Eating garbage in Luxembourg

I am fully aware of the shock value the title of these blogs create, and I love it.





So I was Couchsurfing in Luxembourg city at Sanran's place, great Turkish guy, and he was also hosting Lea from Croatia.  She has been traveling the world and is self admittedly "religiously moneyless".  She has hitchhiked across Canada, travelled Central America, Mexico, and was now bike touring in Europe!  Anyway, she was quite a resourceful person and I learned a lot from her.

The first thing I learned was how to dumpster dive.  Now this may seem pretty silly, but it is an art.  First you need to find the grocery stores.  Then you need to find the ones that don't lock their garbage bins.  Then you need to get in and out all stealth without getting caught.  The other thing I learned was to wait outside bakeries around closing time.  They throw out sooooo much food, i.e. the photo above.  This is over 40 Euros in baked goods.  Fun fact: it's legal to dumpster dive in France.

Luxembourg is the third richest country in the world in terms of the average revenue its citizens earn. The amount of waste in that country is astounding.  It really made me think about how we waste in the Western world.  It is a real shame, there are countries without food at all.

What's fascinating is that dumpster divers have organized themselves using this website: http://trashwiki.org/en/Main_Page Lea would take photos, record the location of the dumpster, and then update the website with as much info as possible. She would note the time we were there and how full the dumpsters were.  It was pretty incredible to be honest.  I was very reluctant at first, but I have been spending A LOT of money on food on this trip.  It's expensive here, especially Luxembourg and Switzerland.

Some of you may judge me for this, but I've sorted through "garbage" in the dumpsters.  I put that word in quotation marks because this is what I saw.  Bags of perfect baked goods, bags of apples in plastic, potatoes, onions, etc.  They actually separate the food waste from the trash waste, so it's all clean and in bags.  The reason she said the dumpster diving is so good in Europe is that the Eurozone is so strict with expiry dates.  I mean they really are tight about it...it's funny I even found a lot of food that had not even reached the expiry date yet.  They probably just had a new shipment come in, so they threw out what was left over.

Lea had 4Euros on her for the last few months, she challenged me to live money free, and I relished the challenge.  I didn't spend any money for a whole week.  I would be on the lookout for dumpsters everywhere, sometimes coming upon some soy chocolate pudding, other days it was packages of rice and pastas...basically whatever you can imagine was there.  One time I found close to 30 perfect bananas.  I mean this is ideal because you just take the peel off and the banana is fine inside.  A whole week without spending any money, it wasn't even hard to do.  There was just so much garbage to eat.

I also learned how to Ranger Roll, yah you heard me.  Check it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=so93nqxZLjM

Lea changed my life twice with a few days.  She showed me how to eat for free, and she completely changed the way I pack on the road.  This was a great addition to the amazing knowledge I am already gathering on different cultures, traveling, language, and connection.  Life on the road...