Yesterday we got the bug to clean up our room and get rid of some of the piles of papers and such that had collected over the last few months. I am pretty big on creating piles of crap - receipts, fliers, magazines, various notes, paystubs, etc. - but I am not so big on cleaning them up. The rain outside facilitated our cleaning rampage, and I even had time to roll up a few dollars in loose change.

In the afternoon the weather turned, and we decided to “blow off some stink” and take a walk to the train bridge. The rain had been pretty intense so the massively polluted Burnt Mill Creek was pretty high.

On the walk to the bridge, Kristin grabbed some honeysuckle and started eating the nectar. It is really good, but you don’t get a lot out of it.

You basically just pick the flower off the branch and pull out the filaments.

When the filament comes out of the flower, a drop of nectar will form at the base.

Among other uses, honeysuckle vines make strong cordage.

Along the walk to the bridge there are a huge number of mulberry trees, all hybridized into various shades and tastes. We found red, black, pink and white, some tasty and some not so tasty and others that we pretty gross. I thought the white mulberry had the best taste, but a few of the trees we sampled had no flavor at all.

Here is a white mulberry ready to pick -

Me picking black mulberries, sporting a well-worn AK Press t-shirt -

You can see all the various shades and sizes of the ripe berries in the sum total of our picking -

Unripe mulberries are hallucinogenic. With the hallucinations come severe nausea and cramps, so it might not be the best idea to run out and get some unripe fruit. Also, large amounts of ripe fruit can act as a laxative so take it easy unless you need that sort of thing.

Our walk brought us into contact with a bunch of creatures, most notable a huge amount of young frogs. The frogs were no bigger than a fingernail, and they were everywhere under our feet.

We also ran into a family of geese near the flooded creek.

While I was taking pictures of the geese, a man came down from this house to ask if we had seen the alligator that had come out with the flood. We hadn’t. He said it was about six feet long and traveling slow.

The next creatures we had to dodge were the fiddler crabs hanging out in the grass near the creek. Since the creek is inter-tidal and brackish, there are usually thousands of these crabs hanging out in the mud. With the flooding there were plenty in the grass and puddles as well.

And of course the flooding also brings out the record of human progress. Plastic bottles, Styrofoam to-go food containers and plenty of basketballs rush towards the ocean at low tide and back into the neighborhoods at high tide. The trash never really makes it anywhere as it builds up into floating rafts of debris or settles into the mud on the sides of the creek.

This is our legacy. If you contributed (and we all have at some point), thank you for helping build this pile of shit. If you need a reminder of why you should use refillable containers, why you should use the recycle bin or simply use a garbage can, then just come back and look at this picture…

Most food that is found in the trash needs to be dug out from underneath the “real” trash. Things like wax boxes, plastic pallet wrapping, random papers and empty grocery bags; wire, coffee filters, soda cans. The good stuff is sometimes all neatly stashed in a spent broccoli box or packed in an empty onion sack, but this is rarely the case. Usually you have to dig. The biggest turnoff to digging is that you have to physically get inside the container and throw things around like a crazy person.

And yes, these big steel boxes stink. This can deter some people and make them think that it is the food itself that is the problem. The problem is actually that these dumpsters never (or rarely) get washed or steam cleaned, so the crap that sticks to the walls as the containers are dumped rots while “fresh” trash is piled in. Since the dumpsters are emptied a few times a week, encountering something that is really foul is pretty rare.

All that to say that I think that March 1st will be the official start of waste stream month, four full weeks of eating completely free. I’ll be in the trash more often than usual, and, since Lynn and Selena are willing to participate over at Trashy Gourmet, the results of the experiment might be different from last time around. I have been practicing coming up with some recipes, but I think that the staple for the month will be Everything and Anything Soup. Currently bubbling on the stove is a pot of yellow squash, celery, kale, tomato, broccoli, spring onions and bok choy taken from the latest round of scavenging.

Add to that a couple toasted bagels and some “expired” goat butter and were good for a lunch/dinner cycle for a few days. And don’t forget the dessert…

I’m picking March 1st because it will give me some time for my hand to recover from cutting it on the edge of a dumpster as I was about to jump in.

It doesn’t hurt as bad as it did. I just need to remember to wear gloves…

Sometimes when I find food in the dumpster I get really irritated. That usually happens after I get really excited.

Tonight I came upon an entire case of unblemished cauliflower - eleven heads of gleaming white goodness still in the box - thrown away in the trash at a store that shall go nameless. I was on my bike, so I could only carry eight heads in my basket. This was my first stop and already I was full… I had to pass up the potatoes, squash, cabbage, onions, garlic, mushrooms and tomatoes. I couldn’t find any good reason why the cauliflower was thrown away. A rare, but not unheard of find.

The cauliflower will make a great soup and also provide a reason to dust off the pressure canner in order to preserve most of the goodness for later eating.

The next stop was the bagel/donut chain that has the awesome policy of bagging their coffee grounds with their end-of-the-day food. Finding a good bag can take a bit of digging, but I found a great stash of bagels. I was in a hurry and didn’t notice the salt bagels until I got home. Salt bagels are the grossest thing ever made. This is weird coming from me since my favorite bagel is the Everything, which has a lot of salt on it.

I packed two grocery bags full of bagels, put one in my backpack and strapped one to the top of the cauliflower in my bike basket.

Nestled among the salt bagels were a few garlic, a few cranberry, a few Everything, a few whole grain…a sampling of all the greats. This is a taste of the daily waste in my city, enough to feed myself and several others for a week. With a couple more bikes with baskets, a small group could find enough food in a few hours to feed themselves for a month and not spend a cent on fuel.

This brings to mind another round of Waste Stream Week, or maybe we could go for Waste Stream Month. How about I get a few other bloggers to do this with me this time? Who wants in?

As part of the Really Really Free Market last Sunday, there was a return of the Wilmington version of Food Not Bombs.

The purpose of FNB is to divert food that would otherwise go to waste into the hands (and mouths) of hungry people. So we diverted some food. And we ate a bunch of donuts.

I went dumpstering with Lynn and two strangers (to me anyway). We drove to a number of places, grabbing bagfuls of stuff here and there. There was no real agenda…just find good food. We drove fast and talked very little.

We came back with a pretty good assortment of produce, donuts and bagels. Lots of various colored peppers and many, many pound of potatoes. Yeah, seventy pounds of potatoes is considered “many, many”, right?

We also found a bunch of squash, cucumbers and broccoli. Potato chopping goes on in the backgound.

Lots of radishes and cauliflower and onions…

A huge head of collards amongst the bags of donuts…

When it all comes back, there is plenty of prep work - washing, cutting, mixing, cooking. The fruit we found was mixed into two giant bowls of fruit salad. Watermelons, mangoes, apples, oranges, bananas, limes, cantaloupes, and pears all sharing the same space.

The soup had so many vegetables that I lost count as I washed them. Eggplant, cauliflower, broccoli, tomato, squash, kale, mushrooms, scallions, sweet potatoes, peppers. This was the epitome of Food Not Bombs soup…anything goes as long as it is a veggie.

Everyone took a turn on the giant potato masher.

At the end of the night we had twenty pounds of mashed potatoes, two bowls of fruit salad, six quarts of steamed collards, a massive pot of soup, two bags of donuts, and a bag of bagels. With this we fed about thirty people. Total cost - $0.00

As friends and strangers come together to make food to serve to hungry folks, all you can think about is that “this is community building”. No money exchanged, no arguments about who is in charge of what, no issues about food origins. This is Food Not Bombs.