I wrote a couple years ago about how I end up eating food that homeless and poor people throw away when given lunches. Like if you give them a bag containing a sandwich, bag of chips, and a piece of fruit or bag of baby carrots, you’re going to find a lot of uneaten fruit and carrots discarded on the street. Picking up litter daily, I can’t miss it.

Today, I’ll give another example. Regular readers know I volunteer, bringing food stores would throw away to a community center where people can get it for free. Many others volunteer this way too, so every day the center sees lots of food.

Yesterday, when I dropped off, I noticed a few cabbage leaves in a pile that was going to go to the garbage. I went over and saw a large pile of outer leaves. It became clear an earlier volunteer dropped off a lot of cabbages. Sometimes people take off outer leaves if they’ve yellowed since then the inside part that remains looks better.

But these leaves were perfectly good. They were just going to throw them away. While many people taking food are homeless, who can’t use food that requires a kitchen, many have homes. Cabbage is about as healthy as food gets. Only a fool would think I’m saying everyone has to take everything, but throwing it away means no one can eat it.

Here’s some of the cabbage I salvaged:

I collected the big pile of outer leaves and took them home, so I’m eating food homeless people spurned. I’m not criticizing homeless people. I’m describing our culture. People who weren’t homeless threw it out.

I don’t even use my fridge. I just chopped the cabbage up, threw some salt on it, and stored it to ferment into sauerkraut, which I did while on the phone, so the few minutes preparation time took no extra time. Americans have largely lost how to prepare vegetables.

By the way, when someone delivers a cart full of donuts to the community center, no one throws them away. On the contrary, they package them in plastic, adding insult to injury, and they get taken faster than vegetables.

Here’s the cabbage fermenting into sauerkraut:

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