Scavenging also includes gleaning scrap lumber from neighboring demolition projects, concrete pieces (urbanite), old greenhouse plastic, bamboo, hay twine, nails, and irrigation drip tape. Combine all those elements and you get a really decent and basic greenhouse.

The process started with a bamboo harvest – this ingredient was necessary for putting together the top framing as well as the side ribs.

The ends of the greenhouse were built with downed cedar trees that we pulled out of the woods as well as scrap lumber from a demolition up the road from us.  There were also a few pieces from a recent gutting of a few rooms in our house.

The plastic came from an organic farm near the NC coast as did the drip tape that was used to staple through and hold the plastic to the framing.

Photo from Danielle

Total cost for this greenhouse (not including labor of course) is somewhere between $5 and $15 depending on who you ask.  I think the staples were at least $4 for the box, but calculating how many nails were purchased versus how many were scavenged is difficult.

Regardless, the greenhouse is ready for seed flats and a jump-start on the season.  Anyone interested in our CSA?

I am vowing that this coming year the mowing will be minimized.  Going in are perennial beds, hugelkultur mounds, insectory plants by the hundreds and a kitchen garden for fun.  The front yard outside of mine and Kristin’s door is the first to fall.  Step one is to kill the grass or otherwise remove it. Well, actually step one is to figure out where the beds will go and do some measuring and flagging.

A few years ago I attended a workshop at the annual CFSA conference presented by Susana from Salamander Springs Farm. The workshop was all about building no-till beds on top of grass.  I finally found the notes in one of the piles of notebooks that I have only recently brought together into one pile.  The notes spell out a no-till “Layer Cake” garden bed recipe:

Step one – “The Plate” consists of large sheets of cardboard laid over existing pasture or lawn.

Step two – “The Cake” consists of several inches of manure or compost.

Step three – “The Frosting” consists of mulch such as leaves, old hay, shredded paper and straw.

Step four – “The Baking” consists of letting it all settle and rot for three to four months.

Step five – “The Eating” consists of pulling the mulch back to put in plants and replenishing the mulch as the plants grow.

For our cardboard needs we almost always head to Siler City.  The dollar stores’ Dumpsters are usually a nice jackpot for all sizes of box, not necessarily a requirement to fit most mulching needs.  For larger jobs we would hit furniture and appliance stores.  The boxes are bigger and thicker providing more grass and weed killing power.  For uniformity of boxes, the local ABC Liquor store would be perfect.  Most folks hit them up for packing boxes.  For wax boxes, hit the grocery… Since this particular project was just a piece of a front yard, the dollar store cardboard works well.  The only problem is the tape.  There is a lot of tape to remove and dispose of.

While peeling off tape, you get to see where all the crap products come from and come through.  Most of the importers seem to be in New York City of New Jersey.  The origins are India, China, Korea, Vietnam.  None of the boxes were made from recycled material (no notices on the boxes), so I will probably be mulching with cardboard descended directly from trees, most likely trees from Canada.  That is a long way to go in order to get into my front yard.  The boxes also have loads of staples, fabric tape and heavy duty packing tape holding everything together.

The value of the boxes and its associated connectors is probably higher than the value of the stuff inside the box. I know the value of what I am about to grow on and through those boxes is higher than the box plus the stuff inside.  And then some – mostly because so much comes from the cardboard.  Earthworms tunnel under and through it; pill bugs, beetles and earwigs make their home in the crevices between the layers; fungal mycelia run like branching rivers throughout the whole bit.  All of this activity leads to the decomposition of the still useful organic matter and carbon that is nestled within the cardboard.

What would have taken years to happen with the use of a new log, the loggers, grinders, pulpers, pressers, importers and exporters have made into a readily available haven for all sorts of micro and macro interactions. But the folks at the end of the box-chain would have just thrown it away or possibly recycled it into more cardboard that would eventually be thrown away (nothing against recycling cardboard) whereas we at Circle Acres have really recycled the box and returned it to its rightful place – rotting on the ground and being digested by those who can do such a thing.

