
All the food in the above photo I acquired today... for free. Little did my friend Kameyo and I know that the free bread we received from the church near her house was just the begninning of our free food day. As we were walking from her house to the library we were stopped by a short, smiling Asian man in his fifties or sixties. He waved us over to his minvan full of bread and the first thing that crossed my mind were the stories I was told when I was a child about bad men that will tell you they have a kitten in their van that they want to show you. But now, grown up, and armed with my grown up friend, I was not afraid, only curious. He told us to please take some bread, as it had been donated to the church. We tried to tell him that we appreciated the offer, but that we would rather he give it to people more in need than us. He insisted, telling us that there was more than enough to go around, and that he had already been to the church to give them all they could handle for the time being. So, I gratefully accepted 2 loafs of bread, and Kameyo stuck a small bun in her purse.
Our day led us to Granville Island, where we did actually pay for some food (a potato knish, 2 tangerines, 2 pieces of chocolate, and a can of coconut). And in the meantime, at South China Seas Trading Co, I tasted the best garlic I have ever had - black garlic! This stuff is beautiful, incredibly delicious, and has twice the antioxidants as regular, raw garlic. Unfortunately, it is $7 per bulb. It has been fermented and has a sweet, slightly smokey flavour. I highly recommend getting your hands on some of this stuff.
On our way out, Kameyo mentioned an article she had heard about, which had described Granville Island dumpsters as the place for Freegans to find food.
"Freeganism is a total boycott of an economic system where the profit motive has eclipsed ethical considerations and where massively complex systems of productions ensure that all the products we buy will have detrimental impacts most of which we may never even consider. Thus, instead of avoiding the purchase of products from one bad company only to support another, we avoid buying anything to the greatest degree we are able. The word freegan is compounded from “free” and “vegan”." - freegan.info
More practically, freegans don't buy food, they search for good food that has been thrown away.
Kameyo and I were both curious about Freegans, and about what one of these dumpsters might look like so we wandered over to one and right in front of our very eyes we saw a merchant throwing away crates full of tomatoes. I took one of the tomatoes from him and asked why he was throwing them out, as they looked perfectly edible. Granted, most of them looked kind of moldy, but there were definitely many that looked perfectly fine. He said they were no good, but then when Kameyo and I started loading up on the ones that looked completely edible, he turned his little cart around and took them back inside.
We had caught the interest of another couple people that were standing there and together we decided to check inside the bin, just out of curiousity, to see what it looked like inside. Not completely dedicated to the cause, we pulled out 4 large red onions, shared them with the other two, and were on our way, Kameyo earning extra points for having the balls to be the one to actually get inside the dumpster.
It was an interesting addition to our day, to live like a Freegan for a few mins, and a social experiment that left me contemplating my consumtion. More than anything, it made me laugh and step outside the box for a moment.