The biggest catch of trash-food that I experienced so far in this country: 8 meters of table fully filled with veggies, fruit and bread was the result of a dumpster dive tour that I organised in Den Haag last Wednesday in cooperation with Stroom, a Den Haag based art-institute with a focus on the urban environment.
We were with around fifteen people on bikes going through ten dumpsters in the city, and dinner was served for twenty. Kasper came along too, as you can see on the photo above of the kitchen where he is preparing food with the other divers. We also accepted for the first time a (diving) journalist to come along, which resulted in a full-page article this Saturday in a leading Dutch newspaper, with a great photo of Kasper giving some food to a local.
Most food we received at two markets and not from the actual skips/dumpsters. The time of the tour at late-afternoon is great for markets but isn't the best moment to dive into the supermarket-skips or bins of other shops in Den Haag (for great results check them in the city-center early morning; I found candles and fresh food there some weeks ago while scouting the city). But the result was amazing, overwhelming for all of us. We took with us a little fright-bike which we literally stacked to the top, and we had to use all the extra bags that we had taken with us as well. We simply had no space left for more!
All participants were super-excited about the food that was given to us, about the market-vendors that came after us to give even more food and the resulting dinner we all prepared together. Dinner in casa-style you may say, like a Thursday-night-open dinner. Together we collected the food, cleaned it, cooked and ate it. People who didn't know each-other had lots of great conversations and new connections were made. There were around ten dishes, ranging from soup and salad to yardlong beans and grilled lettuce.
Before dinner I did a presentation about trashwiki.org, dumpster diving at the casa, and in Leiden. A shorter version of skipping waste by Lily and edited by Olar, accompanied the talk. A great and overall fun experience. Definitely an appetizer for more.
Comments
trashwiki stickers on many of
trashwiki stickers on many of those underground trash things? / dumpsters? freecycle ones would be even better for the furniture and stuff they chuck..
more photos and press
Some more photos from the tour are available right here:
http://stroom.typepad.com/foodprint/2011/04/dumpster-dive-een-verhuisdoo...
And another journalist also wrote an article about the tour, find it here:
http://groene.nl/commentaar/2011-04-04/eten-uit-de-prullenbak
In the meantime I received five more requests from other journalists and one-by-one except a writer who was already working on an article I said sorry I am not a monkey in a zoo ;-)
Fantastic!
Fantastic!
sweet! Glad skipping waste
sweet! Glad skipping waste got a view too (awesome that it was edited down!), sounds like such an exciting time! Yay for us all! You've reinspired me to do some dd tours around here too. yippee!
i miss casa style dinners a
i miss casa style dinners a LOT. and casa. and it would be so great to take part in some DD tours someday..it's way more fun with other people. treasure hunting at it's best! modern day pirates or something :)
how did u manage to find the 15 people who joined the tour?
The participants responded to
The participants responded to a mailing of the art-institute Stroom, who contacted me some months ago to organise a diving-tour in the context of an exhibition and art-installation they were organising called "There I fixed it" (Unruly solutions to urgent problems), about upcycling. They are quite an established organisation and have a lot of people in their mailing-list. In the end we received around 30 requests of people wanting to participate, before announcing it was "full".
The thing in this country is that people have heard about it from t.v. (there has been a couple of items recently) or read about it (even an uncle of mine mentioned it the other day while I hadn't said anything) and therefore more and more people know that "people are doing it", they also know it is kind of hip to do in some circles, and therefore interest is quite high. But yeah, skipping in this country still isn't that easily done as in places such as Berlin, Barcelona or New York, and they have no clue where to start...