Eighner's critique of American waste and homelessness in dumpster diving

¶ … 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 who want to get rid of a half-empty bottle of booze throw it out because they have no other way of dealing with it.

There is also an embedded message about the way that we look at poor people, especially the homeless. 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.

Freedom

Eighner is also trying to convey in his article a moral about materialism. He argues that he has lived a lifestyle with less waste -- though he also notes that sometimes he takes things and then must discard them when he notes that they have little value. He wastes as others do -- he invests time in finding food but then leaves what he cannot finish, same as anybody else would.

He wishes to make a statement that there is glory in simplicity, in particular in not worrying about possessions, but this line of reasoning is also a bit weak. His unhappy consumption fiend is a straw man, and the unhappiness is a projection of his own values. There's nothing wrong with those values, but they are his, not his straw man's. So this point ultimately falls flat for its logical faults. We are material as a society, yes, but there is no real glory is dodging materialism. There might be some merit to avoiding waste -- a takeaway that surely was in Eighner's argument somewhere, but he does not illustrate this nearly as well as his simpler point about the amount of waste that we experience.

Conclusions

Eighner presents his story about life as a dumpster diver, mostly to tell his tale, but also to shed light on some of the waste in our society. He makes a good point about the ease with which discarded goods are available, and his point about the generally high quality of the discarded goods is certainly an eye-opener. But read another way, he works hard for not much. He wants to see himself as noble for this, which is too bad because it does undermine his central thesis about their being too much waste in our society. Our material values are what they are -- we like to live in comfort. That does create waste, but not as much as one might think based on this reading anyway (it actually is a lot, but Eighner doesn't present an overwhelming case). His points about the humanity -- or lack thereof -- in our society definitely ring true, in particular the anecdote about the pizza. While he might be projecting a bit onto the staff, the reality is that we do throw things away that could be re-used, and this waste ends up reducing the quality of life of those around us. That is the true shame in this, that we would rather punish our fellow Americans for what they don't have than to help them out with our surplus. It wasn't really the point that Eighner sought to make, but it was the one that stands out the most powerfully.