The only drawback to this system is that it takes a really long time to build.  For one person, by hand, estimate at least two hours to go twenty five feet.  Then of course there is the “baking” part, but after three or four months the area should be grass and weed free.  It will also be a nutritious place to start off new Spring plants for Summer harvest.

The whole dichotomy came into focus (again) as I was hauling ten pounds of bananas out of the dumpster, taking in a nice and cozy 2600 mile diet subsidy.  We are building a farm with a focus on self sufficiency.  Since that goal is way off, we rely very heavily on the waste stream.

I have written about dumpster diving in the past, but the level of food and resource rescuing we do now is pretty unprecedented.  The chickens eat it (bananas and melons are their favorite), the goat eats it (cabbage trimmings are always available) and we all certainly do our part to go through as much of the food as we can.  The pigs are coming soon; they will eat whatever we other critters cannot get through.  Clothing, shelving, buckets, cardboard, wire, dishes, and a billion other things get converted into feeders, mulch and everyday farm equipment.

Artichokes, red peppers, starfruit, melons, red bananas, eggplant, avocado, asparagus – a sampling of the seasons from around the world, all held up by petroleum and horrible working conditions – picked, packed, shipped and then thrown away while still edible.  It is basically a punch in the face of all the work done … The wasteful practices are illustrated over an over again by the sight of good food going to the landfill.  But we intervene, daily, breaking the waste chain, feeding ourselves and others while the world dies around us.

Yesterday – in ten seconds in the grocery store dumpster – I pulled out an entire case of tomato sauce.  Twelve jars with an expiration date sometime in 2011, undamaged and unopened, thrown away simply because it was delivered to the wrong store.  So it gets thrown away.  Not donated, not given to employees, not sampled out.  If a punk wasn’t there to rescue it, it would be on its way to the landfill at this moment, the jars broken on the sides of the trash truck and contents stuck on the gears and plates and pieces of a wasteful world.

But if that waste stream stopped suddenly (like we want it to), our current food paradigm would change radically.  We are not yet growing enough to feed ourselves.  Entire subcultures are built on the availability of trashed food, websites and blogs are devoted to one thing only -

Every year in the US nearly 100 billion pounds of edible food are sent to landfills by retailers, restaurants, and consumers. It’s also estimated that only about 4 billion pounds of food would be necessary to eliminate hunger in America.

Don’t get me wrong, a huge pot of dumpster veggie soup is delicious, but with Trashy Gourmet I hope to show that dumpsters offer an endless array of options for your culinary delight. So start diving, get cooking, and stuff your face while you help save the world! Eating against capitalism tastes so good.

Can we eat our way out of capitalism?  Can we reconcile our goals with our current actions?  Pass me an avocado and we’ll talk about it later…

With the beauty of the snow in NC comes the problem of clearing it from the roads and the ridiculous frenzy and panic of the local population.  Just the threat of snow is enough to close all schools and most businesses.  Bread and milk flies off the store shelves, people forget how to drive and banks close their doors.  It took me three days to make a deposit at the local bank branch; even the day of the deposit had a delayed opening.

Snow plows are in very short supply around here, and it can take a day just to clear a major highway.  We live on a side road off another side road off yet another side road and then down a dirt road, which basically means that we never see the snow plow anywhere near our home.

It is nothing like New York where the plows come fast and often, their sounds destroying the quiet of night.  I wrote about the plows in Quitter #5.  Here is a taste -

Oh, How Long December…
During a snow storm, the plows mostly come at night.  In the sturdy, hoary months of childhood in Western New York, I would lay awake listening as the distant scraping of the plow brushed its steel blades over the roughly poured asphalt.  In the dry winter air, the low hum could be heard for miles, the flashing orange roof lights of the plow radiating off the lumbering snowflakes, themselves moving unpredictably towards any available surface, wrestling the wind’s vacillating directions.

