Bin Banquets

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PHOTOS BY BEN RAYNER TEXT BY JOHN MCDONNELL

You may be under the impression that eating out of bins is a practice confined to tramps, starving refugees and really crazy people, but the phenomenon is becoming very popular among students and young arty types who tend to live in squats. Pretty gross, don’t you think? For these people, scavenging for food in amongst dead rats, broken glass, faeces and maggots isn’t something they are forced to do to survive, it’s more about not wanting to spend money on stuff they can get for free.

 

know a guy who broke into a squat, then went and bought a car the very next day so he could easily drive round picking up fancy, expensive bread covered in clumps of mould, and bucket loads of oysters left out to fester in Borough market before the binmen could take it away and dump it. I wanted to see what kind of food these people eat every day, so spent a morning shadowing someone who is an expert bin banqueteer with the aim of then taking our findings home and having a puke-inducing feast.

My guide for the day was a girl called Karley, who gets free food out of bins every day. She took me to a fruit and vegetable market in Vauxhall, where you can pick up crateloads of rotting food that is ready to be thrown out. I have to say that I felt a bit awkward walking round mooching through bins while the market workers looked on, but within five minutes of arriving we had found boxes filled with bags of lettuce and rocket, and more punnets of strawberries than we could manage to carry. It was all completely covered in mould, but things were looking up.

The best bits of food seemed to be in and around the bins. We saw this little clump of potential food tossed next to a bin like a used condom, and we were happy to give it a home. We weren’t too sure what exactly it was, but we thought we’d be a bit adventurous and take it with us to try later.

From a distance, the food looked pretty edible, but up close we could see why they were throwing this stuff away. At the time we were in the middle of a hot spell, so the food in the bins was horribly decomposed and covered in squidgy brown shit. The smell was akin to the vegetarian equivalent of a cockroach-infested Yardie killing chamber filled with the dismembered bodies of 12 Turkish heroin dealers who had been brutally tortured with razor blade-studded baseball bats and left to fester in their own excrement before being slowly scalded to death.

Karley spotted some crates of nice-looking fruit in a skip, so climbed in to have a closer look. The whole time she was clambering in and looking in the skip, an excited guy in a truck behind her kept tooting his horn and shouting stuff in a foreign language out the window. I’m guessing you don’t get to see too many hot girls walking round looking through the bins when you work in the fruit and veg business.

Inside the skip, Karley found a little punnet of cherry tomatoes, which didn’t look too mouldy, so she decided to have a nibble. Apparently they were delicious, but I decided to opt out and save myself for our meal later on.

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