The Art of Eating In - Cathy Erway [47]
I quickly got started on making a basic vanilla custard. In the meantime, I turned the oven to 350 degrees and stuck the ramekins inside to crisp up the “pastry” a little. By the time I was done whisking together my basic, milk-and-egg-yolk vanilla custard, or pudding, the crusts had been taken out of the oven and had cooled down a little. The custard would take several hours, however, to cool. Getting sleepy, I filled the ramekins with custard up to the rims of the crust, covered them with plastic wrap, and let them chill in the refrigerator the rest of the night.
The next day, I came home with some fresh berries. I topped my vanilla-custard, chocolate-chip-muffin-crusted dessert with a few raspberries and spooned it up. It was divine.
Could I become a freegan convert? I agreed with almost everything people were saying on the trash tour and was astonished to find that it did seem more than viable to live off of grocery store rubbish, and fairly well at that. Freeganed food isn’t always stale or low quality, I’d learned. That head of garlic I took from the trash outside the upscale grocery? I used it to the last clove. Nothing was amiss about it—actually, it was a lot fresher than many bulbs I’ve purchased. But for me, there were a few problems with the freegan lifestyle. I loved to cook new things. And when I had an idea for something to run home and make, I wouldn’t want to be limited by what options were in the trash that day.
Reliance on availability, I realized, was something that freegans by nature had to fully accept. Instead of the changing harvests of the year (pre-global economy), their food choices were determined by sell-by dates and happenstance. Yet through my encounters with freegans, both on the tour and at the lecture, it didn’t seem as if anyone was too bothered by the types of food they found or didn’t find. This would be my biggest challenge if I were to become a freegan—not being able to choose what I cooked and ate. Plus, I was already giving up restaurant food, let’s not forget.
Overall, I got the sense that few of these freegans were “foodies,” like myself. I’m sure there are plenty of creative freegan chefs out there, eager to take a skillful shot at cooking the “secret ingredient” found in the Dumpster that day in some imaginative way. But still, he or she would have to have a substantial amount of will or tolerance. And what if you couldn’t find salt or pepper?
“I know—I never cook on the stove anymore. I use the toaster oven to cook everything these days,” I’d overheard Janet confide to another person on the tour, smirking secretively.
To be sure, I had gone trash diving in only one city, New York. There are active freegan communities all over the globe, in Europe especially. I once received an e-mail from a reader of my blog who described a trash tour he went on with freegans in New Orleans. They’d shared a giant feast the night after the tour, and he’d been fascinated, and eager to share the discovery.
My friend Matt had been less impressed with a group of freegans he met in Cleveland. They’d identified themselves as vegans, even though Matt had witnessed them eating both meat and dairy products that were found in the trash. Matt found this hypocrisy intolerable, arguing that some of the most important tenets of veganism had to do with nutrition, and a rigorous belief in the more healthful diet of plants-only eating. Indeed, to many vegans, it is important to abstain from meat for more than waste-conscious reasons. Plus, when it came to actually cooking the meat, my friend said these freegans had been clueless. They’d botched cooking a whole, frozen turkey, and had haplessly boiled the sack of gizzards they found inside its cavity while it was still in its plastic