First the plow would pass to the south of our house, down the thin Barville Road, then up North Byron Road and finally across our unmarked, no-shoulder road.  As the sound grew closer I would pull my face up to the window, watching the coming lights reflect off every available inch of ground, the thick cover of flurries yielding very little until the massive vehicle was right in front of my eyes.  A wave of snow and rock passed over the giant chisel, driven by a mass of grinding metal and boiling oil, echoing brutal noises off the aluminum siding of the house.  The sound and lights would fade as the driver made way through the expansive grid of rurality, on and on towards the gawking of other children unable to sleep.

***************

In Chatham County we are blessed with the ability to grow food all year round.  With this blessing comes the curse of trying to fool the natural cycles either through the creative use of energy (wood stove in the greenhouse) or by the less intensive means of row covers and low tunnels.

Yesterday’s snow meant that the folks at Piedmont Biofarm had to battle the flakes in order to keep their crops alive.  I found farmer Doug Jones busy in the storm sweeping off his row covers with a push broom.

Even he had to admit that it was a losing battle.  A day later, he and a few of his interns finished the work, clearing the snow and ice by hand.

***************

Yesterday ended up being a half day of work for myself and Kristin.  The first snow at the farm was an event for me even though snow and cold and ice is basically in my blood.  I haven’t studied an icicle in years.  The icicle is an indication of poor roofing and a lack of insulation, but let’s leave all that for the adults to think about…

One thing you don’t usually see is a Magnolia grandiflora full of snow.  The evergreen leaves stand out during the brown of our short Winter, but they really stand out against the cold white of an even shorter and rarer snow fall.

And what would the short work day be without a little snow fight action?

We threw snowballs at each other and at 80 (our doggie).  But she was busy with work most of the afternoon, and could barely be bothered to play along.

Her “work” mostly consists of chasing mice in the back field and running around like a crazy person.

This work keeps her occupied and healthy, alert and slim.  It is almost a script – the mice run; she follows their scent, bouncing from grass clump to tree stump, digging up rocks and fallen branches all day long.  The mice run some more.  Repeat.

80 doesn’t really come off as a killer.  Now I’m starting to think that I should be cheering her on.  After all, with a depleted mouse population, we may be able to lower the tick infestation in the Spring.  Mouse blood is the gateway drug for young ticks.  Damn delinquents…

After she caught the mouse (the first one I ever saw her catch), I basically took it away from her.  Later on in the evening I thought that it probably would be best if she had been allowed to eat her catch.  We live in the middle of nowhere, so these field mice are not eating poison.  Kind of a waste of protein.

From now on at Circle Acres, the number one rule for all of us is “You eat what you kill.”

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…

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…

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?

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.

The first is goat butter. I have been unable to find a source of local goat milk or local goat butter. So I bought a couple packages of Meyenberg goat butter from the co-op. This butter comes all the way from California. The food miles are pretty dense on that one.

The second is bread. The discipline I need to make my own bread is pretty lacking. After working, bike commuting and then making a from-scratch meal, I don’t yet have what it takes to get into making bread. When Stoneground Bakery closed I was at a loss. The freezer cache emptied quickly, and I had to buy some packaged bread. It sounds weird but it really takes less effort to go out and dumpster a bag of bagels than it does to bake bread three times a week. Call it a weakness or laziness or whatever. Add to that several failed attempts at making bread, and I am a broken local bread eater. It is not that I don’t have the stomach for effort. It is just that six months into this project I have not been able to break this chain and just make it happen.

Bread is a staple for me. It just has to be here, readily accessible and ready to eat. I was trying to set up a routine in the bread world. For now it will have to be from the dumpster or from the shelf. I consider this a failure on my part since I have covered most every other staple with a local source. If I can’t find it or make it I move on…except for bread.

Well, those are the two things. They are a pretty unsubstantial two things, but they are things I cannot live without at the moment. That is my confession…

Last week my friend Mike gave me the recipe for the crust, and so I present my first from-scratch apple pie.

1 – Start by making the apple sauce.

