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Comment by 11235813213455 | Hacker News Reader

I lived with $0 a day during 2 years (I lived in France, in a small student room, for about €140/month)

It's sustainable and compatible with a 'normal' life, I found food from:

- student university restaurants, I asked the permission to collect in the bread 'trash', most bread was in perfect state. I heard this food was used for chicken farms

- end of markets, I was even helping merchants in exchange of their damaged but perfectly good legumes and fruits. I was coming back with a lot of food. It's important to eat the most damaged first of course

- some supermarket bins, where I could find some salad plastic bags, eggs. There was other kind of food, meat, biscuits, dishes, but I wasn't interested by those processed foods

If I had $2 per day, I'd buy a huge rice bag periodically, eggs, and damaged legumes every week at the end of markets

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I seem to remember there was a polemic about supermarkets locking their bins from scavengers. Did you have any problem at the time? Was it before or after there was a change of law?

Just a few more questions out of curiosity from a fellow french student:

How much time a day were you expending in exchange for free food? Did you also use extreme frugality for other commodities?

What motivated you to to take up this lifestyle? Do you think it would have been possible to “have family responsibilities” in your situation?

What alternatives seemed available at the time?

I think now in France supermarkets are 'legally encouraged' not to lock their bins and the culture of food waste is not as prevalent.

In my UK city the supermarkets started locking their bins; describing it as a polemic seems a bit like burying your head in the sand.

The problem appeared to be injuries (of scavengers, and the potential for the supermarket to be liable) and extra work of cleaning bin areas.

High-street bakeries used to sell off all the food cheap at the end of the day. At some point in the last 15 years - Greggs took over all my local bakeries (or out-competed them). Greggs policy is now not to sell off stuff because then poor people will buy it instead of paying full price - they throw it away instead (according to staff at my Greggs).

it was about 8 years ago, some supermarkets used bleach, but I never encountered it, I just went at one place, every now and then, sneaking in other friendly students and people doing the same

Going at resto-u, it'd take 30mn/1h (I was using a bike), end of markets the Sunday morning, between 11h and 14h, so about 2-3h. Extreme frugality yes, I literally paid for nothing else than accommodation

Motivation: I was quite alone, and I suddenly wanted to stop eating all the junk food I was eating since years (american sandwich, mcdo, pizzas, kebabs, biscuits, chocolate bars, saucy recipes, I started being disgusted by oily or buttery things), and at the same time I saw the opportunity to consume all the wasted food around me, saving money was also a challenge. Obviously it's not compatible with raising a young child :p

A better alternative would have been to spend a bit of money for food, because I probably had some deficiencies. Nowadays I'm still frugal, spend around 400-450€/month for food for myself, on the same kind of diet with some good extra like honey, and still choose damaged fruits and legumes at the supermarket, as a reflex, and to try to lower their wastage

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