Hewitt - Making Supper Safe: One Mans Quest to Learn the Truth about Food Safety

To Penny, Fin, and Rye, who nourish me in ways food cannot

Whats that?

Edward leaned forward, peering through the windshield. It was night, and a searing cold had settled over the landscape, riding on a driven wind that had swept snow across the roads, where it had turned to ice and upended numerous cars along Vermonts Interstate 89. Everything looked lunar and foreboding. Already, barely 20 minutes into our drive, we had passed a Toyota truck lying on its side, illuminated by the flashing lights of emergency rescue vehicles. A few miles later, we passed an overturned sedan, its crumpled nose pressed against the ice-rimed surface of a rock face. I thought I saw one of its wheels still spinning; the front passenger door hung open, but the interior of the car was dark and I could not see if it was still occupied.

I followed Edwards gaze. Ahead of us, illuminated by the wash of our headlights, a deer lay at the base of a guardrail. Edward turned to me, and although I did not know him well, I knew him well enough that I didnt have to guess what he was thinking: food.

The car shimmied on the ice as we came to a stop at the highways edge. We stepped into the glacial air, our breath pluming into the dark. A row of cars passed, tires buzzing on the icy tarmac. I bent over the deer and tucked an ungloved hand into the fold of fur where leg met body. Still warm. This was a fresh kill, a coveted prize. We grabbed its legs, Edward at the front and me at the rear, and hoisted the deer into the back of my car, where it lay atop a pair of jumper cables and a rusty tire iron. What a blessing, Edward said as we slipped back into the car and its welcome cocoon of warmth. I slid the shifter into gear, and we pulled onto the highway.

We had our meat. It was time to find some cheese.

I suppose its simplest to say that Edward Gunny is a dumpster diver, although its probably not fair to define a man solely by his predilection for digging through trash in search of his supper. Still, its worth noting that Gunny, a lean-framed 28-year-old of middling height and possessing a laconic-but-not-quite-sleepy countenance, sources at least one-third of his calories from the garbage and has been doing so for nearly a decade. Given that history, and given that Ive personally observed the man waist deep in garbage in pursuit of his lunch, I dont feel too badly calling him a dumpster diver.

When I first learned of Gunnys habit, I was quick to assume it meant that he ate poorly. I imagined dented cans of soup, spore-dotted loaves of bread, and the picked-over remnants of Big Macs. But he was keen to correct me and, when I asked, eager to demonstrate his prowess. Sure, Ill take you out, he said, and he proceeded to reel off a list of his greatest scores. Aged goat cheese and specialty chocolates. Strawberries, fresh and frozen. Wine (and not the cheap stuff, he assured me). Boxes upon boxes of Alaskan salmon fillets, admittedly a little suspect at the edges, but nothing a sharp knife and an easy hand with the spices couldnt take care of. In the nonfood category, he was particularly proud of a recent haul of 60 insulated winter jackets with only minor blemishes (he sent the bulk of the jackets to a friend in Philadelphia, to be distributed to needy families).

Why, just 2 weeks prior to our outing, hed snagged more than 50 pounds of imported brie from a dumpster in Burlington, Vermont. For the Christmas holiday, Edward had hauled a few pounds of the stash to his familys home in southern New Hampshire. He then proceeded to bake it in his mothers oven and serve it to the assembled guests. Where did you get this brie? Its delicious, asked his aunt, as she slid another spoonful of gooey-warm cheese between her lips. Not wanting to diminish her obvious pleasure, and yet not able to bring himself to tell an outright lie (this is the sort of fellow he is), Edward took the middle path: Oh, its from a store I go to all the time.

And so we embarked on that bitter December night in search of the good stuff. It was only days past Christmas, and we considered the ways in which this might work to our advantage. Theyll probably be tossing extra holiday inventory, I offered. Edward nodded, then added: Or maybe because they were closed for a few days, a bunch of stuff went bad. I nodded. Or maybe, I noted sagely, with the economy so bad, they made a lot of extra inventory and had to get rid of it. This was basically a repeat of my first point, but Edward didnt seem to notice or, if he did, was too kind to mention it.

I picked him up at the house he rents for $400 with his friend David, a builder of straw-bale homes who sports a gold-capped front tooth and spends his spare hours refining his musculature with a kettlebell, a simple contraption that consists of a 35-pound steel ball with a handle. Ill show you a few moves, he said, when Edward took a phone call. And he proceeded to crank out a dozen deep knee bends with the ball hanging from his meaty hands like a penance for some earlier transgression.

The house was decorated in a style Ill call rural bachelor rustic, which basically means that David and Edward live as if they occupy a parallel universe, where everything is oriented around an old woodstove and things like women and toilet bowl cleaner have yet to be invented. To contain heat, the upstairs had been closed off, leaving the single, first-story room to serve as bedroom, living room, and kitchen for both Edward and David. Beds were tucked into opposite corners; Edwards was open to the room, but David had troubled himself to fashion a thin privacy curtain from what looked to be old sheets. A large woodstove was central to the space, with an aged couch pulled close. Above the stove, a rack of deer antlers was mounted on a post; wool socks with blown-out heels hung from its points. The wood floor around the stove was pockmarked with charred burns from errant embers; I looked for a fire extinguisher, did not find one, and made studious note of the nearest exit. A circular table held a can of whipped cream (dumpstered), a log of butter (dumpstered), a container of sour cream (dumpstered), and a jar of kimchi, a fermented vegetable medley of Korean origin. David had made it, and he offered me a bite. Unable to source a clean utensil, and finding the dirty ones too dirty to risk, I used the tip of my pocketknife to spear a chunk of cabbage. It was insanely good. I speared another chunk, then rinsed my knife under a kitchen sink faucet that consisted of two garden hose shutoffs. It was not hard to imagine Edward and David growing old in this space, spending their days feeding the woodstove, padding around in soiled long johns, and emitting voluminous kimchi burps.

As Edward finished his call, and immediately after I completed a wobbly set of kettlebell deep knee bends (35 pounds never felt so heavy, and I earned not only a kink in my lower back but a new respect for David), David delivered a quick primer in dumpster-diving philosophy. There is one question the dumpster diver seeks to answer, he told me, his gold tooth gleaming in the light from a bare bulb. And that is, Why was this thrown away?

I understood immediately that David wasnt asking the question to express his concern over the foods safety but rather to indicate his distaste for capitalism and the profligate waste it often engenders. Already, Id come to understand that among Edward and his dumpster-diving cohorts, rage against the capitalist machine is a defining motivation. This could be seen as biting the hand that feeds, for if it werent for free-market capitalism and the inevitable waste it generates, the quantity of well-stocked dumpsters would likely decline. Its important to not get so attached that we perpetuate the system, explained Edward, when I pointed this out. Being bummed out that there arent more dumpsters isnt part of the equation. And yet, I sensed a degree of conflict between Edwards anticapitalist mores and his obvious delight at sniffing out a garbage bag full of brie. Indeed, Edwards lifestyle and identity had clearly been forged, at least in part, by his gleaning habits. It seemed to me that letting go of this, even if it meant the demise of the corporatism he railed against, might be harder than he imagined.