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.