One woman found so much food in Countdown's bins, she bought a chest freezer to store it. Photo / Supplied
An occasional series profiling New Zealanders who have lived lives less ordinary yet largely unknown.
As living costs soar to a 32-year high, hitting us hard at the supermarket checkout, one woman reveals how she found a way to avoid paying for fruit and vegetables.
As the light seeped out
of another moody Dunedin day, Amanda* pulled on an empty tramping pack and rode her bike to the back of her local Countdown.
A student with little money and no car, her grocery budget was tight. But she knew there was food still good enough to eat in the bins behind the supermarket. Parking her bike behind a nearby building, she scaled the supermarket fence, scurried over to a dumpster and clambered in.
For two years, this was how Amanda did her "weekly supermarket shop".
"I knew there was so much food that was just getting chucked out. Bags of wrapped food. Bread daily, and I was guaranteed fruit and vegetables every week," she says of her Countdown dumpster diving that began in 2009. "They always had bananas. They weren't necessarily very ripe or had anything wrong with them, I think they just always had excess," Amanda tells the Herald, adding that, to this day, she loathes having to pay for a bunch.
In the height of summer, Amanda discovered black rubbish bags full of ripe berries which she turned into smoothies and sorbets. Other times she'd open a bag to find "delicious cheeses", boxes of biscuits or damaged bottles of maple syrup. She ate them all. There was only one thing she considered off-limits: "Except for meat, I was never really worried about food being near its expiration date. I think I would just go by sight and smell. I washed everything really well and I never got sick."
Amanda found so much food in the Countdown bins, she and her flatmates bought a chest freezer to store it.
"I didn't buy fruit for more than a year. I could make things and freeze them: soups, curries - it was substantial. It made a real impact on my ability to eat good food during that time, because I was on such a limited income. Fruit and vege is really expensive. I ate better because of it."
Sometimes, Amanda says she arrived at her local dumpster spot with her tramping pack and found it was the equivalent of having picked up a shopping basket when you really should have got a trolley.
"Every now and then there'd be a really big haul. We imagined maybe [the supermarket] had a power cut and everything in the freezers had to get chucked out. So, on those nights, everything would be mostly frozen and we'd fill up a car. Those times it was just as much as we could fit. There were just trolleys of it sitting outside. I think we only had one or two friends with cars. If it was a big haul, we'd tell the others and they'd go and get it."
Amanda says she and her mates, who wore gloves and boots as they sifted through the bins, were "really particular about trying to be respectful" about what they were doing.
"You usually had to get in the bins and dig through. The less responsible divers might be leaving things next to the bin or not closing it after they've been in there. But we were really particular about trying to be respectful about it. It kind of felt like a resource that we'd tapped into.
"We knew it wasn't right that it was happening but we didn't want them to just lock the bins and then not be able to access them at all. It just seemed like there should be another way of dealing with that much food. And knowing there are so many people in need of food - we could just see that it was a systemic problem," says Amanda, who lived in an industrial area and fashioned a shopping trolley into a bike trailer so she could cart waste to a compost bin across town.
"I think I'm quite a thrifty person, I don't like waste," she says. "We were being really, I suppose, intentional around what waste was going in the bin. It was something I was feeling concerned about – producing waste. [Dumpster diving] appealed to my desire to keep it out of the landfill."
But Amanda and her friends weren't the only ones feeding themselves from this "untapped resource" - and that was what brought an untimely end to her dives.
"In the beginning, I was less concerned about getting caught. I'd bike down and I felt safer being by myself. Because if I got caught by police, say, I could just explain to them that, you know, it was just me. It wasn't a party. I was just getting my weekly vegetables."
But one night, Amanda arrived on her bike to find a pair of travellers rattling around in the bins.
"I think they were Australians," she recalls of the two men. "I waited for a while because, you know, that whole thing of it not being a party ..."
After an hour of riding her bike around in wait and seeing it was close to midnight, Amanda decided to join them.
"I jumped over the fence and as soon as I did, the police turned up. They'd had some complaints from someone. I should have probably not done it that night. I think I'd had quite a good run for quite a few months that I'd probably become comfortable.
"The boys and I both got taken to the police station and we both got warnings. That was the end of it for me. The police were like, 'We'll charge you for burglary next time'. Which does seem a bit extreme. If I hadn't been caught I would have just kept doing it until I did.
"It was really fun. You know when you're young and you don't have to be up early so you can stay up late and jump in a dumpster and open some bags and get your groceries. It was quite an adventure."
It wasn't until Amanda moved to Auckland in 2012 that she had another go and found there was still supermarket food being dumped.
"I went to Farro a couple of times, they also had lots of bananas," she recalls. And while she made friends with another dumpster-enthusiast, she says it was never quite the same as those heady days out the back of that Dunedin Countdown.
"We did a few together but it became quite challenging. Most of the bins were behind locked fences and things."
Although her dumpster diving days are well and truly behind her, the experience has impacted how Amanda shops now.
"I try not to go to the supermarket. I try to buy all my fruit and vegetables from farmers' markets. I still buy bananas and every time I do I wish I didn't have to spend money on them."
According to a Countdown spokesperson, the company has been working to reduce food waste since 2011 when its food rescue programme began. It has a sustainability goal to "send zero food waste to landfill from our stores by 2025".
Initiatives such as The Odd Bunch fruit and vegetable range has been introduced and in-store bakeries make use of overripe bananas by turning them into banana bread.
The supermarket also has a policy of "donating any food that is still fit for consumption, but can't be sold".
When it comes to dumpster diving, Countdown considers the practice "trespass and theft as waste bins are located on supermarket property".
"We work to rescue and donate any food that is still safe to eat, so while a product in a bin may look okay on the surface, it could have been recalled, or food safety could have been compromised at some point, which has meant it needs to be disposed of."
*Amanda's name has been changed to protect her identity.
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