At this point, I am only dumpster diving to style my chickens out with massive amounts of fresh-to-them vegetables, and it's interesting to see what a chicken prefers when it has a daily five-gallon buffet to choose from. Chickens are often hyped up as loving the lettuces, but I have found they get around to that only when there ain‘t better things on the ground. What they really love is melons. Cantaloupes are a huge hit with them, and a bunch of times I've found watermelons with like one rotten spot that I chop in half and lay in their pen like a bowl, and a day later that shit is picked clean, hollowed out, and the rind remains until it dries up enough in the sun they can kick it under their door. Cauliflower, the first time I gave it to them, they liked at first, but then dissed it. They also love the little plastic containers of squash and sweet peppers, because when packaged like that, the moisture sucks out of it and makes it soggy, which means it has a shorter shelf life than regular vegetables, which in turn causes it to end up in the dumpster, and feeds my chickens. The past week or so, I have not had the same luck looking in my steady routine of dumpster checking, and I've noticed a ridiculous increase in how much feed they go through. I guess regular folks have to buy bags of feed every week, whereas I am living off the fat trash of the land, bro. America.
From my steady routine, I have a few favorites. There is a grocery store near Short Pump in Richmond, which is where I do banking bullshit, so I always check this store on the way home. It has two dumpsters, the one behind the store is all their trash can shit and dairy trash and meat trash, and the dumpster on the side of the building is straight up nothing but produce, with both sliding doors on the dumpster unlocked. Usually the one about a foot off the wall is most full since it's right by the access door from the building, so I can squeeze in, open up the door, and bamm! vegetable smorgasbord. That spot is usually good for mad lettuces and spinach, like whole cases at a time, and has been the spot with watermelons at times. My main one near my home I check five or six times a week, usually around a certain time of the day where one of the produce dudes told me it was the best time to check. He had a Travis Bickles mohawk, so I figured he was a good enough dude to answer my questions about taking thrown out produce without sweating me about legalities or any of that corporate grocery store bullshit. That one can be hit-or-miss. Some days, I come away with a good 20-gallons of stuff, and other days it's nothing. The far side of the one dumpster's door is wired shut, and I contemplated cutting it one time since there was piles of cantaloupes on that side, but decided it best to not rock the boat. There's a shitty little Barney Fife town cop who sometimes is lurking in the parking lot, and he seems to be there more often than not lately during my timely check-ins, so I wonder if maybe he's not hip to my game and trying to catch me. I'm not legally doing anything wrong though, it's just trash, and I figure if anyone ever stops me, I'll throw out the hard times got three kids type mantra that'll make them feel all fucked up that I'm eating trash, even though I'm not. Well, I eat some shit if it's packaged and I can tell it just got thrown out. I ain't too proud to admit that. It's not like I'm eating rotten shit, so don't go looking at me like I'm that lady on Good Times that the Evans kids thought was serving them a catfood meatloaf. Although if you were at that party at my house last June, that big bowl of baby carrots came out the trash. Haha bitches. You ate trash. The biggest problem with this store's dumpster is the meat department dumps in the same dumpster, so you might reach down to grab a few heads of lettuce, and there'll be about a five-pound pile of beef fat right in the middle of it.
The latest addition to my dumpster routine I first visited the other week when I picked up some guineas to add to our compound, loud ass little fuckers. This store's dumpsters are behind the building and the path closes off as opposed to looping all the way around the building like most strip malls, so it's a little weird driving back there. But if you hit it early in the morning before the restaurant next door opens and has their back door open all the time with dishwashers and cooks always milling around smoking cigarettes and speaking Mexican or Honduran or something to each other, there's two dumpsters. One is a sliding door style and the other is regular flip top that you could easily actually climb into. Honestly, I prefer reaching in sliding door or over edges, and have not actually climbed into any dumpster yet, because I've worked enough shit jobs to know that you never know when you climb into shit like that. It is a gamble. This store has had crazy amounts of fruits the chickens love, including whole pineapples almost every time I've gone there. Today, at the back of the flip top dumpster was a ton of pre-packaged chopped fruit trays, with pineapples, honeydews, and cantaloupes, at the back of it, plus more pineapples. I almost broke my climbing in cherry and busted up in that bitch for the fruit haul, but decided against it, mostly because right within reach was about five pounds of tomatoes and five pounds of strawberries, and I'd already snagged almost a case of bok choy, spinach, and cilantro earlier.
I am amped to see how much trash I can haul this winter, because grocery stores don't stop having produce just because the growing season is gone. It'll be interesting to see the difference compared to summer time. I also have noticed trends amongst different grocery store chains regarding how they get rid of their trash. Harris Teeter is like the hoity toity local store, and they're some bitches about their trash, it all going into an enclosed compacting type dumpster with no outside access. I can't even figure out how they empty the motherfucker when it's full. Kroger can be hit-or-miss, but most of their stores are right in town with heavy traffic nearby, so not worth the hassle just in case somebody decides what I'm doing doesn't look right. Food Lions are everywhere, and tend to be the chain grocery store in most small towns where I live, as well as throughout Virginia and North Carolina. I have only found their dumpsters locked in urban environments, and that shit's really been the mainstay of my dumpster circuit. Independent grocery stores around where I live tend to just have one dumpster where all the store's trash is dumped, so it's so much work to find anything good or an amount worth the trouble when the bigger chain stores usually have a couple dumpsters where part of the store's trash is not included, and you can hit the produce dumpster and not have to sort through every fucking thing that came out of the store to get to the good stuff.
Really, this whole dumpster diving thing for my chickens is proof positive of my obsessive compulsive disorderliness, because I have mental checkpoints about time of day and part of town and know that wherever I am, oh yeah, I need to hit this one up or that one up on the way home, or I can swing through this way and check this one out. Sometimes, when I take a step back and see how my brain so methodically yet retardedly works, it can be a little scary. Had I been trained to use my mind for good as opposed to odd, the world would probably be a better place in some very focused aspect.
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