2 – The crust is pretty straight forward. Mix two cups of flour with one teaspoon of salt and two-thirds cup of butter. I used goat butter, which can give the pie kind of a goaty flavor but I like it.

3 – When the dough starts to have a flaky texture and about half the pieces are pea-sized, start adding ice water in tablespoon increments. Don’t add any more than five tablespoons of water.

4 – Form the dough into a ball.

5 – Roll the dough out on wax paper. No wax paper? Just sprinkle some flour on a cutting board or countertop to avoid sticking. I started with a roller but ended up just using my hands to flatten the dough.

6 – Use half of the dough to line a nine inch pie pan.

7 – Add a bit of flour, no more than a tablespoon, to your apple sauce to thicken it up.

8 – Pour enough sauce into the pie dish to get it almost to the top of the dish. Add some honey to the top of the filling.

9 – Use the other half of the dough to cover the pie. I did the lattice top. Sprinkle with cinnamon if you have it.

10 – Bake at 450 degrees for ten minutes then reduce heat to 350 and bake for another forty minutes or until browned.

Crust recipe is from Mike and is adapted from Cooking Southern Vegetarian Style.

I still have a couple of brown artichokes and a burly looking rutabaga to cook. They can wait until tomorrow or the next day; I’m not in a hurry with those.

Overall this has been an interesting experiment. It has reminded me that I can go quite a while without buying groceries or relying on the food stashed away in various cupboards. More than anything else it became a project on relearning some survival skills. This is never a bad thing. The fact that the grocery bill was zero dollars for the week is an added perk.

The waste stream is not a solution to anything. The waste stream will not feed tons of hungry people unless it were managed with numbers in mind and included a dedicated group of people. If anything, the waste stream is a reminder of the excess that our current economic model creates day in and day out. It speaks to an exploitation of resources and indicates that we waste food simply because we can. All the energy that goes into producing, harvesting, transporting, storing, boxing, unboxing, etc is lost as soon as the product goes into the trash. Sure, folks are paid during every step of the process, but you can’t eat a paycheck and hope to get any nutritional value from it.

What am I trying to prove? Basically I am saying that we can eat well balanced meals out of the trash. I am saying that we should be mindful of our waste and take responsibility for it. I am saying that we should reincorporate food waste back into the system that brought it to market – get it back to farm workers, integrate it into new food, anything to keep it out of the landfill where it will be buried and sequestered from the nutrient cycles. Compost the leftovers that went bad instead of throwing them in the trash can. Disregard all the warnings about not putting oils, fats and meat in the compost pile. The critters will dig for it and aerate your pile or, if they don’t, those things will all break down just like any other organic matter. Cooked food decomposes just like vegetable scraps, maybe even faster.

Take responsibility for your waste…

Breakfast has been a really basic meal consisting of a few pieces of expired bread made into toast and coated with honey (the same that used to “house” a fly) and some free cherry jelly. Nice, sweet and filling for the morning.

When I get to work there is always a selection of bruised or ugly fruit from the previous day’s culling, so I usually pick one or two to eat for a snack before lunch. The last two days, lunch has been plain sandwiches – overripe tomatoes on expired sourdough bread.

Dinner on day three was a bit different as it was not 100% out of the waste stream. A Wilmington Star News reporter and photographer came over to do an interview and sit down to eat a local, foraged and scavenged meal. In order to satisfy one of those qualifiers, I defrosted some chicken soup from the freezer. That was the 100% local part of dinner. The chicken was from Grassy Ridge, the rice from Carolina Plantation and all of the veggies (potato, green bean, yellow squash, garlic) were from Black River Organic Farm.

The foraged part was some sassafras root tea. The scavenged part was the salad.

The lettuce was two days out of date. The carrots were a month out of date. The tomato had a bad spot. Same with the turnip, green pepper and zucchini. Dressing was Annie’s Organic French out of The Stash. Overall a very good meal and an interesting conversation about regional food systems, community and the general disconnection that most folks have from their food. Jessica over at Fresh Thinking was interviewed for the article as well, and we are both anxiously awaiting its publication.

