Guy Eats Out of Dumpsters for a Week to Highlight Food Waste

Rob Greenfield, a 27-year-old adventurer from San Diego, took up a unique cause. He wanted to create awareness about the large amounts of food wasted in the U.S, so he decided to travel the country and eat out dumpsters for a week.
It’s surprising, the kind of food Greenfield gets from the trash. His refrigerator is filled with fresh fruits, vegetables and bagels worth $200. And he hasn’t paid a penny for any of it. All he does is ‘dumpster dive’ behind grocery stores, which means he shuffles through the food discarded by store workers. “Some people call it nasty,” he says. “It’s just a matter of perspective.”
Greenfield has taken dumpster-eating to a whole new level. He created 21 Gourmet Dumpster Meals to showcase “the flaws in the American food system and inspire people to be part of the solution.” Surprisingly, Greenfield does not encourage people to follow him and eat from dumpsters. “I don’t recommend dumpster living to anybody. I recommend taking proper care not to put food in the dumpsters in the first place.”
According to the National Resources Defence Council, Americans throw away food worth $165 million every year. That’s about 90 billion pounds of perfectly edible food. Greenfield says that the U.S. produces enough food to feed twice its population. But most of it is wasted or inefficiently used. He suggests that instead of throwing away food, locals make a conscious effort to donate food to the San Diego Rescue Mission and San Diego Food Bank.
Greenfield has created a video of his experiences, called ‘Dumpster Diving with Rob Greenfield’. His first stop was at a grocery store in Holdrege, Nebraska, where he got enough loot to feed him for three whole months. He biked 4,700 miles in 104 days and 70 percent of his diet was from dumpsters. This experience prompted him to take on the 7-day challenge.