Dumpster Diving #1: My Reason for Making this Blog
Dumpster diving has been a side interest of mine for a while. Growing up in somewhat impoverished conditions, and finding a home in the punk, DIY, and ecological movements of my generation, I gravitated towards dumpster diving naturally. I didn't realize how interested I was until I found myself looking out for trash compactors behind big box stores, and expounding on my hatred of them with every sighting.
Researching dumpster diving is, by its nature, a hard task. The most reliable sources are often zines, forums1, and various anarchist cookbooks. Second to those are heavily curated first hand accounts from social media, and while those can provide insight, they mostly focus on the most attention grabbing rather than the most educational or true.
The issue with these sources is that they tend to be incomplete, and sometimes there is excellent information buried in threads of the same sort of thing. Not to say "go to colleges after move out season" isn't great advice, but it's been said about a million times by now.
And of course, the several blogs I found filled with AI slop (insulting to the stuff pigs eat) on dumpster diving boiled my blood. So here I am.
The prime motivation behind this blog is going to be that there needs to be a place on the internet for dumpster diving knowledge to be centralized, for me and those interested in the practice. In a time when things with broad appeal is elevated more than ever, it's important to cultivate your niche interests.
There are a few dangers of starting this blog, though. First is the old "I will create a new central place for information!" and then just creating another place with incomplete information. However, this is not as big a concern because, frankly, there isn't much on the internet about it.
The larger concern that I'm much more worried about is that centralizing information will gentrify the practice. Dumpster diving is obviously a thing done out of desperation and poverty, but in a time when rich kids go to buy $100 pants at Goodwill, we must be vigilant. People experiencing homelessness often rely on dumpster diving as a means of feeding themselves, and often people who are just scraping by do so by dumpster diving. If a bunch of teenagers with trust funds start posting dumpster diving aesthetic TikToks, we've failed as a society.
Now, if you're economically privileged and you want to dumpster dive, you should be extra conscious about not taking more than you need, and focusing on giving to people who are in need. Also, don't leave a mess, and for god's sake don't post about it. Stores have too many trash compactors and locked dumpsters as it is. I think I'll do another post about diving ethics soon, but that's where I'll leave it for now.
Thank you for reading my first post on this blog! I hope this is the first of many posts that I write and you read, but we'll see about that soon. This is the Chicken Farrier, signing off.
I'm including reddit in the "forums" item of that list only because lists of three are the most impactful. Calling modern reddit a forum is an insult to the beauty of real old school forums.↩