¶ … dumpster diving provides insight into the life of the dumpster diver, generally in a state of homelessness and living off of the discarded goods of others. Eighner seeks, through his piece, to not only explain the lifestyle that he lived for many years, but also to offer some commentary about the wastefulness of American culture. There are a few different conclusions that a reader can draw from his essay, and these will be outlined here.
Waste as a Way of Life
Perhaps the simplest way of expressing Eighner's point is that there is enough waste in American society that a person can live with a reasonable level of comfort and security on the discards of others. Eighner describes being able to routinely acquire food by scavenging garbage bins outside of restaurants and food stores. The waste is often perfectly good -- he describes conditions under which a pizza restaurant might produce an extra pizza accidentally and simply discard it.
The underlying message is that this should not be possible, and he does seem to want the audience to be incredulous that one can survive nicely on dumpster diving. This argument is bolstered in particular when he describes food. One would think that food is something you would not want out of a dumpster -- who ever saw good food in a dumpster before? Yet, he describes how one not only eats food from a dumpster but can have fairly high standards for cleanliness in doing so, highlighting that it is not only old or questionable food that is thrown out.
He also describes how perfectly good materials, including alcohol, find their ways into dumpsters. These goods are discarded out of convenience. Whatever the underlying reason, there is cause for those goods to be removed from someone's world and they simply end up in the dumpster. This highlights the inefficiency of our society, in that people...
Eighner presents an anecdote about the pizza restaurant to illustrate this point. He notes that when the restaurant noticed their discarded pizzas were disappearing, they refused to discard pizzas until the end of the night. Not that this was going to discourage the dumpster diver, but there is a message that people will not get the pizzas for free, and especially that the restaurant was loathe to feed a homeless person, and would rather see the pizza go to waste than to use it to do some social good. This cuts to the heart of what waste is to Eighner -- robbing other people of livelihood. When you throw something useful in the garbage, it goes to a landfill. When you take something useful and repurpose it, or give it to someone who can use it, you are benefitting society in some small way. Waste, therefore, is a specific choice that an individual makes not to benefit society where it was possible. Eighner's point illustrates a lesson about the inherent selfishness of our society.
Waste is Overstated
There are other ways to interpret Eighner's arguments about dumpster diving. The first is that the reader will note that it is hard work to acquire the materials of life. Eighner presents his dumpster adventures as relatively easy, but it took him time to learn where to dive, and then he invests further time and energy in the exercise itself -- waiting around out back of the pizza restaurant, for example. There are, all in all, more efficient ways of feeding oneself. Work usually pays well enough to purchase all that Eighner did in far fewer hours. Never mind the dirt and grime, dumpster diving seems highly inefficient as…
