The Dumpster Behind Wheatsville

Michael was furious. He had been chased off the dumpsters behind Wheatsville while scavenging for ingredients to bring to the AMA kitchen. Wheatsville is the local hippy grocery and a staple of Austin culture. People loyal to Wheatsville include liberals, vegans, massage therapists, people with strange or severe allergies, ear candlers, and essential oil enthusiasts. Short of a farmer’s market or growing your own vegetables, there is no more leftward a way to get groceries in Austin. People congregate there after Ecstatic Dance. When I first moved here, the cork board outside Wheatsville was where I found apartments to live in and later where I posted vacancies. These are my own tribe, or rather, one of my tribes: Texas Hippies. Moreover, it's a co-op, owned by members and steered by a committee. It's cumbersome, not especially profitable, full of politics and drama, and firmly anchored to a community and a place. Something between a chain store and a kooky neighbor. 

When it froze and snowed 12 inches, no one went anywhere. While I went sledding, people whose job it was to rotate stock, put things in refrigerators, throw out expired food, and do a bunch of other grocery store things did not go to work. When they returned two days later, they had to throw a lot of food into the dumpsters behind the store, only there was so much food, it wouldn't fit in the dumpsters.

Now, this is controversial, and I sympathize with both sides: I do love living in a world where there are serious laws about the handling and the sale of food. People who work in grocery stores are saturated in food safety doctrine. What is saleable and what is spoilage is defined by laws and those laws are good. Spoilage must not be sold, nor gifted, nor eaten in the break area, it must be “Wasted”. Waste is a word that gets maligned but is critical to a functioning first world. Waste draws a line that says, this is civilization, we exist on this side.

I've eaten out of dumpsters before. Once or twice for fun, once because I was hungry. It was quite a feeling to cross that line for the first time. I felt more like a criminal digging through a dumpster than at any other time, doing any other thing I may have done in my past. Hunger and need carry more social stigma than breaking the law. 

Wheatsville should have been the first place to relax about dumpster diving, but when Michael got there, there was a guard. There was a hill of food next to the dumpster a meter high and several meters wide. It was all cold. It had never not been cold. Everything had been cold. The man warned him away. Michael politely explained that he understood the risks and held no one liable but that people were starving and he was going to bring them some of this food. As they argued, Michael noticed a discarded cardboard box for a 9mm handgun, recently purchased and opened. He confronted the man with the box. What the fuck is this? The man called the police.

Maybe the gun was purchased with a different phase of the disaster in mind. The looting phase. It's hard to reconcile this with the ostensible relationship between the store and its surrounding community, it being a coop. To Micheal, it was a shocking culmination of neglect and cruelty toward the poor and unhoused. It was one thing for comfortable people to sit it out in their homes, another thing to stand guard over food with guns.  

I first tried my local Randalls, but there was nothing there for me to steal, only a padlocked dumpster and security cameras stationed at each corner, so I drove to Wheatsville. When I pulled up, there was a guy there. He explained to anyone that approached that the food was all bad and that we shouldn't eat it or feed it to anyone. He had a clipboard. I gave him my full attention and thanked him when he had said his piece. Two dirty guys were tossing stuff into an old pickup. One of them was super skinny, they both looked cold. As we rummaged through the hill, I struck up a conversation. They were getting food for a community of homeless people established at a camp somewhere nearby. Another guy was there on foot with his backpack. He seemed invigorated by the presence of basic folks dumpster diving with him. He and the man with the clipboard seemed to be invisible to each other. The invisible line of need and social stigma amused him. “I've been eating out of dumpsters for years, this stuff is fine.” 

I approached the dumpsters with the same critical appraisal with which I approach my own refrigerator. Just because something is in my fridge doesn't mean it's safe. First, is it the kind of thing that goes bad? Check the date, check the smell. I trust my senses in my own fridge, why not here? 

I found cardboard boxes of boxes of butter, the fancy kind. Boxes of cheese sealed in plastic. Glass jars of pricy hippie yogurt. These are things I eat fearlessly from my own fridge, long past their expiration dates, things that I would eat after leaving out for a day. There were lots of plastic clamshell boxes of prepared meals, but those were for suckers, the most likely to be bad, if anything could go bad in this weather. The guy with the clipboard had spooked me, standing like the guardian to an orderly world ransacked by vandals, shaking his head at the opened gate. I don't know what happened to the mean guy or to the gun in the box. Maybe Michael’s post sparked a flash of outrage that made its way to management. A store like that lives by its community; if Wheatsville was uncompassionate, what would be the point of it? Why should a Texan eschew bbq if it ends with some thug pulling a gun on hungry people at a dumpster?

I was in no position to judge. During the freeze, I slept with a nine millimeter by my bed.

This essay series is part of a project to document Texan’s experiences during the 2021 freeze. Do you have a story to share about the 2021 Texas freeze? Share it with my publication, Freeze Stories, on Medium. If its not filled with filth, I’ll publish it. Ok, I’ll publish it even if its filled with filth.