ourselves.
 

The challenge
With a crack team of four eager students, we’re ready to check how much food supermarkets really throw away. Starting at 10pm, we’re going to go and hit the dumpster of every supermarket we can think of, and see how much goodies we can find. “The Don” (a.k.a. our getaway driver) has classily decided to wear a suit: the rest of us are in black jeans, jackets and balaclavas, partly to feel cool, partly to protect ourselves from dumpster grunge and partly because we don’t know if these supermarkets will have cameras to identify us.
 

Roslyn New World is almost laughably simple. They’ve got a couple of dumpsters on the edge of their car park, with getaways on all sides including the car park exit just next to them. They’re also unlocked. We throw back the lids and look in – both of them just seem to have cardboard boxes. This is fine for one of them, which is labelled as being for cardboard only, but for the other it seems a bit odd. Not wanting to give up, I pull back some of the boxes, and bingo! We have a bag of bagels. Digging further I see a couple of lettuces and pull them out. Then we get serious: I jump entirely into the dumpster, and a bit of digging realises more bagels, more lettuce, several bags of beans and a box of what looks like broccoli. Happy with what we’ve found, we run back to the car and toss them in the back. I make sure we close up the dumpster lids to be polite.
 

Just up the road is Fresh Choice. This looks a bit scarier. The dumpsters are lit, and it looks like there is a camera nearby. There is also a car parked outside the supermarket, and it looks like it belongs to a security guard. The dumpsters are unlocked, but a quick glance in them shows them to be mostly empty. On the way out we see a few extra bins, and this time the glance reveals a whole lot of meat bones in one, and meat scraps in the other, including a pig snout. It’s gross and unappetizing, so we leave it where it is.

 
Coupland’s, everyone’s favourite bakery, is next. It’s a bit more public, with houses around and right next to the highway. The dumpster is barred this time, so the only option is to lift them slightly and put my skinny arm in. I manage to pull out one pie and one bacon bap.
 

Gardens New World is the biggest challenge yet. It has fences on all sides, and there’s a large van parked at one entrance, and we can’t tell if there are any people in it. It’s also heavily lit. We climb one fence, onto some crates and onto the ground next to the dumpster. There’s music coming from inside – hopefully no one hears us. True to Greg’s word, there’s no food in the dumpster. However, in racks beside the door to the place are a several dozen loaves of bread and some bags of English muffins. We check the best-before date. It’s two days away; they must be due to go on shelf tomorrow. Although I love English muffins, we opt not to take them and jump back over the fence.

 
Centre City New World is genuinely intimidating. The dumpster is in a dark alleyway, with walls on three sides, and a gate to the street with some quite threatening spikes on top. However, there’s a large gap between the gate and the ground, enough to crawl under. Rookie error. Unfortunately the dumpster is locked, and also looks fairly unfruitful from what we can see. No joy.
 

After a brief and uneventful glance around Pak ‘n’ Save, we return to Countdown for our final effort. Thanks to some industry knowledge we know they have people shelving until 3am, so they might as well still be open. We walk up to their dumpster, which is well lit and (we think) monitored by camera. Fortunately the dumpster isn’t locked, and we lift the lid slightly, keeping quiet. At first it looks empty, but then I see a full bag of potatoes in one corner. I jump in, grab it and pass it out, and then go for a few more potatoes on the bottom of the dumpster. Problem: there are people coming from the supermarket. Taking drastic action, my comrades close the lid of the dumpster with me in it, so I’m crouched in the dark with an armful of potatoes, not sure if we’re about to get busted. After a few moments the lid is opened and I can pull myself out, with potatoes and an extra carrot I found for good measure.

 
Countdown has a couple more dumpsters out the back, which we briefly check but again find them locked. It’s now 1am, and we decide to end our mission there.

 
The results:
Although most of the dumpsters didn’t yield much, and we didn’t find any wine, it was still a reasonably fruitful night. We finished with 2 bags of bagels, 1 bag of potatoes, 5 bags of green beans, 2 lettuces, a big bunch of silver beet, 5 heads of broccoli, 1 loaf of bread, 1 carrot, 1 banana, 1 bap and one pie. That should help keep us healthy for a while. We’re especially happy with the bagels and beans, which aren’t things usually on our shopping list.
 

These are the basic lessons we learned for future dives:
1) Roslyn New World was definitely the best place to go. Security was lax and it had a lot of food. Gardens, Countdown and Roslyn Fresh Choice also might have potential, but didn’t have much when we went out.
2) We chose to go on a Sunday night, which could be the worst time, as supermarkets don’t get new stock during the weekend. Friday may be the best yield, although during the week is likely to be best on aggregate as people won’t be out then. It’s hard to believe the dumpsters would usually not have food in them, considering the multiple security efforts some supermarkets put in.
3) Rubber gloves are also a good idea, as dumpsters don’t only have food in them.
 

Disclaimer: Dumpster diving is illegal, and if you do get caught, you can be prosecuted. Critic in no way condones or endorses breaking the law, and encourages students to visit the OUSA Food Bank instead of resorting to illegal activity.