Pesto spaghetti. Curried cauliflower and peppers. Roasted chicken. Fruit salad with apples, bananas, pomegranates, grapefruit and oranges. Green salad with arugula, cucumbers, peppers and tomatoes. Warm bread. Freshly squeezed apple cider.

All of these items were included on the menu for the last large meal served by The Gleaners’ Kitchen, an underground restaurant and grocery store started by Tufts University student Maximus Thaler.

But these foods also share another commonality: They all came out of a dumpster.

Thaler came up with the idea for The Gleaners’ Kitchen after he realized how much usable food grocery stores threw away at the end of the night, he said in a March 25 interview with National Public Radio.

“I found out that in a single night, I could go out into the dumpster and pull out literally thousands of dollars of food, and it was absurd,” he said. 

Thaler is working to turn “waste into wealth” by recycling food that supermarkets throw out because it is no longer sellable. He began a Kickstarter online fundraising campaign for The Gleaners’ Kitchen last month with the hope of creating a space where people can come together to exchange food and ideas, according to the project’s Kickstarter page.

The restaurant gets its name from what is known as gleaning, or transforming food waste into something usable, according to the website.

Thaler’s focus for the restaurant is the idea of building community.

“The point is not to sell food, but rather to foster community, because food has this incredible way of bringing people together, and I think that sharing food with one another is one of the most important things we do as humans,” he said in the NPR interview.

Thaler’s vision is for The Gleaners’ Kitchen to be open 24 hours a day with full meals served daily at 6 p.m., according to the Kickstarter page. He plans to always make coffee, tea and lentil soup available.

The Gleaners’ Kitchen has already surpassed the initial goal of reaching $1,500 by raising more than $3,000 through its Kickstarter campaign, which will close on Thursday, according to the website. The money raised through the Kickstarter campaign will fund The Gleaners’ Kitchen’s operating space.

Those working for The Gleaners’ Kitchen do nothing illegal by taking food out of dumpsters on public streets or serving food that came out of a dumpster, so long as the food is given away for free, according to The Gleaners’ Kitchen website.

While there have been no court cases dealing specifically with dumpster diving, the 1988 U.S. Supreme Court case California v. Greenwood ruled that items are considered to be in the public domain once they are thrown out and that anyone can search through them, according to the website.

The Gleaners’ Kitchen is able to serve the food it collects under the provisions of the 1996 Bill Emerson Good Samaritan Food Donation Act. This act allows for the distribution of food that seems to be safe, but is not marketable due to appearance, freshness or similar conditions, as long the food has not been knowingly poisoned, according to the website.

The ingredients used by The Gleaners’ Kitchen are 100-percent freegan, according to the group’s Kickstarter page. Freganism is an alternative living style centered on the idea of living minimally to reduce waste, according to freegan.info.

Thaler wants The Gleaners’ Kitchen to be a space where people can come learn about this alternative lifestyle, he said in a March 20 Boston Daily article.

“I want to show people there are other ways of making changes in the world, rather than just protesting Washington,” he said in the article. “Dumpster diving is a way of closing a loop and recognizing there is waste in the system.”

Published on April 17, 2013 at 11:57 pm

Contact Michelle: mlsczpan@syr.edu