The Solution to Overthinking

I am an over-thinker. From girls to papers to books to dreams to afternoon activities, I take over analysis and thinking about possible consequences and implications to absurd proportions. This trend extended into my political thoughts at the same time that I began to develop them (after reading A People’s History of the United States, in case you were interested), and initiated my foray into the world of facts concerning food. My first encounter with factory farms and everything that went along with it was through the book The Ethics of What We Eat by Peter Singer.
I had gone vegan for Lent my senior year in high school. In Waconia, Minnesota, this was akin to giving up your chance to eat in the school cafeteria, but I wanted to try it after both of my parents became vegan after being introduced to some alarming statistical correlations between cancer, along with other “non-preventible” diseases, and animal protein. I read the book they did (The China Study) and was by no means convinced that there was a true connection. However, I wanted to give it a shot.
After Lent, I started eating ice cream occasionally (it’s so good), but had lost my taste for meat. When I found Singer’s book, I thought it might provide me with reasons to feed my incredulous friends and their families when I refused to eat hamburgers and hot dogs. What it provided me with was a long list of reasons to eat lower on the food chain, and enough information to never let me take the food I eat for granted again. Where my food comes from, how it was grown, harvested, produced, shipped, kept, sanitized, and sold; these all bog me down in an unescapable morass of questions which sometimes keep me from buying anything when I go shopping.
My food choices are influenced by four things—cost, taste, health, and environmental friendliness. I try to balance cheap food with healthy, tasty food, with a small impact on the environment. Last year, I found the ultimate way to get all of the above without compromises, complete with exercise, a clean conscience, funny stories, and good times with friends. I’m thinking about publishing a book about the new diet, but I know it wouldn’t catch on too well. I dumpster-dive.
And to cut off your objections before they start, let me say this: I have seen much more mold in refrigerators than I have ever seen in dumpsters. I have only ever seen one rat by a dumpster, but more than I care to count scurrying around AU after dark. I have never gotten sick of dumpster food. The legality of it is questionable, maybe, but the ethics are clear—food going to waste is fair game to those who are willing to dig for it.
My dinner last night was composed of pasta, bread, tomatoes, red peppers, and bread—all from a dumpster. The only pieces of the meal that I didn’t salvage from eternal damnation and rotting in a methane-producing garbage heap were the spices I used to season the sauce I made form the tomatoes. Not every meal I eat is express from the “dumpster gods,” as we call them, but most have some connection.