I’m using dumpster scraps to cook Christmas dinner

Food & Drink

By Ben Cost

One person’s trash is another person’s Christmas dinner.

A Danish dumpster diver redefined “junk food” after announcing plans to make her family Christmas dinner using scraps scrounged from the trash.

“There’s no need for me to go out and buy stuff,” Sofie Juel-Andersen, 29, told SWNS while describing the proposed trash-to-table Yuletide feast. “I’m seeing a lot of festive foods being thrown out by the supermarkets — you can usually tell by the amount of dessert ingredients, cabbages and meats in the dumpsters.”

After embarking on her first dumpster dive three years ago, the “canned” goods enthusiast now forages full-time, which has allowed her to spend just $90 on groceries a month. Her hobby also helps shed light on the monumental amount of edible food that’s discarded by grocery stores each year.

The Dane frequently shares clips of her gathering everything from packaged snacks to meat and cheese to her nearly 30,000 followers on TikTok.

For her latest feat of garbage bin gastronomy, Juel-Anderson decided to contribute to Christmas dinner by gathering enough discarded “winter salad and pickled red cabbage” to feed 20 people.

This required the dumpster diner to scour multiple trash cans for cheese, nuts, fruits and pre-mixed salads, and “hundreds” of pre-mixed dressings like a secondhand salad bar.

“The other day I found a kilo of cashew nuts,” Juel-Anderson said. “I’ll definitely be adding those to the dish.”

She added, “I found a lot of cheese — shredded cheese and parmesan, which won’t go bad until the New Year.

Pre-made salads are also in abundant supply in the discard pile. Juel-Anderson explained that if the greens are wilted, she’ll just take the dressing.

The Dane’s scrap-petizer might seem at odds with a festive family gathering, but Juel-Anderson claims her family takes “no issue” with her “Mad Max”-evoking lifestyle choice. She added that her mom is down with her recycled repaste as long as it’s “clean.”

Thankfully, like a human-habituated black bear, this garbage gourmand only selects the “choicest trash.

Juel-Anderson can tell when the supermarkets start to dump their Christmas stock by the volume of flour, butter, duck and pork (the latter two are traditional Xmas foods in Denmark) which gets tossed.

“Supermarkets often have a price war around this time of year, and butter and flour ends up being really cheap,” she explained. “They ordered so many last year, they had a ton of surplus stock and threw a lot out.”

Also prevalent, per the dumpster diver, are seasonal fruits and veggies such as clementines, oranges and kale — which is why Juel-Anderson decided to make a salad in the first place.

“I’d never bring anything dirty or expired, I always make sure I can actually eat the food before I bring it home,” declared the Dane, who often brings “junk” food to family gatherings.

Not to mention the “tossed” salad is just one part of the festive spread, which will also feature non-discarded sugar-covered potatoes, rice pudding and almonds.

For New Year’s, however, Juel-Anderson plans to gather her dumpster-diving friends for a veritable trash banquet supplied exclusively with foods foraged from the garbage. That way, she can presumably get her land-“fill.”

Juel-Anderson is not trawling the trash as part of some minimalist TikTok trend, but rather to fight against the rampant food waste phenomenon.

“So much good food is being wasted — and supermarkets know there are people out there who can’t afford to eat,” she declared.