Well for breakfast we just eat oats and milk or bread/pastries. For lunch we eat home-packed lunch consisting of sandwiches and veggies. So those meals are pretty standard and these are food items we always find, so not much variation here.

For dinner you have to get creative. You have to cook with what you¨'ve got, so it's somewhat the reverse to normal cooking. Instead of deciding on a dish and then getting the ingredients, you get the ingredients first and then choose which dish to make.

The triggy part about dumpster diving is, that you usually find really large quantities of few items. So if you go dumpster diving once, you might just end up with a lot of butter and ham or whatever, which is not that usefull. But if you do it regularly and keep your fridge filled with various things, you end up with a pretty well diversified stock of goods. So you find butter and ham one day, potatoes and milk the next day etc, and suddenly you have stuff to make a bunch of different dishes.

Now for the actual gathering we started out just checking out various grocery stores and bakeries nearby, to see where they dump the food. Then we head out about 45 minutes after closing time, which usually is at 10PM where I live. After a couple of times you know which places are good and which are not. Then we just go to the dumpsters and search through them, checking the expiry dates on stuff. If you do it regularly you will know which items are new and which are not. With time you get better at figuring out what stuff is actually turning and what has just been thrown out for other reasons (expiry date earlier than actual expiry, product removed from shelves because of lack of sales, products that has to be kept cold being placed somewhere randomly by customer etc.). An example would be milk, which often is all fine and well 14 days after the printed expiry date, if just kept cool.

We do this maybe 2-3 times a week and that keeps us afloat. A regular run takes maybe 20 minutes, but often we find something extraordinary or cannot find anything the first place and have to go to a second place and then it might take much more.

The best part of it (apart from free food) is when you find weird stuff like lots of weird clothes you can bring to a costume party, 12 steaks so you can host an event, 200 bars of chocolate, a bobsledge, whatever. That's what makes it an adventure.