Last night and tonight I had some leftover soup and some of the poorly packaged hot dogs I brought home Saturday night. To the usual salad fixings, I added some broccoli bits dug out of the bottom of a case that was emptied of its bunches.

I also found a nicely sprouting onion that would probably do better in the ground waiting for spring than hanging out waiting to be eaten.

I expect tomorrow to be more of the same, although I did find some out-of-date tortillas and a dented can of refried beans. Could be a theme if I could ever find a decent avocado in the dumpster…

Dinner was pretty diverse as I had found quite a few crappy looking pieces of produce. I decided to make some steamed greens from a sad looking bunch of green kale. This went with a stir fry of potatoes, green pepper and garlic.

The potatoes were green and had sprouts, so in order to avoid any Solanum tuberosum poisoning, I trimmed the potatoes pretty deeply. There was still plenty to work with, and I managed to get rid of all the green and then some. Even though there hasn’t been a reported case of potato poisoning in the US in 50 or so years, there is no reason to mess around. The amount of solanine in one unpeeled green and sprouting potato is enough to cause some interesting problems such as paralysis, vomiting and fever. Peeling and frying a green potato reduces the amount of solanine to background levels in most cases. So with all that said, under no circumstance should you eat an unpeeled green potato. It only takes a few seconds to peel a potato even if all you have is a rock…

To the stir fry I added some beef hotdogs from a package that was not sealed correctly. The dogs were perfectly fine, it was just that the seal left too much play in the plastic and it seemed like the package was open. It wasn’t.

For another side, I had a butternut squash with a bad spot on the neck end. I just cut off the bad section…

scooped out the seeds…

and baked it skin side up in a baking dish with a 1/4″ of water at 350 degrees for 25 minutes. When it was done I just scooped everything out and ate it as is. As I said at the start, it was a pretty diverse meal…

Breakfast on day one consisted on some ten grain cereal, some “expired” sourdough bread toast, some honey that was packaged with a fly in it (just scoop out the fly!), some cherry jam and apple sauce made from damaged fruit.

I skipped lunch because I was too busy checking on the status of the neighborhood pecan trees. I was able to pick up a few pounds of the nuts, but the big drop is still a week or so away.

Dinner was a very basic ground turkey goulash modified in such a way that it does resemble traditional goulash in any way. I used green pepper, tomato sauce and garlic. I started with a dented can of tomatoes.

I then fried up some ground turkey that had opened up at one end when it was removed from the case.

I then added some green pepper that had some soft and bad spots and some stray and sprouting garlic cloves, all destined for the compost bucket.

Making this meal is easy even if you only have a few ingredients.

1 – Cook a can of tomatoes for a few hours just adding some salt, oil and garden basil. If you don’t have any extra ingredients, just the tomatoes will do. Cooking at a slow simmer for a few hours brings out the flavor and hides the sweetness of canned tomatoes.

2 – In a skillet, brown the meat of choice or some tofu, whatever you have will work. You can add salt and other spices, anything available such as oregano, basil and marjoram.

3 – When the meat or tofu is browned, add green pepper and garlic. Cook until the green pepper is soft.

4 – Add the contents of the skillet to the simmering tomato sauce.

5 – Bring everything to a slight boil then reduce to a simmer. Cook for another twenty minutes or until all the flavors are mixed nicely.

6 – Serve on pasta, fried potatoes, spaghetti squash, fried butternut squash cubes, anything you can find that you think would taste good with the sauce. The mixture could also be served on toasted bread or bagels.

The possibilities are only limited by what you have on hand, which is the essence of waste stream week. What did I find, and how can I make a balanced meal out what I now have available.

I am also closely looking at the waste I generate on a daily basis. What can I reuse or carry with me to refill or use again? Is this pile of broccoli stalk trimmings from work still useful somehow, maybe in a stir fry or broccoli soup? Where is the edge between usability and garbage, and how can I walk that edge while still getting good nutrition out of out-of-date food or scraps?

