Tonight I ran into Trader Joe's fifteen minutes before they were closing. While I was picking through the apples, a young man who worked there was taking bananas and throwing them in a cart. He worked hesitantly and an older man, who I can only assume was his manager, started barking at him to "Just get rid of all the ones that are bad! Think of it as if it was your home. Would you want these on your table? Treat this the same way." When I looked over at the young man our eyes locked and I made a face that said "Jeez! Calm down mister." The man smiled and said "It's so hard because these are just getting good!"as he motioned to the 100 or so bananas filling up his huge cart. And he was absolutely right. The bananas were yellow with smallish brown spots. They were at the ripeness in which they are sweetest and, in both of our opinions, the best! On the bottom of the cart, underneath the gorgeous bananas, were 20 or so perfect looking gala apples. I started to get a sick knot in my stomach picturing all these beautiful fruits dumped in the trash. "This is terrible!" I said. He agreed and whispered that he doesn't understand why they can't donate them to a shelter or lower the price so people can buy them still. He said he brings it up but they are not allowed. I was totally flabbergasted and it was in that exact moment that I gained clarity and understanding towards a subculture of people I have in the past dismissed as wacky, extreme and beneath me...Dumpster Divers. So of course I asked him if they have people that Dumpster Dive there and he said yes and he always feels so bad for them. When I did a little research at home I found that Trader Joes is a Dumpster Diver favorite and is "known for throwing out the most usable food."He told me a story of one homeless man who was diving there around the holidays. He spoke with the man and inquired about his situation. It was quite simple: the man had lost his job, could not pay his rent and had no place to sleep and no money to buy food. This can and IS happening to many people here in America EVERY SINGLE DAY. We seem to draw a line between "us" and "them" when the reality is that life can turn up or down for anyone of us at any time. As I stood there talking to him as he sadly plunked another banana into the cart I had the overwhelming desire to leave my basket filled with green bananas and unbruised apples and wait outside in the dark-my car running nearby- and grab the amazingly FREE, beautifully clean, perfectly ripe-and-ready-for-my-Vitamix edible dumpster treasures. But I didn't. Instead I gathered even more items, waited on line and forked over 108 bucks.Why? Because I was too embarrassed to ask the guy if I could have the stuff he was going to throw out anyway. Why? I'm not sure why. And I think when I start to unearth the answers to WHY they are going to be far reaching, deeply ingrained and messy. Most of us are taught, especially through the media, that being a consumer has value. That what we spend and not what we can afford somehow defines us and as a result can either fill us with a false sense of pride or a bad case of the mean reds. Isn't the larger question though, why are grocery stores (and dunking donuts and starbucks the list goes on and on and on) throwing out perfectly good food when we have people with no food to eat down the block? Or at the very least, why not mark it down so that people who cannot normally afford organic prices can have the opportunity to buy it on sale? Are the poor not worthy of good food? Or clothing? Are we going out of way to deny people of their basic needs? It reminds me an article I recently read about H&M and Walmart throwing out clothes. To make matters worse they were destroying the clothes before throwing them out to make them unwearable. WHAT is going on? We would rather destroy the clothes than let the person who digs through and finds them be able to make use of them and wear them? It even took the New York Times multiple attempts to even get a response from the retailer. Everyone is defining themselves as "Green" but it is all bullshit. A very BASIC "Green" practice would be to donate food and clothes instead of wasting them and adding millions of trash filled plastic bags that will pollute our water and land. It's called basic RECYCLING. Everyone is recycling bags and plastic containers but the simplicity of reusing food and clothes you were going to sell for profit is lost on them. The practices of Trader Joe's, along with H&M and Walmart are continuing along a toxic path that they are adamantly "saying" and constantly praising themselves for not walking on. You are talking the talk. Now walk the walk. And remember that "Green" doesn't just stand for dollars.
