“No don’t eat that! It was in a plastic bag for 5 minutes. It’s ruined!” - Fynn
Okay so I’m aware that on this “inexperienced guide to travel” I’ve done little to no actual guiding. So consider this to be Lesson 1. People always say “I’d love to travel but it’s so expensive.” And people ask how we’re able to travel spending so little and at times spending nothing at all. One of us currently has €0.00 left in his bank, but it’s not much of a problem because it is in fact possible to get by without money if you’re committed.
One thing I’ve neglected to mention in this blog so far is actually quite a key aspect of the way in which we’re travelling and living: ‘Recycling’.
‘Recycling’ is the nice word that everyone here uses to say ‘dumpster diving’. For a lot of you this will be an alien concept and you’re thinking “eugh gross dumpster diving? Are you f*cking serious?” And I get it, it sounds gross. But if you bear with me it’s not actually as dirty as it sounds.
When I first arrived in Granada with Dermot, I remember Olek lead us up the long mountain path to our cave and started cooking a meal almost immediately. As he was chopping vegetables he explained to us that all the vegetables had been found in the bins and just needed washed before eating. Dermot and I shared uneasy glances throughout the entire meal and even though the food tasted great and we got a real good feast, I still felt uncomfortable knowing where my food came from. However this unease was short lived, as once I saw recycling in practice and saw for myself the quality and surprising cleanliness of a lot of the food, I realised that bin diving isn’t just homeless drunks reaching for half-eaten burgers.
Every day shops of all kinds and sizes throw away a lot of perfectly good food simply because they’ve got fresher food to replace it on the shelf. This means that at the end of every day, there’s a lot of free, and perfectly edible food lying in the bin bags of supermarkets, fruit & veg shops, cafés and bakeries (and more shops but commonly those kinds). So as unpleasant as it is, if you just man up and reach in, you can get your food covered for the next few days and it costs you nothing. You don’t even need to leave it to chance. If you can find the right shops in a town and go to their bins when they’re closed or closing, you can guarantee that you’ll find something to make it worth your while.
While in the UK & Ireland this mostly would be seen as a completely dirty and alien concept, it’s somewhat common in Spain. In Granada there are even communities of recyclers ranging from travellers & homeless to just everyday locals that understand the value of free food. Every day & night outside certain shops just before they close you will find a gathering of people waiting for the shop to bring their bin out so that they can all get for free the same food that the shop would have sold to you 5 minutes before. And there is always so much that even when divided among 10 people, everybody has a full, heavy box to carry home each. So if you want the free food but don’t want to reach in yourself, these places are good too, but hard to come by and not necessary for getting good finds.
The food tends to be bread that hasn’t been sold before the day ends so it won’t be 'fresh enough to sell’ tomorrow, fruits & vegetables that are maybe starting to go off on one small part although the other 90% is still fresh and vegetables that have grown into a funny shape but are completely fresh. So admittedly the food isn’t always the freshest but it’s still just as tasty and just as edible. But I’ve learned to stop being surprised by what you can find; From perfectly sealed, packaged and in-date chocolate to hard drugs (which we didn’t interfere with for fear of mafia), you can find anything and occasionally will find something mad!
A few weeks ago in Arrecife we went to the bins of a bakery immediately after watching them close for the night and what we found was a half-ton bag filled with a few loaves and then all kinds of delicious pastries imaginable that were still fresh. This is like gold dust for us so of course we raided the bag, filled 3 boxes and engorged ourselves on chocolate croissants over the following 2 days. We gave 2 of the boxes away to random people in the street, spreading joy and pastry goodness to everyone we met, seeing as we knew we physically couldn’t even finish one box in the few days that it would take for the food to expire.
I stress again, if we had went to that bakery 5 minutes before, the bakery would have sold us these very same pastries for over a euro for each. Show up 5 minutes after and you get as much of them as you want for free.
That said, in the small village of Famara we had more of a struggle. There weren’t any big franchise supermarkets and the shops didn’t need to restock or overstock often, so there were no jackpot bins with bags of just food. A lot of the food was mixed in with the trash and unedible whereas at bigger supermarket bins you can often find the food individually bagged. So you had to get your hands dirtier and it was pretty unpleasant, but there was still good food to be found if you looked hard enough and it kept us fed for the week. Well fed. We still found plenty of good rice and vegetables to feast on regardless, and more sweet potatoes than 3 men should be able to eat in 3 days.
I’ve realised recently that you’re actually better off recycling your food than buying it if you’re trying to travel cost efficiently. When you’re buying your day’s food on a budget, you tend to buy minimal amount. A loaf of bread or two and a few fruits or vegetables. Whereas when you recycle your food, you can often end up with several loaves of bread, lots of fruits & vegetables of all sorts and maybe even a few other nice things like pastries. All this and you get to keep your money! It’s funny how when people hear that we bin dive for food, they ask or assume that we go hungry a lot when in actuality we’re probably eating better than them!
So if you’ve been wondering how it’s possible to live and travel on a very small budget or for completely free, there’s your answer. Food costs = covered. I would even say my diet has been healthier since eating from bins because it has me eating a lot more vegetables and good quality, perishable food whereas back home I would more often have bought cheap processed food that requires no cooking skill, has no nutritional value and doesn’t expire for 5 years (a steady flow of frozen pizza and pot noodles). Yes bin diving sounds disgusting at face value, but in practice it’s actually pretty damn great. Some of the best meals I’ve ever eaten actually came from bins.