For the next part of this project I will attempt to eat out of the waste stream for 100% of my meals for seven days straight. Whereas I usually incorporate some waste into my meals throughout the week, this will be a much more conscious effort to do so. Twenty-one meals starting this Sunday morning. I will document as much as I can, but since I don’t always have my camera with me I may have to rely on some detailed descriptions.

Wish me luck…

I have an assignment for you and me. We are going to enter the mainstream food waste river, together. We are going to pick a grocery store in our neighborhood, we are going to approach the produce manager or, preferably, a produce worker, and ask for a day’s worth of bruised fruit. We’ll tell them we prefer apples and pears, that it is for an art project or whatever it is that you want to tell them, that you will pick the fruit up on such and such a day at such and such a time. We won’t leave them hanging.

We are going to salvage twenty or so pieces of fruit and make them into apple/pear sauce. I do this with bruised fruit at work where bringing home culls is standard practice, but it would be interesting to expand the reach into more hostile territory. Directly engaging workers and collecting the waste of their day’s work is not something most of us think about, but I am asking you to put aside any fear you have of approaching these folks. They are just like you and I – a stomach to fill, rent to pay and dreams of how to spend a day off.

If anyone says they can’t give you fruit for legal reasons, let them know that (at least in North Carolina) there are laws protecting grocery stores that give away food. Specifically,

Chapter 99B. Products Liability.

§ 99B-10. Immunity for donated food. (a) Notwithstanding the provisions of Article 12 of Chapter 106 of the General Statutes, or any other provision of law, any person, including but not limited to a seller, farmer, processor, distributor, wholesaler, or retailer of food, who donates an item of food for use or distribution by a nonprofit organization or nonprofit corporation shall not be liable for civil damages or criminal penalties resulting from the nature, age, condition, or packaging of the donated food, unless an injury is caused by the gross negligence, recklessness, or intentional misconduct of the donor. (b) Notwithstanding any other provision of law, any nonprofit organization or nonprofit corporation that uses or distributes food that has been donated to it for such use or distribution shall not be liable for civil damages or criminal penalties resulting from the nature, age, condition, or packaging of the donated food, unless an injury is caused by the gross negligence, recklessness, or intentional misconduct of the organization or corporation.(1979, 2nd Sess., c. 1188, s. 1; 1989, c. 365; 1991 (Reg. Sess., 1992), c. 935, s. 2; 1995, c. 522, s. 1.)

Arguably we are nonprofit organizations unto ourselves. If you have success or failure accessing the waste stream in this way, please let me know by posting a comment. Once you have the fruit, here is the quickest way to make some sauce.

Here is the type of fruit that I bring home: bruised, cut, nicked and extremely overripe -

1 – Wash, core and peel the fruit. I usually only peel the worst looking fruit in order to cut out the bruises and such as well as any overripe skins. For apples, get yourself a $4 apple corer. You will go through the apples really quickly especially if you don’t have much trimming to do.

2 - Put all the fruit in a large stockpot. Add any sweeteners or spices that you like. I added honey and some cinnamon from The Stash. Also, add a little bit of water so that the bottom pieces are not scorched as you bring the temperature up.

3 – Heat the mixture to a boil then reduce the heat to a simmer.

4 - Stir the mixture often. Use a potato masher to crush the sauce. You could also use a blender to get more of a grocery store sauce consistency, but I prefer having lots of fruit chunks in my sauce.

5 – When the sauce is the sweetness and consistency that you want, you can simply fill containers and stick them in the refrigerator or you can go through the process of canning the sauce for storage. I eat it so fast that it isn’t worth my time to can it.

6 – Enjoy the sauce on waffles, ice cream, sourdough pancakes, whatever!

