College student opens free café with food gleaned from dumpster diving

A Tufts University student named Maximus Thaler wants to find a better use for the staggering amount of food that grocery stores discard every night. According to a recent study, $2,500 in food is thrown away every 24 hours just by grocery stores alone. But Thaler has a plan: Collect that food and redistribute it through a free café.

Called the Gleaners Kitchen, the café is being funded by a Kickstarter project which hopes to raise $1,500. The café plans to offer "concerts, poetry readings, lectures and one meal a day for the hungry."

It's easy to mock the idealism of college students. But Freeganism is a growing grassroots movement which has a very excellent point: grocery store waste is truly out of control. Some grocery stores have set up connections with local food banks to come collect the expired food and unattractive produce. But most stores simply chuck it all into the dumpster.

One of the problems of the Gleaners Kitchen project is also its greatest strength. By bringing attention to the issue of perfectly good food available free for the taking at the dumpsters behind local stores, the students are taking a chance that the stores will respond with counter-theft tactics. Stores which discover people dumpster diving will often fit their dumpsters with locks, pour bleach over the contents every night to render them inedible, or crush everything into a pulp before throwing it away.

In a nation where food insecurity is rampant, this kind of corporate behavior seems practically criminal. However, the best way to counteract these tactics probably isn't by continuing to dumpster dive. But to instead work with stores and coax them into donating their "bad" food through legitimate channels. The Gleaners Kitchen clearly has its heart in the right place, but it will be in big trouble the first time someone gets sick from eating a cross-contaminated dumpster carrot.

Image courtesy Flickr/infinity, defines.