In the parking lot of a fruit and vegetable wholesaler, May (28) takes ripe but rejected pineapples and mangoes from large containers. They take them home for free and for nothing in a large, colorful shopping bag. “Sometimes it’s like being in a video game. Then I’m in a container full of blueberries and I have to jump from pumpkin to pumpkin to get to the avocados.’
The non-binary May only goes to the supermarket sporadically. The student goes for almost all their food dumpster dive, which came over from America about ten years ago. ‘Waste bin diving’, in other words: removing valuable items from the waste. In addition to food, it can also be clothing or furniture. May herself calls it skippingas it is called in their native England.
A warm, sweet smell rises from the containers from which May takes their vitamins for the week tonight. ‘There is mold on some strawberries or apricots, but there is nothing wrong with these pineapples.’
Been on the agenda for years
Combating food waste has been on the agenda in the Netherlands for years. Supermarkets do their part by offering discounts on products that are approaching their use-by date. Consumers can buy a ‘magic box’ for a small price through companies such as Too Good to Go, which is filled with products that would otherwise be thrown away that day. The initiatives help to combat waste, but a quarter of all food in the Netherlands still ends up in the garbage: 2 billion kilos per year, according to research by the Samen Tegen Voedingwas foundation and Wageningen University & Research (WUR).
Consumers have the largest share in the waste; Every year a little more than 34 kilos of food is thrown away per person. 1.6 percent of the food is wasted in supermarkets, according to a study by WUR from 2020. But exactly how much is wasted by farmers, growers, wholesalers and food processing companies is much less clear, because they collect less data and are less transparent. , the researchers said.
To save the fruit from the garbage mountain, May regularly stops by the distribution center near their home to fill a shopper. While cycling through the industrial estate where the wholesaler is located, the student greets everyone who meets them in a friendly manner. ‘I never enter areas that are not public, that goes too far for me,’ they say.
However, May prefers not to use their real name in the newspaper, because dumpster diving is not always legal. Waste is sometimes still bought by companies that use it to make animal feed or to generate energy. Even if it is outside in a container, the food is still their property. Taking food out is then theft.
Strict quality standards
It is hard to blame individual entrepreneurs for having a lot of waste, May says. Rather, it is the system of overproduction, strict quality standards and best-before dates that causes the large mountains of waste. They regularly go dumpster diving at companies whose owners are happy that their discarded food is still eaten by someone.
Wholesalers must adhere to strict European standards for food safety and sometimes also to specific quality requirements of supermarkets. For example, fruit and vegetables should look aesthetically pleasing and not yet be too ripe. Ripeness can be measured in different ways, says owner of fruit and vegetable wholesaler Med Fruit in Amsterdam, Mehdi Haddadi. This can be done with a pressure gauge, or based on the sweetness level for fruit or the oil content of avocados. “It’s a stressful job,” Haddadi says with a laugh.
He calls it the exception rather than the rule that whole loads of fruit are actually thrown away. ‘But sometimes it happens that fruit has been left lying around for too long, or that the transport took too long,’ says Haddadi. ‘Then it can no longer stay fresh in a supermarket for a whole week, it is too ripe for that in our country.’ He often still sells the loads that are rejected for that reason to market traders, or he has food banks collected.
May remembers the first time they went dumpster diving. That was in England. ‘After a night out, a friend and I searched the containers next to a supermarket. She reached for eggshells and banana peels, while I found croissants and a bag full of pastries. I’ve been eating pastries for breakfast all month.’
First out of money need to the container
Once she moved to the Netherlands for her studies, May increasingly exchanged the supermarket for the waste container due to lack of money. “I got really addicted to it,” they say. ‘It’s such a nice feeling that you can take all kinds of tasty products home for free and thus prevent food waste.’ After a while, May began to slow down. “I gained weight from all the tasty pastries I kept finding.”
Dumpster divers are like raccoons, May says. Late at night they take to the streets, quietly going into the garbage cans in the dark in search of food. The timing of that search is essential, they explain. ‘You have to go to the bins just after closing time. Then there is still plenty of good quality food. Sometimes I’m late, you just see that another dumpster diver has already passed by.’
They hoist the shopping bag filled with pineapples onto their bicycle. They go to college on a racing bike, but for their food search they have a sturdy granny bike with a crate at the front and two panniers at the back. In it they slide stumps of leeks, a vegetable that they discovered thanks to dumpster diving.