We road our bicycles around like bandits under the streetlights of central Reykjavik. The Scot had 24 plastic bottles of Redbull in his back wheel pannier bags; the Icelander had cucumbers, lamb steaks and blue cheese in his small backpack, and the Spaniard had peppers, celery and potatoes. We’d hit three different supermarkets afterhours to “skip,” which was the Scot’s word and the most polite way to say that we were dumpster diving.
Reykjavik is a fairly inexpensive place to stay for awhile if you can find a cheap apartment, don’t need to buy clothing and can mostly move about by foot. But food is a pricey necessity here (alcohol, too, but there’s no helping you there). Because it’s an island where the majority of food is imported, a small bag of granola can cost almost $6 USD; a 300-gram hunk of cheese: $5.65 USD; 10 eggs: $4 USD. Since the 2008 financial crisis, the Icelandic króna has lost significant value while consumer prices here have risen 34 percent. My personal, worldwide index of food prices simply comes down to whether or not I have to buy crackers as a meal. According to my index, Iceland, Argentina and New Zealand are top-tier cracker countries.
But dumpster diving makes Reykjavik fairly livable. Unlike many dumpsters in the U.S., these treasure troves are free of fences and barbed wire. They sit in the shadows of the supermarkets away from people, cars, windows and employees. We simply rode right up to them and started liberating perfectly red peppers, slightly soft beets and cartons of milk that had only expired a day or two prior (Wait! Where are you going? It’s not as unsafe as you may think!).
Reykjavik has clothing swaps, DIY bike shops and even an anarchist library but a very small culture of dumpster diving. Although Iceland has lost 30,000 jobs since 2008, salvaging food isn’t a part of their recent past and it’s a frugality they have little want to embrace. That we twenty-somethings were dumpster diving says less about larger Icelandic culture and more about what it means to be a young person living in post-recession Europe.
We ran into another “skipper” behind one supermarket – an art student from the Iceland Academy of the Arts who was hauling out lamb steaks and tucking them into the basket on the front of her bike.
A few years before, she had worked at the very supermarket where we met her. She told us about being forced to work standing up without heat so as to work faster, and she wasn’t allowed to eat or take home any damaged products. Supermarkets became a popular source of steady work for many young people in Iceland during the financial crisis, but the markets had a lot of leverage over the employees. For better or for worse, there is no set minimum wage in Iceland, but rather, all wages for an occupation are collectively negotiated by industry groups or unions. Those wages are then applied to all employees in that sector. She worked under those conditions, for as little they offered her, and for as long as she needed to, and is now getting her just-dues in skipping.
Skipping was no shock to the Spaniard, who told us about the lines she’d seen outside of supermarket dumpsters in her native Barcelona where people were trying to reclaim wasted food to bring home. The financial crisis hit there with remarkable force, and she’d since seen most of her friends move away to countries like Germany or Switzerland to find work.
For many young twenty-somethings who came of age during the financial crisis and have come out of university into post-recession Europe, moving around, working odd-jobs and even dumpster diving are in reaction to limited access to jobs and steady income. All of these things that I had associated with a backpacking and adventure lifestyle seem less romantic when I realized people have been cornered into them.
Despite lamentations over food prices and wages, we were excited about the food we had found and we hung around like a gang of rascals, swapping stories of mischief and rebellion. When we heard a car coming up behind us, we went flying onto our bikes, and when we reached home we unpacked our haul and ate stale cookies that were perfectly sweet and perfectly free.
Alex Baumhardt is a freelance writer currently based in Iceland, where she is writing for The Reykjavik Grapevine. She has worked for the Land Stewardship Project, and her writing has appeared on lostgirlsworld.com, the Matador Network, Global Journalist and German-based Retomag and has been recognized by the Missouri Press Association and her grandma. Follow her adventures @AlexBaumhardt.
