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!

Fine City Freeganism

So, this is the first post! Basically, this blog is to document and share the tasty stuff my friends and I make from things we've bin dived.

This is bin/dumpster/skip diving, or freeganism:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freeganism

Our main reasons for going binning are to eat well for less money and to reduce the amount of food wasted unnecessarily by local supermarkets. I am no expert (and should make it clear that I am not currently affiliated with any larger freegan organisations or groups) but thought it would be fun to share the stuff we make and show what delicious food you can save from going to landfill by bin diving.

I've only been binning for a bit over year but because of my extreme lack of money, the recent discovery of more good places to go locally and a growing awareness of food production and consumption, I've been going pretty regularly for the last 6 months or so. I still buy food in shops but I generally base meals around things that I have dived and buy small amounts of food accordingly. This results in extremely cheap, healthy and delicious dinners.

My friends and I are very, very careful when recovering the food - we are extremely quiet, make no mess ourselves and if necessary clean up any mess already there. We don't ever go diving in private bins, only
commercial ones such as those outside supermarket chains etc. We only take what we can use and if there is a chance of other divers (particularly homeless divers) we will make sure to leave enough for others to eat well too.

I'm always interested to hear what people think and meet other folks doing similar things so get in touch if you fancy it.