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Dumpster Diving & Food Sacrificed to Idols
Been trying to find a more elegant way of framing this, but haven’t struck on anything, so I’ll just blurt it out here for later use:
A friend of mine recently mentioned that there is a trend among stores or restaurants where they will dump bleach into their food waste containers, so that people can’t eat their leftover trash. I know Ran Prieur has written a lot around this subject in the past and it’s a worthwhile one. Why shouldn’t garbage be free?
A co-worker recently unloaded several containers of expensive organic brand fruit juice on us, which was allegedly taken from a dumpster in, I think, Elkton, Maryland. And that’s what got me thinking back on the topic. The juice is fine. It’s in containers. No bleach. Somewhere along the way, I remembered some comparative religion stuff I’d read: the subject of food sacrificed to idols. In many cultures, food sacrificed to idols was taboo. It was not to be eaten. It had bad mojo, not because somebody was trying to contaminate perfectly edible waste products, but on account of the notion that the energy of the food had been dedicated to the spirit of the god or ancestor or whoever it was for. I know the Bible talks about this, and apparently it says different things about the subject in different places.
The thing that got me the most though was a re-envisioning of what a dumpster is, what a trash-can is. It’s not an area for waste, but an area where you leave offerings: offerings to some kind of god who oversees garbage, waste, loss, etc. It must be some dark earthy smelly god, some god of fungus and decay but also of renewal and the re-flowering of life laid low. The god of garbage is a god of resurrection - if biodegradable - or a god of things that stick around forever, life everlasting. Can someone eat your garbage? Some person or spirit? Should you be throwing that away? Should you have bought it in the first place?
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March 14th, 2008 at 12:58 pm
I think this is the type of question that astrology answers beautifully. I think they put bleach on the food for the unconscious, ritualistic reasons you’re seeing but also for the legalistic reason that if they know people are dumpster diving they could be put at legal liability for food poisoning etc. if they don’t take that extra step to make their garbage inedible.
This is why I think astrology would have an answer. Whatever house/planet/sign sign denotes garbage etc. it would have to be opposed by a house/planet/sign having to do with law. My understanding is that law in astrology is also ritual law because there was no division between church and state.
BTW I’ve read enough astrology to form an opinion on some things and when I got an accurate chart done (for free on a web site) I found that all of the planet-sign combinations I had most ridiculed were ones I had in my chart.
March 14th, 2008 at 7:52 pm
In all of the food establishments I’ve ever worked in, one of the ways in which you run a “tight ship” is that all “dead food” or food mistakenly made or rung in, gets thrown away immediately. Employees or anyone else for that matter are prohibited from eating these perfectly good dishes and if caught are summarily “written up”. 3 write ups — you’re gone!. If the ratio of trash thrown away breaches the product that which is sold in some percentage, I suppose all garbage will have a certain cache enough to warrant security forces and strict penalties for anyone eating anything ever that is “free”. And hell, why not a death sentence too for eating bleach poisoned perfectly good food?
Capitalism is truly a beautiful thing.
March 14th, 2008 at 8:14 pm
I once asked a restaurant owner why the tons of food thrown away every day were not used to feed homeless people.
His response:
“That’s all we need, homeless people coming around the back for free hand-outs.”
So I draw several conclusions from this.
1. The taboo of associating with the homeless, them being dirty, diseased “losers.” The owner and his restaurant cater to wealthy people who can afford to pay people to wait on them, as well to pay people to cook their food. Wealthy people do not want to associate with poor people. The view themselves as “winners” and the poor as “losers.” Losing can be viewed as contagious. You hang out with losers and you become a loser.
2. The taboo of giving something away to be consumed by a human. Most people pay for what they consume. To pay for what they consume, they work like dogs. If they work like dogs, everyone should work like dogs. People who dumpster-dive aren’t working like dogs or else they would have money to pay for the food.
3. The need to set an example. If everyone ate the food thrown away, nobody would pay for food and the business would collapse. The price that you pay for food factors in the excess food that is thrown away. So you subsidize waste when you purchase food.
4. The people that run society do not want the lower classes to get any freebies. The point is to “grind the poor” not enrich them. Otherwise, where else will you find people to work for a pittance? If people squat in an abandoned building and feed themselves for free, they take themselves out of the labor pool. Additionally, what could they be doing with all that “free” time on their hands? While everyone else works, these people are up to god knows what.
March 15th, 2008 at 6:58 pm
It’s weird, while reading this I was eating packaged fruit salad from Ken’s Market that kinda tasted like it had bleach on it. I thought that right before i turned on my computer.
Didn’t the farmers in the Grapes of Wrath pour chemicals all over the surplus fruit in the ditches rather than give it to their poor dust bowl pickers?
Remember when I had that dream that I saw the god of “Free” boxes and how this divine entity bore a striking resemblance to Samuel L. Jackson?
March 16th, 2008 at 2:03 pm
Oh yeah, I forgot the most important part.
Leviticus 23:22 And when ye reap the harvest of your land, thou shalt not make clean riddance of the corners of thy field when thou reapest, neither shalt thou gather any gleaning of thy harvest: thou shalt leave them unto the poor, and to the stranger: I am the LORD your God.
Ruth 2:15 And when she was risen up to glean, Boaz commanded his young men, saying, Let her glean even among the sheaves, and reproach her not:
16 And let fall also some of the handfuls of purpose for her, and leave them, that she may glean them, and rebuke her not.
My mother says she heard of a small farming town where a woman knew of this biblical law and decided it was ok for her to go into the fields and pick up the leftovers. The local farmers knew it was biblical so they let her and some others who had joined her continue to do this. Sorry no link.
March 16th, 2008 at 2:26 pm
Cool
March 18th, 2008 at 9:59 am
Julia, the author of “The Year of Living Biblically” references that Leviticus law. Great book by the way, even if he stumbles on the New Testament