The Art of Eating In - Cathy Erway [42]
I had met Adam that fall at a joint lecture and film screening in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, that he was giving alongside Heather Rogers, author of Gone Tomorrow: The Hidden Life of Garbage and director of a short documentary of the same name. The lecture was held at a small gallery space, and after the presentations, I briefly introduced myself over the buffet of freeganed refreshments. I explained that my blog was based on not eating out in restaurants, and he nodded appreciatively.
“Yeah, people ask me all the time, ‘What do you do when you want to go on a date? How do you take someone out?’” he said.
I laughed. I tried to imagine Adam in a restaurant, waving down a waiter. In baggy corduroys and a couple of layers of chewed-up T-shirts, Weissman cuts something of an effortless and completely unintentional re-envisioning of Chaplin’s famous “tramp” persona. The idea of him sacrificing his beliefs for the sake of dating just seemed preposterous.
A few weeks after signing up for the e-mail list, I opened an e-mail about a trash tour taking place that night. It was a mild spring day, and I couldn’t think of anything else I needed to do that night. I wrote down the meeting address, grabbed a couple of plastic bags that were around my apartment, hoped it wouldn’t rain, and headed out to meet them.
The moment Janet untangled the sturdy black plastic bag’s double knot, a pleasant, oniony aroma greeted us, as if we had just entered a bagel store in the morning. Yet it was ten o’clock on a busy weeknight in Murray Hill, and we were gathered around a pile of trash bags on the sidewalk. Inside the bag Janet held open was a cornucopia of multicolored bagels that had been baked that morning. It must have weighed ten pounds. Beside it were two more giant black garbage bags filled with more bagels. All had come from the bagel store that we were standing in front of on Second Avenue, which now had a metal grate over its facade.
With frizzy gray hair and dressed in comfortable slacks, a fanny pack, and sneakers, Janet Kalish looked to be in her midforties. She and Madeline Nelson, who was middle-aged and sporting similar, no-nonsense clothes, seemed to be leading this night’s tour. For some reason, I hadn’t expected I’d be meeting two middle-aged women this evening when I headed out the door, but then here I was, listening in attentively to their observations gleaned from much trash-going experience.
Bread, Janet explained, was by far the most commonly wasted type of food in this city. Every bakery that takes any pride in its baked goods must throw out any unsold products at the end of the day. All the hundreds of bakeries, selling crusty baguettes or rich brioches, Jewish challah or Italian foccacia—these all went into the trash. No matter the type of bakery, almost every one in the city practiced this tenet of the business: Never stock day-old bread. Hence, bread is the bread and butter of the city’s food waste.
Still holding open the garbage bag of bagels, Janet gestured to a French reporter who was standing near me: “I’m sure you know that in Paris, if you go to a bakery toward the end of the night, you’re picking through the last crumbs left on the shelf, maybe a