A Free Guitar & A Free Wheelboard

My Dad is an absolute king and got me this semi-acoustic electric guitar out of a skip. It was thrown out by the music department of his school and with the exception of some minor superficial damage and some small adjustments/cleaning etc. it's absolutely perfect.

I also love that my Dad binned this for me, I can remember him getting stuff out of skips with me when I was younger which is pretty cool.



I bodged a guitar strap for it out of a couple of old belts and a shoelace and just bought some pretty decent (I think/hope) replacement machine heads for only like £5 on Ebay. I'm going to put them on in a couple of weeks and re-string the guitar and play some shows with it.

 

As far as I can tell Audition is a brand name that Teisco used for importing their guitars into countries other than Japan like America and England. From the design and info on the company I would guess that this design came out in the 60's-70's but I don't really know since there's not a lot of info online. If anybody knows for sure, please let me know I'm interested to find out and a bit sceptical that the guitar is actually 50 years old. Either way, it's awesome and free.

It's also pretty appropriate that I got this recently since I've been making plans to build a wheel board for my guitar amp from binned stuff. My friend got me a knackered old airport trolley out of a skip a while ago which I'm going to use the castors from and I got a dirty but functioning heavy duty ratchet strap out of a skip a little more recently. I also scavenged a high quality ground sheet someone abandoned at a festival in August that I'm going to cut and sew into a padded waterproof cover. The final part is today I got a wardrobe door out of somebody's skip (he said I could take it) that I'm going to make the main part of the board out of. I'm going to spray paint it too and hopefully it's gonna look awesome. I'll stick some photos up when I've built it, though I'm not sure when that'll be!

Summer Bin Diving

It's been far too long since I updated this, so here's a brief summary of the summer diving that I can remember right now.

It's been quite slow generally since a lot of people have stepped up "security" by locking and chaining bin lids and gates and installing bright motion sensing lights. This has successfully put me off a little bit because generally it's much scarier and more work for very little/no pay off. I've also encountered specific shops pouring bleach over everything to ruin it, infuriating for us but even worse for other people since this happens more in town where there are more homeless divers who need to eat. Pretty shitty. But, there have also been some really good trips, particularly a few times I've gone with friends who have been staying and those were really fun and we ate really well.


Anyway, the main thing that sticks is my mind is this; the most hilarious thing I have ever binned.



Had a bit of an explore around town with my buddy, didn't find any food but we got The Mamas & The Papas 20 Greatest Hits and and a huge picture/mirror frame out of a biffa behind a supermarket. No idea what either were doing in there but no complaints from us.

Got some of this stuff from our regular diving at various places, all of it pretty good (as ever could do with some more bread and vegetables/fruit instead of so much cake).

We got this next lot in one go, the night before we had a party/house show and there were loads and loads of hungry friends staying with us for about a week. Very good timing and we all ate so well. The fruit and bread and spaghetti were brilliant, we got it weeks ago and I still have some hoops left. Free stuff is so delicious.

Somebody else actually ate the cheese that I wrote my name on before I could get my hands on it, which I was sad about at the time but actually it turned out to be a good thing. A few of us ate some bin yoghurts the same night and I had pretty excruciating stomach cramps the next day (everybody else was fine) so I think I'm gonna have to stear clear of freegan dairy from now on. I'm feeling pretty good about it since the tricky decision to not eat binned dairy has been made for me. Good times.

I think that's pretty much everything for now.

A friend just linked this to me....

And I thought that it was interesting enough to share on here.

http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/green-living/the-night-i-ate-outof-a-bin-2370923.html

Smoothie & Monster Apple/Banana Pie

Got a whole pack of perfect strawberries the other day, they were four days in date too so that was a bit of a find. I'm pretty sure they only got thrown out because one corner of the plastic over the pot had started to peel away very very slightly. Made a huge epic smoothie with some bananas and soya milk and a little bit of vanilla essence.

I made this mostrous fruit pie last night out of bin dived apples, bananas and pastry. It was amazing. The only stuff that wasn't binned was the lemon juice, spices, fake honey and the Pure spread (I could have used bin butter, but I already had the Pure and it meant it was completely vegan).

Also just as an afterthought, I don't know whether anything has changed recently legally or in specific store's policies or what, but bin diving has been pretty hard. Bins are being put away more often, locked and/or locked up with enormous chains and padlocks, and/or locked away as people are shutting or installing gates and fences to keep people out. I'm not 100% how they've found out that people are doing it at the places we go to (I doubt we're the only divers but there definitely aren't too many others) because we haven't left any traces, I guess it must be CCTV or something.

I obviously don't agree with chains of shops like Tesco cracking down on binning but I do expect it from them, however as individuals I don't understand why staff have a problem with it. It does no harm to the company and no harm to the individual, the food that's dived is being salvaged when otherwise it would be wasted and quite frankly I'm pretty reliant on it (let alone what a problem it must be for the people who are completely reliant on it).

