Urban Hunting Part 1: The Dumpster
Jason Scragz 6 months ago // 1 response // Outdoor Adventure Urban adventure

Hello and welcome to my brand new Urban Adventure series. We’re going to start with arguably the most important thing you’ll need to figure out in your adventuring, how you’re going to get fed.

Dumpsters are an ideal place to start due to being readily available in just about every part of the city and such a great source of goodies, food and otherwise (we’ll cover diving for inedibles later).

Getting ready

Before you head out, there a few things you should do to prepare. First and most important is to get open about what you eat. You are presumably broke or cheap enough to be eating out of dumpsters so you probably can’t afford to not like mushrooms. You’re not going to encounter much edible meat, especially compared to some other freegan type activities, but it still helps to at least be open to dairy.

Next, get some good shoes or, preferably boots. Consider pants as well. You’re going to be in a dumpster.

Where to look

Don’t bother with houses or apartments; people don’t generally throw out enough to be useful and their trash is usually pretty gross. You want a place that is forced to throw out tons of food. Grocery stores are tops. Lots of almost fresh produce, bread, some of that precooked deli stuff.

Restaurants can be good too, depending on the place. Sometimes their trash can get pretty gross, but sometimes you can get e.g. whole pizzas that they’re forced to throw out if they mess them up.

Donut shops are great; aside from occasional coffee grounds their trash is mostly clean.

Those are some ideas. Basically wherever there’s lots of food, there’s food in the trash.

When you get there

You can just jump in for the most part. Take a quick look around, for sure; especially strip malls usually have a security guard cruising around. Keep in mind that any official people are going to be cranky about it. Most normal folks don’t care too much.

Locks

If your perfect dumpster is locked you have a couple options. The safest is to come back some other time in the hopes it will be open. That’s probably not going to happen so the next would be to attempt to get in without breaking the lock, If it’s just in a little fenced or walled in area, you could climb it or get a shopping cart to jump on.

If it’s totally locked and enclosed then it’s usually not worth it. If you really want to push it and you have bolt cutters, your best course of action is to cut the lock and leave for a couple hours, getting rid of the broken lock and your cutters. Then if you get busted there’s less evidence for breaking and entering. That’s getting into serious charges, and again, it’s not usually worth it.

If you get caught

Again, security guards, employees, and cops are all going to be pissy about you trying to prosper off the garbage that they’re forced to protect, so there is always a chance you’re going to get caught. Unless you really broke in or are making a huge mess then they’re probably just going to tell you to get out of there. Or you can take off if it’s not a real cop and they get uppity.

Other things to look out for

Aside from getting filthy, there are some mini dangers. A lot of times there’s stuff that can cut and scrape you up that you might not notice. Make sure to clean up afterwards.

I’ve heard of some people putting poison on the vegetables and whatnot. I don’t have any first or even second hand knowledge of that really happening. Be warned in any case.

That’s about it. Just be smart and you’ll be finding more food that you know what to do with in no time at all.

Until next time, happy eatin’!