Extract from Friday at Kaaitheater

I’m from Manchester in the UK and I’ve lived in cities all my life. I’ve lived off food I’ve got out of bins for six months at a time.
It was a fun thing to do with friends.

What we did was meet up in the evening, after the pub or whatever, and cycle round the smaller supermarkets of the city, hopping in the bins at the back and picking through the see-through plastic bags picking out what was edible. Bag of pineapples? Magic. , for example, Bag of beef? Eurgh, put that back in! My all time favourite skipped food finds have to be…No 1 the forty bunches of Marks & Spencer’s flowers – we gave them away to everyone on the main road, they were like Oh that’s so nice are you really sure are they for free?! And we were like, we just got them out of the bins, on you go! And then No 2 the great mango and cabbage find, literally about 40 of each, mangoes not even ripe yet. My friend made a lot of chutney. And then finally No 3 is when they recalled Maltesers, that was a good one. They got everywhere.
We’d take loads of bags with us, and divide out the food into bags for different people that we’d then drop off on our way home. You’d put in all the things you thought each person or household would like the most – no cheese for them, they’re vegans, all the ricotta for Thom, he’ll use it, and flowers? They have to go to Scarlet, she loves them and so on.

I like statistics which are expressed in humans, so for example, 1 in 15 people think Obama is actually going to make some changes, or 1 in 2 people have tried cat biscuits or, I remember in secondary school when someone found scientific proof on the internet that 1 in 3 people were definitely gay, and the whole class looked round the room of like 30 of us and realised that meant 10 of us were gay but we were 12 and we didn’t know if we were one of the gay ones or not so it was quite exciting.
So, 1 in 5 people in the UK live below the poverty line, in Belgium it is 1 in 10. Meanwhile, across Europe, 30-40% of food put on the shelves ends up in the bin. In the UK an organisation formed to get some more numbers on it. For me there was a clear winner for the worst and therefore kind of the best statistic. Guess how many whole chickens are thrown away in the UK every day? Any guesses? 5,500 whole chickens. Each day. Shit. Sqwauk.