The truth is, I don’t really need anything, but I still pick through the free box looking for something useful, basically something to rely on during the lean times. Most times the items are “slightly expired”, damaged in some way or labeled in a way such that we can’t sell it. In my own eating habits, I take into consideration that expiration dates are pretty arbitrary, and I have never had a problem with slightly dented cans.

The food – be it gluten-free pretzel samples, a dented coconut milk can or a jar of mayonnaise without its label – goes in my bike basket for the trip home, saved from filling a cranny in the landfill. At the store, staff are encouraged not to waste all this food that took so much energy to bring in, in a damaged state, yet takes virtually no energy to throw away, basically erasing all those calories. Just tossing the stuff in the dumpsters takes seconds and requires no thought on its final destination.

My friend and former collective-mate Will used to work for one of those big southern grocery stores, the kind of place where employees are forbidden by corporate rules from taking home any expired or damaged goods. Everything had to be thrown in the dumpster. Having no problem foraging in and eating out of that dumpster, we frequently brought home cases of various goods, many with no damage except for a splatter from a broken jar or burst can. So it was that we came into a lifetime supply of Texas Pete hot sauce, gallons of vegetable oil and more Hamburger Helper than has ever helped anyone. We were only after the noodles, but still…

Many other large grocery stores no longer have dumpsters. All their trash goes into a compactor and is one hundred percent wasted. Perfectly good food smashed to bits, never to fill bellies or even go into a compost pile. Hundreds of these stores compacting tons of edibles every year. With what we throw away every year, we could create some of the richest soil amendments we have ever seen and still fill plate after plate with decent calories. Yes, these stores donate to food pantries and other charities, but the waste they generate is still at a sickening level.

Maybe I have seen too much of the waste first hand, pulled too many bags full of still warm bagels out of the trash and into the night air, discovered too many pints of still frozen ice cream or cases of potato chips “expiring” the next business day. How can this practice be sustainable for the store or for the people working in it? Surely most of the items going into the trash could be simply diverted to staff on a daily basis. Hundreds of employees, many making minimum wage, would deeply appreciate a dip in the free bin. I know that I do.

I have foraged with modest success on various occasions, with most bountiful results coming from fruit and nut collection. Wild blackberries, mulberries, pecans, chestnuts, black walnuts, hickory nuts and figs are all found in abundance around Wilmington.

* Pecans can be tricky to find because the trees can go for years without producing nuts. I found this out when Noel and I picked up probably 100 or so pounds of the nuts three years ago, and we haven’t seen anything since. But hickory nuts are pretty much a yearly find as are black walnuts, though it is often a race with the squirrels for the walnuts.

* Figs are in abundance at the beach and down a few alleys in my neighborhood. They are often neglected, the fruits going unpicked every year. Most folks don’t mind if you pick your fill as long as you don’t make a mess. As if fallen, rotting fruit isn’t a mess…

* For greens, our weedy areas and yards have a selection of plantain (seeds), lamb’s quarter, chickweed, mints, dandelion, sunchoke and wood sorrel. Dandelion can be used for many purposes -

“The plant can be eaten cooked or raw in various forms, such as in soup or salad. They are probably closest in character to mustard greens. Usually the young leaves and unopened buds are eaten raw in salads, while older leaves are cooked. Raw leaves have a slightly bitter taste. Dandelion salad is often accompanied with hard boiled eggs. The leaves are high in vitamin A, vitamin C and iron, carrying more iron and calcium than spinach.^[3] Dandelion flowers can be used to make dandelion wine. The recipe usually contains citrus fruit. Another recipe using the plant is dandelion flower jam. Ground roasted dandelion root can be used as a coffee substitute. Drunk before meals, it is believed to stimulate digestive functions. “

Source – Wikipedia Danedlion article

* Sunchokes, also known as Jerusalem artichokes, are a member of theHelianthus(sunflower) family, grow on roadsides and near ditches. Here in Wilmington I find them all the time on the bike path behind Time Warner Cable and also along Park Avenue, usually surrounded bykudzu, another plant with some edible parts.