Some Rambling & Awesome Bin Finds

So, a month or so I decided to go vegan, having done some more research into the dairy industry etc. I also read Jonathan Safran Foer's fantastic/very grim book Eating Animals (I would recommend it to anyone, even just got a copy for my Dad) and talking to other vegans. I've been as strict as I think is possible though as ever you find out new stuff about unethical products every day - like palm oil being in every single bloody type of Co-Op biscuit and pesto not even being vegetarian - so I've messed up a few times and will probably mess up again, but hopefully soon I'll be a bit more clued up on animal friendly and vegan products. Luckily people are pretty helpful with advice on this kind of stuff which is really nice and makes the whole thing a lot easier.

I didn't manage to dive any dairy for a while after going vegan (the battery eggs where before I even started cutting down on non-vegan stuff), but we got loads of yoghurt this week and I've decided that I'm okay with eating it. Obviously opinions can change, but at the moment I don't feel like animal products such as eggs and dairy are inherently unethical in the same way meat is, e.g. while factory farming is awful owning a couple hens and eating their eggs would be brilliant. Pretty sure the hens would be happy too. So, over the last week I've been eating bin dived stuff that contains dairy which I'm fine with ethically and is pretty handy since it's a great source of protein, calcium etc. that I could really do with right now to save some money. I'm not sure whether I'm technically a vegan because of it but excluding bin dived food I still consider myself one - e.g. I only buy vegan products.

Anyway, here are some blurry photos of (some of) the ridiculous things we've binned over the last couple months. It's been brilliant.

Carrot Cake & Battery Farmed Eggs

It's been a fair while since I started the blog and I haven't posted anything, but even though I've been too slack to write on here I have still been bin diving and cooking and being really really terrible at baking cakes. So now I've got a few minutes I'm going to post some blurry photos of the cool things we've binned and made since those first two posts and try and keep the accompanying ramblings a bit more concise this time.

So, as I mentioned before we got some battery farmed eggs and I wasn't sure whether to eat them. But I was hungry and had no money and they were there so I had them with the bagels we'd dived the week before. I think I'm okay with it. I'll talk more about this in the next post.

After the eggs and bagels I made a massive carrot cake with some apples and stuff in there too. The only things I used that weren't freegan were spices, some icing sugar, oil and a pack of pecan nuts that had been in my cupboard for two and a half years. It was awesome.

Carrot & Potato Soup

Post two! There's obviously been a lot of tasty stuff that we've binned and made in various quantities over the last  year and a half that I don't have photos or details of including curries, pastas, pies, smoothies, yoghurts, milk, juice, donuts,  tinned soft drinks, vegetables, fruit, nuts, eggs, pizzas, ready meals, olive spread, crisps, SO many fresh cakes and more different kinds of bread than I could name. Hopefully we'll get some good stuff over the next couple weeks.


This is what I made for dinner tonight. It's an enormous soup that is mostly binned carrots and potatoes. I also put a small splash of binned cream on top and we ate a load of bin bread on the side. Very posh. Please excuse my dodgy phone camera.

 The soup also had:
-Frozen spinach
-1 tin coconut milk
-1 tin chopped tomatoes
-Garlic, coriander, turmeric, garam massala, chilli powder, boullion, salt, pepper

We had a shed load of binned crumpets with jam for pudding, it was brilliant. Hopefully my other friend and I are going to make some bin carrot cake later on too which will be cool.

Along with the carrots, crumpets, bread etc. that we got from last night's dive we also got twelve battery farmed eggs. I'm interested to hear what vegans and vegetarians think about eating these. Free range eggs are increasingly popular with everyone and the battery farming of chickens seems to be something that people are generally united against even if they disagree on other animal rights issues.

I am vegetarian and currently only dive vegetarian foods, though on one occasion previously I have eaten something containing meat from a bin - a pepperoni pizza - which (I'm pretty sure) was also the only time I have eaten meat in the last three and a half years. Binning meat does not contribute to the meat industry and I feel like it is less insulting to the already dead animal to salvage and eat it rather than discard it. However, I'm still not sure that I myself feel comfortable consuming another animal at all - I felt quite unwell after eating the meat, though it should be said not unwell enough to indicate that there was anything wrong with the food itself; it was winter, snowy and the pizzas had only been in the bin a couple hours at most. It was more that I felt extremely, uncontrollably aware that I was eating the flesh of another animal. So despite my thinking that binning meat is not only morally justifiable but actually a pretty good thing, I have not done it since.

This feeling of revulsion at the treatment of the animal despite no direct contribution to it's fate is how I imagine I will feel eating the bin dived battery farmed eggs - I feel like they unethical to the point of barely being vegetarian. I realise that most vegans will probably find the consumption of any eggs or dairy revolting anyway and probably my stance on battery farmed eggs could be interpreted as hypocritical, but as it's a fact that battery farmed eggs are more unethical than free range or farm shop eggs I hope you can see where I'm coming from.

It is also a particularly appropriate time to be considering this issue anyway as I've recently been thinking of going vegan. I reckon that I would probably not object to eating vegetarian (but non-vegan animal) products such as milk and cheese from a bin even if I abstained from them generally. But for me bin dived, battery farmed eggs seem to fall in this wierd grey area where they're freegan, technically-sort-of vegetarian (but also maybe not really) and obviously not vegan.

Anyway, that's probably enough rambling for the first proper post. Hopefully it wasn't too dull, I'm interested to hear what people think!