Episode: 634
Title: HPR0634: Urban Camping ep 5
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0634/hpr0634.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-08 00:13:13

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Hi everyone, this is Episode 5 and how to be an Urban Camper.
My name is Clat 2 and in this episode we're going to be talking about food, how to get food when you're an Urban Camper.
Controversy alert, this episode is going to mention fevery.
So fevery and stealing will fend you and do not listen to all of this episode.
So in previous episodes we've talked about why you might want to be an Urban Camper.
We've talked about how to find shelter, how to upkeep your personal hygiene, how to organize all of your stuff,
and then in this episode we'll be covering how to find food for yourself.
Jumping right into it, a couple of different ways to find food.
One would be purchasing it.
Yes, you can purchase food at grocery stores primarily and restaurants.
Now obviously this is assuming that you're Urban Camping for fun and pleasure and profit rather than for out of necessity because you're broke or something like that.
If you're Urban Camping and you're gainfully employed and again if you are Urban Camping and you're employed you may find that part time employment is plenty to make ends meet and still have enough leftover to treat yourself to meals out at restaurants and things like that on a regular basis.
That's kind of an upside of Urban Camping, is that the money that you're making goes directly back to you and you can spend it in any way or save it in any way that you want.
Not every time but the more recent times that I've been Urban Camping, that's exactly what I've done.
I kind of forsook going out to grocery stores and I would just buy a lot of my food from either a small marketplace or from a restaurant like a coffee and bagel for breakfast, some kind of sandwich or wrap or vegan meal from this little vegan cafe that I know of.
I you kind of and I only eat about twice a day so that was it for me so you you kind of you can be a little bit more I don't know I consider that extravagant because previously I didn't really eat out that much.
It was very much a lot of cooking for myself. That's kind of cool kind of fun. It does get old after a while to be honest but the vegan cafe that I found actually that that doesn't get old because that's really good food and really healthy food.
But if you're not around really good restaurants that are also affordable because I mean kind of wasteful to just go to like a really nice restaurant all the time.
I don't even know what I would do in a really nice nice restaurant to be honest so yeah I just kind of went to normal places but places that served really good food.
So point being that gets a little bit old after a while but it can be done if you're urban camping and you're employed.
Now I obviously started out with that one because that's kind of the easiest one so let's work our way back from that.
That's that's the luxury of being employed and having money for restaurants. Another way of doing it and this is this I've done twice now.
Urban camping and getting a job very intentionally mind you that is very food centric meaning that you work in a kitchen yes or a restaurant.
Those places they have food all over the place and typically not always mind you but typically they're totally fine with you eating food while it work.
Now I say not always because there are some completely fascist restaurant owners who completely just don't want you to eat their food and they think that if you even look at a dish and imagine some food on it they think you're stealing from their bottom line and they won't allow it.
I personally would not work there myself but you know if you do need a job or something that might be where you're at but I found jobs that were completely fine with me eating food on the job.
More recently a really great job and I could eat as much food as I wanted and in fact the owner or the manager rather was sending me home with fresh fruit all the time.
He would just always make sure that I had a lot of food partly because he's a nice guy and partly I think because the food would go bad after a while anyway so someone might as well take it and eat it.
So that was really cool. His name was Greg actually. Good guy Greg was. That's cool. Now the other place that I worked was actually a bagel place and they were okay with you eating.
I think you got like one meal per six hours shift or something stupid like that. I don't ever listen to them when they say that. I just eat what I want anyway.
That's just stupid I think. And then if you're closing up you know if you have that last shift there's generally stuff that you're going to throw out so you can just throw that right into your own little plate and eat for free.
So that's a really good way of getting free food is working in a place that serves food. That's a great way to feed yourself. Now there are also ways of finding free food in without getting a food centric job.
One place of course every Sunday if you go to a Christiana temple you get free food. That's all there is to it. There was one on a Christiana place on.
It was near like Venice Beach in LA where I used to live for a little while and yeah free food every Sunday. So you go there for their little worship thing and you eat and it's great.
The Christian churches don't seem to be that big on serving food for some reason but if you keep an eye out for for for events and sometimes they have them posted on the signs outside of the church.
Sometimes you have to kind of really you have to go there and and get one of their pamphlets and see what they've got going on in the next month or whatever.
And you can sometimes find events where they're doing like a pot lock. They're really big on pot locks. Unfortunately pot locks a lot of times tend to not be very vegetarian friendly still.
So if you're me that might not work or if you're vegetarian that might not work. So they're they're not quite as good for the free food but other community events do exist.
And again the gym that I was a member of actually had well still am a member of I guess they have a lot of community events.
And so if you show up on on the right night or if you keep an eye on the bolts and board and and know when to show up exactly then you might find that free food is is right there.
And you just kind of integrate yourself with the crowd. I mean I honestly have no clue as to what these events are. I honestly have no idea.
But I do know that I'm let's just say I'm fairly unique at those events but no one really asks questions. I mean as long as you're friendly and I guess that's part of the whole social engineering thing.
As long as you're friendly and and and talk to people and and are just nice they don't really mind that you show up to their events.
Now I'm not going to say that that will always work. I mean there might be an event where you try to show up and they ask why you're there and who you are and you know stuff like that.
