This Article is From Aug 29, 2010

Food scavengers in New York

Food scavengers in New York
New York: The Dumpster divers started their bicycle run just after nightfall on a summer Friday, rolling through the steamy streets of Williamsburg and Greenpoint, stopping only to dig through trash bags and pull out produce. They wore plastic gloves for the messier bags and used a flashlight on the darker stretches of sidewalk. Then they loaded their finds onto a cargo bike, retied the bags and cycled on.  

The goal was to find enough food to supply an every-other-week gathering called Grub, which one founder has described as "a cheap, simple dinner for friends and co-conspirators." It is a communal meal created from food that would otherwise have been wasted -- and that many people might not deign to eat.

So Jessie Martens grabbed a bruised cantaloupe and some shiny heirloom tomatoes from a curb in front of a supermarket on Union Avenue. Eric Levinson found bottles of organic juice being discarded outside a building near the Pulaski Bridge. And on Bedford Avenue, Phoebe Gray and Eric Lewis sifted through seven bags of trash before uncovering a bounty of kale, blackberries and peppers, as well as a punctured avocado that Mr. Lewis called "premade guacamole."

"It's a way to feed a lot of people for free," Mr. Levinson, a 27-year-old chef and yoga teacher, who was piloting the cargo bike, said of the group's scavenging. "And it's a way to raise awareness of the way food is wasted."

Two days later, on a Sunday afternoon, five people stood inside Rubulad, a Bedford-Stuyvesant loft space that usually hosts underground art events, examining the peppers, the blackberries and the rest of the haul. (Since that dinner, events at Rubulad have been suspended because of fire code issues, and Grub has moved, temporarily, to a spot in Downtown Brooklyn.)

"This is a kind of improvisation," said Mirella Huertas, 26, an artist from Puerto Rico, as she began chopping tomatoes.

Inspired by communal meals shared by squatters in Amsterdam and Berlin, the dinners are meant to promote camaraderie. Each menu is determined by the vagaries of the sidewalk haul and the palate of whoever shows up to cook. While the concept of eating from Dumpsters might turn the stomach, there is a rich history in New York of intrepid people transforming someone's trash into treasure, and the Grubsters are careful about what they take. Most of the discards they grab are bagged inside supermarkets and never come into direct contact with other garbage -- not perfect, perhaps, but perfectly safe.

Jeff Stark, who made a short documentary about Grub called "First the Dishes, Then the Revolution," said the dinners brought together people from varied backgrounds with a shared interest in stepping outside mainstream consumer culture.

"Grub provided a recurring space to come back and check in with an extended community," said Mr. Stark, an artist from Carroll Gardens who helped start the dinners in 2005. "You could find a place to stay, a bike to ride, a show to play, all in one shot."

These days the dinner is organized by the In Our Hearts collective, which has also run the Really Really Free Market, a cashless swap meet held at Judson Memorial Church in Greenwich Village.

As afternoon turned into evening, people continued to show up and pitch in with preparations. There was Robert Holley, a first-time visitor, who said that he had arrived from Toronto the night before and had come to the loft on advice from a friend in Amsterdam. There was a man who goes only by the name Ayr, who said he had been working on environmental campaigns in California and had not set foot in Brooklyn for five years. And there were Sadie Spence and T. J. Matteson, both AmeriCorps volunteers who moved to the city two years ago from West Virginia and quickly became regulars at the dinners.

"This is like a food community," said Mr. Matteson, 21, who lives in Crown Heights. "Because I'm from a working-class background the idea of salvaging things is a natural family value."

Songs by Alex Chilton and Charlotte Gainsborough played through speakers. Ornaments and cardboard cutouts in the shape of stars and planets were suspended from the ceiling with ribbon, and a breeze blew through a skylight. Kale and sweet potato stir fry sizzled on a stove. Somebody made a jumbo salad. Somebody else uncorked a bottle of wine.

Soon it was 7:15 p.m. The dishes were taken from a cupboard.

"Welcome to Grub," shouted a tall man called Thadeaus. "Talk to somebody you never met before."

People filled their plates, walked out onto a porch and then climbed an iron ladder to the roof, where benches and chairs sat among sculptures of branches.

On one part of the roof people were discussing the finer points of traveling by freight train. In another, people reminisced about Tuli Kupferberg, a member of the seminal East Village rock band the Fugs, who recently died at the age of 86.

Youco Harada, 33, a fashion designer from the Lower East Side, said that it was her second time at Grub. Her first had been on a chilly night three years earlier, and she had followed the Grub directive to speak with a stranger -- a man who gave her a jacket to wear home. Before returning, Ms. Harada said, she sent the man a text message asking if he would be at the dinner and offering to bring his jacket.

"He said he didn't know if he would be here," Ms. Harada said. "But he told me he didn't need the jacket back yet because it isn't cold."

The light faded. People took turns playing a mandolin as trucks rumbled in the streets below. As darkness fell, the dinner guests climbed back down the iron ladder, carrying empty plates and glasses.
.