At the turn of the 20th century, thousands of horse carcasses littered public thoroughfares, kitchen waste showered the streets from above and “swill children” walked door-to-door gathering kitchen refuse from city dwellers to sell to farmers for animal feed.
Fireplace ashes, sewage, horse manure and dead animals were strewn along city roads.
This was the turning point in the history of trash, and it changed the public’s notion of waste.
The public-health concern urged municipalities to pass anti-dumping legislation and develop strategies for gathering leftover materials. While Edwardian-era health reformers welcomed the increased attention to sanitation, at the same time, it altered people’s perceptions of what is and is not trash.
“Most Americans produced little trash before the 20th century,” writes Susan Strasser, a historian of American consumer culture, in her book “Waste and Want: A Social History of Trash” (Holt Paperbacks, 2000). “Women boiled food scraps into soup or fed them to domesticated animals; chickens, especially, would eat almost anything and return the favor with eggs.”
A matter of preference
According to Strasser, nothing is inherently trash. Food is not dirty in itself, but it is considered dirty to leave food splattered on clean clothing.
Recycling is often considered a noble aim, but not when people jump into Dumpsters to forage for food.
Even the term “trash” is relative: One person’s bruised apple tossed into the garbage is another person’s afternoon snack.
“Part of the mind gap is that if one part of the piece of food has gone bad, the whole thing has gone bad,” said Brady Ryan, a Seattle native who Dumpster dives. “So if there is a bruise on an apple, the whole apple is bad. No, I just cut off that bruise, and now I have an apple.”
Elizabeth Wang, a senior journalism student at the University of Washington, differs.
“I won’t eat a bruised apple,” Wang said. “I just hate the texture of them. There’s no crisp.”
“The sorting process that creates trash varies from person to person, it differs from place to place and it changes over time,” Strasser writes. In other words, how people define waste, defines their actions.
“Food waste is anything that is expired,” said Meghin Spencer, a senior UW astronomy student.
Dumpster divers disagree. Expired food is often perfectly ripe for the eating or could be nice additions to soup.
“Food waste is any leftover that is uneatable, according to individual preference,” said Yun Wang, a sophomore philosophy student at the UW.
No waste
Farmers might disagree. Food waste can be used to fill the hungry bellies of hogs, which will eventually be slaughtered to meet the farmer’s own caloric needs.
In fact, early 19th-century women often stored scraps of food in slop pails and grease pots. On the farm, leftover grease was used for making soap and candles. Farm animals grazed close to home, eating the extra scraps and bones that occupants threw out their windows.
“At some point we define [waste] as rubbish, to be taken back out and removed beyond the borders of the household,” Strasser said.
It is exactly this “out of sight, out of mind” mentality that Carl Woestwin battles as a waste-reduction planner and program manager for Seattle Public Utilities.
“Don’t have bigger eyes than stomach,” Woestwin advised. “About 56,000 tons of the commercial waste stream is food” and “we estimate that up to 10 percent of that food is edible.”
For Ryan, Dumpster diving for edible food is part of being a globally conscious citizen and, at the same time, providing himself with a free meal.
“We’re eating good food. We’re eating better food than anybody who goes to a store,” Ryan said. “We eat $45-a-pound cheese here.”
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