(A couple of months earlier, they’d unearthed a few dozen cartons of organic ice cream before that, enough Odwalla juices to fill the bathtub.) Leftovers were pickled or composted, brewed into mead or, if they looked too dicey, fed to the chickens. About half the household’s food had been left somewhere to rot, Clover said, and there was often enough to share with Asheville’s other opportunivores. “Super low-impact, deep green.”Īlong one wall of the kitchen, rows of pine and wire shelves were crowded with dumpster discoveries, most of them pristine: boxes of organic tea and artisanal pasta, garlic from Food Lion, baby spring mix from Earth Fare, tomatoes from the farmers’ market. “We’re just living way simple,” Clover said. They relied mostly on secondhand bicycles for transportation, and each paid two hundred dollars or less in rent. Only one had a full-time job, and more than half received food stamps. There were four men and three women in all, aged twenty to thirty-five, crammed into seven small bedrooms. His neighbor Catfish had droopy whiskers and fleshy cheeks. “If the Man comes around, you can’t give him any incriminating information.” Mostly, though, the names fit the faces: Clover was pale, slender, and sweet-natured, with fine blond hair gathered in a bun. “It came out of the security culture of the old Earth First! days,” another opportunivore told me. “We didn’t put in the pinks,” Clover told me.Ĭlover’s pseudonym both signalled his emancipation from a wasteful society and offered a thin buffer against its authorities.
The whole compound was painted a sickly greenish gray-the unhappy marriage of twenty-three cans of surplus paint from Home Depot. The sinks, disconnected from the sewer, spilled their effluent into plastic buckets, providing water for root crops in the gardens. The walls and ceilings, chicken coop and solar oven were held together with scrap lumber and drywall. Abandoned by its previous owners, condemned by the city, and minimally rehabilitated, it was occupied-perhaps infested is a better word-by a loose affiliation of opportunivores. It sat on a weedy lot in a dishevelled section of Asheville, North Carolina.
The house at 40 Congress Street wouldn’t have been my first choice for lunch. Simple and safe to make, it leads novice picklers to more offbeat practices. Sauerkraut is Sandor Katz’s gateway drug.
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