You Eat Where You Are...What If You Are Homeless?

In his story "On Dumpster Diving", Lars Eighner chronicles what it is like to feed yourself when you are living on the streets. Eighner's main form of sustaining himself is by rummaging through dumpsters to find other people's leftovers or throwaways that are edible. While one might assume that Eighner would struggle to find enough food and avoid hunger, his story tells otherwise.

Eighner was able to acquire enough food to avoid hunger, and even found that while he was homeless and practicing dumpster diving, he was susceptible to gaining weight. How is this possible? Isn't he just struggling to get by? Well, Eighner had located a pizza shop that discarded the day's unused pizzas into its waste at the end of the day. He frequented grocery stores that had to rid themselves of day-old baked goods and fruit that was no longer fresh. He was near a college campus where the students were extremely wasteful when it came to food. Eighner was not hungry at all!

Not being hungry does not mean that he was properly nourished. He was consuming lots of simple carbohydrates that were satisfying his hunger, but not supplying his body with the nutrients its needed. As Dr. Pena pointed out in his December 4th lecture, there is quite a difference between not being hungry and being nourished. He gave the example of the "Big Mac Diet", which is similar to the diet that Eighner was consuming. But Eighner's needs did not require a healthy diet, he just wanted to have a diet. He just wanted food in his belly. You eat where you are, and when that is the street, you eat anything. Beggars can't be choosers. Where you are shapes your food needs and wants. In Eighner's case, he was living on the streets, and his needs and wants consisted of satisfying his hunger. If he were living in a mansion with a personal chef and he was obese, or if he was training for a marathon in the desert, his needs and wants would be quite different.

Eighner, Lars. "On Dumpster Diving." 75 Thematic Readings: An Anthology. McGraw-Hill: New
York, NY: 2003. 509-521.

--Zak Rosencrantz