Sara Moniuszko

George Mason University

Students love to save money, but would you be willing to do your grocery shopping in a Dumpster?

William Reid, a graduate student at American University, has spent only $5.50 on store-bought groceries in the past two years. Total. As in, $2.75 a year.

The rest he finds on his own. Dumpster diving.

Before working for the D.C. Public Library, he told USA TODAY College that his tight budget left him eating cheap, unhealthy foods.

“I ate a lot of ramen, ate lots of really processed, cheap foods,” he said. “Now I’m eating really fancy food -- and I’m eating it for free.”

He figures he has pulled between $6,000 and $10,000 worth of food from the Dumpster.

“In terms of how much have I saved that I would’ve been spending on unhealthy food? A lot. But even more, I’ve saved a whole lot of money on food that I probably wouldn’t have even imagined affording to begin with,” he said.

This whole “food experiment,” as he calls it, happened after volunteering with an organization called Food Not Bombs, where he and his colleagues solicited donations of food, then cooked it and provided it to people in public spaces. This donated food, Reid explains, would have otherwise been bound for the landfill.

“My interest was sort of piqued because of all the food that was being donated to us that was perfectly good that they were intending to throw out. So the assumption, of course, is that places that don’t donate their food must also have a lot of great food that they’re actually throwing away,” he said. “So [Dumpster diving] started as a fun exploration, and then more and more it became clear that there was enough of that stuff that somebody could provide.”

He recalls being “very shy” about sharing his newfound habit and kept it a secret for about five months, fearing how people would react.

“There’s this whole fear of social repercussions when you tell someone you eat trash,” he explained. “But after a while, it sort of became an exciting thing for me … [and] I realized that there were too many large social and environmental issues at stake here to not tell people that it was possible.”

And to his surprise, he received “very little negativity” when he first posted about it online.

“As soon as you tell someone it’s possible to survive off of trash, suddenly they’re more willing to listen and hear about the issue at hand,” he said.

And what issue is that? Food waste.

According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, food waste is the “discarding or alternative (non-food) use of food that is safe and nutritious for human consumption along the entire food supply chain, from primary production to end household consumer level.”

This practice leaves an estimated one-third of all food produced for human consumption lost or wasted in the world each year -- and is part of what Reid is fighting against. So much so that Reid's graduate thesis is a documentary on the complexity of food waste as well as his experience trying to avoid it.

“The number one thing is raising awareness. There are lots of people in the United States who are fed, they get food, but they’re malnourished. There are people who are obese that are also malnourished,” he said. “And at the same time, we have tons and tons of perfectly good, healthy, fresh produce ending up in the Dumpster. So for me, this is a way of highlighting that issue, and I think that’s the number one thing.”



Related: 42% of UC students suffer from hunger. Help is on the way

What kinds of foods can you find in the garbage -- and where do you look?

Reid describes a large range of foods he finds behind local supermarkets and pharmacies in the D.C. area, including fruits, vegetables, juice, milk, meat and even chocolate croissants, which he picked up for breakfast in the trash of his local bakery.

“Unless the Dumpsters are entirely dry, I can be eating just about whatever you’re eating,” he said.

He also clarifies that, although he accepts the term “Dumpster diver” as a “fair description” of what he is, he does not typically need to do much deep diving.

“For the most part I don’t actually go into Dumpsters,” he explained. “Unless there’s something really enticing, for the most part, I just sort of scrape off the top of Dumpsters so I can just sort of lean in and not have to get inside.”

Other misconceptions he has faced are people thinking he eats rotten food and gets sick –- but he said neither has never happened.

“The food that exists in American Dumpsters or probably in Dumpsters in many westernized countries or Dumpsters in general, a lot of this food is perfectly good food. It’s food that’s not even hit an expiration date. A lot of produce now is wrapped in plastic, so you can go to a Dumpster and get food that’s never even been in contact with other things in the Dumpster because it had a coating of plastic around it.”

If it's relatively easy to fish decent food from the trash, would Reid recommend his lifestyle?

“I never really tell somebody, ‘Look, you should be Dumpster diving’ -- for some people it’s just not their cup of tea, and that’s fine. But if someone is curious about it and they’re just nervous or scared, absolutely, they should go and try it,” he said.

How to get started? It's simple, Reid says: “Just go and have a look. There’s not really anything complicated about it -- you just kind of look inside a bin and hope for the best. And more often than not, you will find something of value. But it’s not like I’m advocating this as a lifestyle. It’s more of a way of highlighting an issue that might seem absurd just to prove a point in a way.”

Although he is moving closer to allowing himself to buy food on a limited basis, Reid isn't ready to give up his current methods yet.

“As far as Dumpster diving goes, so long as this is an issue, so long as it’s possible to survive off of trash, so long as there’s perfectly good food in the Dumpster –- yeah, I’ll be Dumpster diving until I’m 87. I mean, I’ll take my kids Dumpster diving,” he said. “This habit is not going anywhere anytime soon.”



Sara Moniuszko is a student at George Mason University and a USA TODAY College correspondent.

This story originally appeared on the USA TODAY College blog, a news source produced for college students by student journalists. The blog closed in September of 2017.