Once I met some hippies who live in the Canary Islands. They told me that is is a great place to live as it is always warm (+18 in January in the daytime), so it is possible to live outside. It is quite good for making money by playing in hte street or selling some hand-made stuff as there are a lot of rich tourists there. At last, the islands are quite good for dumpster diving too.
Of course, it is good to hear 1000 times, but it is still better to see it and experience once. So, Dear Santa gave me a present – a week in Lanzarote, the Northern island of the Canary Islands.
The island was quite touristic, the sea coast was full with hotels and restaurants. I also saw some alternatively looking people playing music and pretending to be statues, as well as selling some ceramic and leather stuff. The temperature turned out to be high enough to live outside, even in January. One guy who was playing hte guitar in the street said he lived in a cave and it was wquite comfortable as there is almost no rain in the island.
Regarding the vegetation, the island looked quite rocky and desert like. It turned out that Lanzarote is of volcanic origin as any other ones in the chain, but the truth is that on this particular islands not many things grow. I saw mostly palm trees, cactus and some grapes. The locals say most of the food is imported from the mainland, primarily Spain, and other Canary Islands. So, the hope of getting local food from the island died.
Nevertheless, the curiosity took its power over me, and I tried to dumpster dive. There were several interesting encounters. First of all, during the New Year’s night a number of cafes put out some small packages outside of hteir doors. In one of the packages I found several pretty nice lemons. Then, there were some big trash bins, but the trash there was mainly from the restaurants and the houses, so, nothing really valuable.
Near the hotels I saw just a couple of interesting things that I did not really need: a pink child bag full of children clothes, and an insulating swimming suit.
The best part was, of course, the trash of one of the supermarkets. Most of them had their trash locked up, but I have found by chance one that had it open and accessible to the public. It just put out everything that seemed to be not OK just outside in the trash bin. Or in front of its door in case with the bread. You can see the results of dumpster diving in the supermarket trash.
Some vegetables, fruit, mushrooms and sauce (the expiration date is several months from the date when it was found in the trash). Dinner is ready!
The bread outside of the supermarket. Fresh and packed.
Some fruit, bread and the King cake – a traditional pastry for the Spanish Epiphany festival during the Christmas season (8 January in 2012)
In 2015 a journalist from RTL Klub, Hungarian media portal, decided to film dumpster diving and cooking. Apparently, this topic gets Hungarian media attention once in a while.
In 2010 journalists from Index.hu decided to make a video about dumpster diving and then cooking the dumpstered vegetables. The dumpster diving took place in the Central Market in Budapest. The journalist and the cameraman were following us while we were fishing for veggies from the market’s dumpsters. The journalist also joined the dumpster diving. After that one person from the group invited the cameraman and the journalist home, where they cooked a nice meal from the dumpstered food.
