Recipes for Disaster: an anarchist cookbook

Dumpster diving can be rough for the recovering bourgeois. There is hardly anything so deeply ingrained as the middle-class fear of having to go in a trashcan to eat?the ultimate in social failure. Recognize what you may be up against in that regard, and remember, it's a path of a thousand steps. One day you will be able to proudly walk right up to a public trash can, fish out some Chinese leftovers, and eat them right there in front of all your ex-classmates?^with such ease and confidence that they'll come over to ask for a bite.

Once I was climbing out of the dumpster behind a bread shop, drooling and gigghng of course, when two bread shop employees came out the back door. They looked at me.

I looked at them, we all looked at the bag of bread I was toting like Santa Claus. They were appalled; I felt a little weird. "1. . . uhh . .."?^but the two went back inside before I managed to get out my doctoral thesis on free food. It wouldn't have bothered me much, except that I recognized one of them as the little sister of a kid I was in drug treatment with years earlier. Before I could make a break for it (see Evasion, pg. 234), the two emerged once again, this time with a loaf of fresh potato bread. "Urn, thanks," I said. I don't think she recognized me.

It may help to explain to the dubious and disgusted that you're not actually taking trash, you're intercepting perfectly good materials on their way to the trash. Don't be shy about your means of acquiring supplies, however critical or snobbish your friends may be. Like veganism and abstinence from chemical intoxicants, the issue of dumpstering tends to provoke defensive responses?-for if it isn't unpardonably disgusting after all, then those who have been paying for things all along are straight-up suckers. Flaunt your loveliest dumpstered wares, make a delicious feast of pristine trash-picked cuisine and only tell where it came from afterwards; they'll come around. Excessive squeamish-ness is counter-revolutionary if anything is.

Converting the Infidels

We learned this one from the FBI. We use it to keep tabs on hotels that might host events for offending corporations or, for that matter, the police, on corporate offices where nasty plots are laid, on the houses of fascist organizers or others whose plans are interesting to us. Look for schedules, notes, anything that gives away secrets. Big scores in this department have provided serious intelligence resources for effective actions, believe you me.

Dumpster Diving as Surveillance

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What Do We Do with It AH?

You can start a Food Not Bombs (pg. 248) or hold a "Really Really Free Market" (see Festivals, pg. 241). You can establish a free store, a space where free materials and resources are always available. You can make gift packages for the needy, or walk through the streets giving things away. In most neighborhoods, useful things left on the curb will disappear swiftly. Waste is everyone's problem if it makes its way into the landfills to pollute our earth and crowd out our future?hijack it on the way and make sure it gets back into circulation.

Reverse Dumpstering

Warnings and Hints

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It was the Young Lords, I think, who, in the 1960s, when the city government refused to do adequate trash collecting in their neighborhoods, organized their own garbage collection. At the end of a few weeks' labor, they took all the trash they had picked up to the neighborhoods of the wealthy and deposited it there as a massive roadblock. Don't let the wastrels forget how much trash they're producing?make sure it reappears to haunt them just when they thought they were rid of it. Not long ago, Europeans carried out a successful campaign against superfluous corporate packaging by unwrapping products inside the store and leaving the containers there on the shelves; some years earlier, a group crusading against non-recyclable containers distributed mailing labels, so conscious consumers (or dumpster divers!) could mail these back to their manufacturers.

Some of us once had a problem with this, that's why I bring it up: you've got to watch out for scabies. It was common among us for some time to acquire our sleeping arrangements from a mattress store down the street that would throw away the old mattresses their customers brought in when they got new ones. We have also been tempted by the many foam cushions people leave out with their trash on Thursday nights. Sometimes these seemingly dreamy cushy-cushies are infested with litde bugs that get in your skin and try to eat you. This is a condition to avoid.