“It is perfectly valid as a food source,” says Regina Hines, a fiber artist in Ball Ground, Ga. “In the springtime, I like to gather the little shoots, and I will saute them with onions and mushrooms. They taste almost like snow peas.”

From the article “Kudzu:’Vine that ate the South’ is also good eating“

* Kudzu is an invasive plant, much maligned these days. I haven’t tried kudzu as of yet, but that doesn’t mean that I won’t try it soon. I’m discovering that I am becoming more open to trying wild edibles even if only to confirm my dislike of something. In the case of wild mushrooms, I would like to confirm my dislike for the thousandth time.

* Mushrooms are everywhere, but I am not a fan of mushrooms, wild or cultivated. I am fan of looking for mushrooms though, or looking for any other edible substance. It is the learning aspect that I often crave more than the actual eating experience.

I want to know how to identify the food, learn its habitat and then store that information for a time when I could really use that particular knowledge. I guess I am that way with many things, as there is so much to learn and so much more feral to become.

A few days ago my friend A. called to tell me about the same abandoned blueberry farm. He had also heard about it from the plant grower, but unlike me A. had gone out to the patch and seen the berries a few years ago. He didn’t pick any then because they weren’t ripe, and he never went back that year or the next. He did go back a few days ago. His report to me got my curiosity boiling, and I was ready to go whenever. Yesterday morning A. called with an update – berries were looking ripe.

I wasn’t able to go with him, but he was kind enough to give me directions to the place. After work, Kristin and I loaded up a 12 quart stock pot, a couple small containers and a sheet and drove out to the place. Battling rush hour traffic was a horror show (I rarely drive), but after 20 or so minutes we managed to get to the parking lot near the berry plot.

To get to the berries we followed what seemed like directions on a treasure map. Turn left at the old house foundation, right at the trail fork, look left for a downed tree and go straight ahead into a clearing. My friend told me I wouldn’t believe it when I saw it, that it was so out of place and out of the context of the rest of the area. That is how I knew we were there.

Kristin and I were talking about something when we entered the clearing. Mid-sentence I looked up and practically yelled “berries!”

We stood at the beginning of a 1/2 acre of 10 to 12 foot tall blueberry bushes, arranged in perfect rows in what looked like staggered plantings of various varieties. The bushes were definitely old, maybe 30 or 40 years old, and most certainly abandoned. They hadn’t been pruned or cut back in quite sometime. But the great thing was that there were ripe berries and plenty of them.

After gazing and grazing for a few minutes, deciding where we might start, we walked down a random row and spread out the sheet. I immediately started shaking the branches. Berries fell everywhere, landing on the sheet and everywhere around it. Berries bounced off heads and shoulders.

Kristin scrambled to pick them up as they fell. This quickly gave way to the two of us shaking opposite sides of the row and then gathering all the berries. The berries were everywhere. We couldn’t pick them up fast enough.

With the berries came all sorts of debris – twigs, old leaves, flaking bark – and my sweaty skin was soon covered in an itchy coating. Along with the debris, we managed to shake loose all sorts of creatures. Small flies, crickets, inch worms and all sizes of spiders came down on the sheet and on us. We swatted and flicked them away as we loaded up with the little blue treats.

Kristin sampled way more berries than I did, probably because I was still in disbelief that this place existed. I still can’t believe that we weren’t surrounded by other people picking. I kept saying to myself, surely people understand what is back here, surely the county has some people come pick this, surely we will get yelled at when we leave the clearing. But the patch obviously goes unpicked by anyone except random scavengers like us. In the next few weeks there will be enough berries to fill several freezers. Most will go unpicked.

After just an hour of work, Kristin and I hauled off about 10 quarts of berries. It doesn’t sound like much, but think of 20 pints of berries stacked on a grocery store shelf. That’s a lot of berries for an hours work. At the end of our picking session, looking at a full stock pot of blueberries, us sweaty, itchy and giddy, we wondered how long it would take before we would both be out here again, on hands and knees, piling berries into our little plastic containers.