Dog Dare No. 2. Authored by Jon Slight. Originally sent on Aug 14th 2007 to Dan Carey.

(See Dan Carey's second dog Dare here.)

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"MAKE A MEAL THAT COSTS YOU NOTHING"

Having heard a lot about taking food from skips – or ‘freeganism’ to use its more irritating, media-friendly title – I decided to explore the possibilities for obtaining free food in Newcastle. Quickly realising that it was beyond me to create anything like a single, cohesive meal from what would no doubt be completely random ingredients, I realised that this course was going to take me far from the original intention of ‘a meal’, unless I employ the great semantic get-out clause, i.e. a meal being : “a portion of food taken at one time to satisfy appetite” rather than the more commonly-accepted “one of these regular occasions or times for eating food”. Id est, I could just go out and find something to eat to satisfy hunger rather than assemble a romantic meal for one using only my bare wit.

The other key issue was exactly how I would go about this task without it ‘costing’ me anything. Time would be applied to the task but perhaps not sacrificed, unless the entire endeavour was a disaster. Health, unlikely, and dignity, ignored, I reached the happy conclusion that money, finance was the key resource that I had to avoid depleting. Thus, buoyed by my own ability to think of a half-decent project, I aimed to explore Newcastle and feed myself without handing over a penny of my own money, or indeed eating any of the stocks of food in my flat.

Armed with stanley knife for gaining access to bins if required.

Picking fruit from the trees and bushes threw up limited success as expected. Exhibition Park has a collection of brambles, bushes and trees in a secluded area that I have often thought would be a good place to rape and strangle someone if I were that way inclined. I made my way there, about ten minutes walk from my flat. The vast majority of edible resources had been harvested by other enterprising locals, and the foliage cut a sorry sight. I spent an equally wretched while collecting the dregs of the blackberries left behind, which were tasty enough. I also sampled some berries which, whilst small and blue, were clearly not blueberries. They had a speckled white coating as if they were frozen. Anyway, they tasted of nothing in particular, and whist not a fat bastard I felt I needed more substance to my meal. I had a chaser of some red berries, which looked vaguely poisonous and on later googling it emerged that they were exactly that [woody nightshade?], although I suffered no ill effects.

Jesmond, the area of Newcastle where I live, is awash with reasonably priced restaurants serving equally reasonable food to stag dos and members of the drinking community. Restaurant bins were, predictably, a waste of time. You are more likely to be challenged, since the waiting staff regularly come and go through the open doors to the rear of the buildings. Moreover, the food has been half eaten and scraped into a single receptacle, resulting in a coagulated syrup of unrecognisable and unappetising slop. A few smaller restaurants and a pie shop offered up ingredients, notably a huge drum of vegetable oil that was unattended in a delivery bay, but I felt bad about stealing something they were going to use, and since the general hospital wasn’t on my route I decided against guzzling 20 litres of oil. I found a fist-sized mushroom in one bin which I appropriated with the intention of eating it later that afternoon.

Onward.

Tesco proved my saviour, as they seem to have a lassie-faire attitude to waste disposal. Most supermarkets, and even the larger shops, that I visited around Heaton and Byker, kept their bins guarded under watchful CCTV eyes behind large, wire-topped walls. The Morrisons of Heaton looked particularly imposing, didn’t approach bin area for fear of being shot by guards or treading on a land mine. Many stories about supermarkets pouring bleach over their products or destroying them so that they don’t get stolen. A small branch of Tesco Express, favoured by local students as it is in the heart of Newcastle’s Headingley equivalent, has two large bins (Biffa), only one of which is locked. The bins were in a relatively exposed area, so I had only a brief foray into them. However, success – a colossal bag of day-old bread and pastries. All items were, brilliantly, still inside their plastic containers which assured me that they had not been laced with killjuice. I took a pack of four doughnuts with pink icing (normal price – 98p, one day out of date) and a loaf of bread what I understand to be the ‘bloomer’ style. At this point it suddenly dawned on me that I was rifling through a bin in broad daylight, and I legged it down an alleyway. The bread loaf was fine, although I preferred scooping out the insides of the loaf to eating the outside since the packaging had split. The doughnuts were a revelation, ‘Thank Christ’ thought I, ‘something nice and filling to eat and now I won’t look like a complete tosser when I write this up’. Ate 2 of them, took the other two home to photograph in amusing artistic style but haven’t yet bothered. They are in the fridge along with some of the poisonous berries I took. Big mushroom was eaten as part of a pasta dish the next day.

I began to write this with the intention of moralising about the evils of wasting food when so many are hungry, as you can probably gather from the opening sentence of this piece, and I have decided to spare you that, chiefly because it’s all so obvious and it would only serve to wrap this essay up in a neat little package. I feel that I have come out of all this with a greater awareness of the contents of other people’s bins.