Outrage and Dumpster Diving.

Once, I casually mentioned a dumpster diving experience to my parents. Midway through my story, not even letting me tell it, they threw up their hands,
"Why?!" they demanded.
"Are you hungry? Do you not have money? Why would you need to do that?!"
I couldn't tell them.
I told them I did it because it was there - that I knew for certain.
But much later, it dawned on me. Me, dumpster diving, it was their fault. Or my grandmother's fault I suppose.
While I was some impressionable age - 4 or 5 or 6 Grand (my grandma who prefers this title) stayed with us for sometime following her two year stint in Sierra Leone. As a child, eating dinner I would push my plate away and fuss that I was full after a couple of bites.
My grandma would glance up with a look of calm fury,
"Oh no you're not," she would say and tell me about the children in the village in Sierra Leone where she stayed; how they hardly had any food, how they would fight for food, how the people were starving. And I would eat my food until my stomach was so full I felt sick.
One thing I've never thought in any way funny, is when people make off-hand comments about "the kids in Africa" or "starving kids in Africa" when they are throwing food away.
When I worked in a restaurant, for example, and would ask people if they wanted me to box up their food they would say, "No, I don't like leftovers. Sorry kids in Africa."
It looks I'm smiling but I'm really grinding my teeth.
I dumpster dive because the food is there, and it shouldn't be.
The idea of having a seed planted in the earth and growing to it's full harvest and then being put in the dumpster makes me crazy. Bread really gets me. Grain is grown, harvested, ground up, formed into something magnificent; a beautiful final product; a roll or a baguette and no one buys it that day so it is thrown out.
Or the broken circle of having a cow, feeding it all it's life, slaughtering it, and then tossing it in the trash makes me crazy. Doesn't it make you crazy? Even just the small bits - like one little shrimp - a whole life in it's own tossed out because some stupid spoiled undeserving human is bored of it.
Mom and Dad, I dumpster dive because Grand put this crazy notion in my head that people are out their starving and somehow it makes it better when I finish all my food and don't throw anything out. I dumpster dive because there shouldn't be any good food in the trash and there is. So there.