But that's never happened to me. Never ever ever. So I think that if you can if if it's posted on a bulls and board or if it's in a paper or a city paper or something then you can pretty much show up and and get food and and no one has a problem with it.
Sometimes and this is much more of a gamble. There are volunteer things that you can do and also get said in an ideal world I think when you volunteer for some activity you know you're doing free work.
I think they would also feed you and and in the film world that's that's generally the the rule of thumb. I mean if you've got people working on your film even when you're paying them you make sure that you feed them.
And if you're not paying them you really make sure you feed them quite well and that typically gets a lot of well the cliché starving artists right so that gets them on your set namely for the free food but they work as well.
And that would be great and so I'm saying that you could volunteer on things because in theory that there is free food to be had at at volunteer events.
I have found that that does not always hold true to the point that I have kind of given up on that tactic. I do not really bother with that so much.
I almost don't recommend that but if you find out of a good organization that also happens to be good about feeding you if you volunteer to work for them at some point then hey go for it.
A far more reliable thing are art openings. Art gallery art openings things like that they always have food because they want a crowd they want people to come to their art opening and enjoy themselves they eat a lot it's great.
The openings are usually free because they want you to go there and create a crowd and make it look really popular.
If you go to an art opening you're probably going to be well fed keep that in mind and hunt them down.
The added bonus there is that you get to appreciate a lot of typically cool art. It's really fun to go to art openings or art shows.
I don't know if you've ever been but it's really cool and if you've never been it's not nearly as pretentious as you might imagine.
There are at least the ones that I always go to. They're very sort of down to earth. There are some people there that are probably in a completely different social class than I am but that's okay.
They don't seem to really be bothered that I'm there and I'm not really bothered that they're there and the art openings that I've gone to have really always been a very mixed crowd.
That's kind of cool and like I say there's free food and it's highly enjoyable really really enjoyable.
I try to go as many to as many as I can really for both the social aspect and the art aspect as well as the free food.
Check that out for sure. That will get you free food almost guaranteed. I can almost guarantee that if you go to an art opening you're going to be fed.
Another way of getting free food is the kind of popular now dumpster diving tradition.
I remember in some New York papers or somewhere I think it was probably the village voice. They did this article you know what I don't think it was the village voice.
I think it was like something even more popular than that. I mean something very mainstream but there is this article about dumpster diving about how people would go and find food that was perfectly acceptable to eat.
Literally in dumpsters and they would take it home and they would eat that food.
And if you think about it that makes a lot of sense because the food is very frequently thrown away in bags dedicated to just food trash.
As you didn't even say trash you know it's dedicated to food that is being thrown out.
So very near expiration date vegetables or bread loaves or whatever.
So they're typically together in one single or two bags and there's no other trash in there.
It's just that quote trash that they decided that was going to expire and that they needed to get rid of.
So those are really good finds. Typically you're going to find those in the backs of grocery stores and places like that.
You're not going to just find it out in any random dumpster.
Of course a dumpster behind a bagel store might render a trash bag full of bagels.
And that was a very very common thing on film shoots to do is find the bagels that were going to be thrown out and take them to your film shoot for breakfast the next morning because like I say you need to feed the people working on your film.
So very common places to find good food for free.
Now dumpster diving itself sounds like you're well diving into a dumpster.
And well first of all crawling into a dumpster is never really a great idea because you don't know what kind of trash is in there.
And you probably shouldn't go on you know you should go in well guarded if you're going to literally just look around in the dumpster.
What I've done is never that.
My brand of dumpster diving is to intercept the trash on the way to the dumpster.
That's close enough to dumpster diving to me to make it perfectly hardcore and yet a lot more palatable.
My people have a saying and that is a friend of a grocer never goes hungry.
Actually I just made that up but I thought it sounded fulxy and profound.
But anyway this basically means making friends with people at your local grocery store or small grocery stores even better usually.
For me it's Trader Joe's is the chain of little semi healthy, semi vegetarian-esque kind of grocer.
That's a good thing.
If you make friends with these people who work at the grocery store then we're alternately just work there but that was under that old classification.
You make friends with people who work there and on their way out to the dumpster and you're hanging out on the loading dock they see you and you say hey what do you got?
And they say well I got this and this and this and they give it to you and voila you've just dumpstered dove without having to ever go near a dumpster and never having to actually dive.
So that's a really great way to do it. It takes a little bit of social skill.
Again I would call it social engineering. I realize that a lot of people classify as social engineering as getting someone to do something that they don't want to do but I don't think that's correct.
I think that you can also just be friending people because you know that they might be able to bring you free food.
Yes that is social engineering. It's also just being friendly and very pragmatic because obviously if that food is going to be thrown away you may as well take it.
And here is where we get into the gray area and a big controversy of theft.
So the food while in the store is apparently worth $5 a pound and then once it gets taken by an employee outside of the back door has to be the back door apparently towards the dumpster then it automatically goes down in value to $0.
That is kind of absurd and I think that food is a right.
Just like I think shelter is a right. I do not believe either of those things should be ever considered to be privileges.
I don't think they should be things that we as modern human beings need to struggle for.
I think that we've reached a point in our development as a species that we can actually provide food and shelter for each and every person in the immediate future.
In the immediate area and by the immediate area I mean certainly in this country because we're a very very rich country.
And I think that if we dedicated our time and effort to making sure that people had what they needed to have to live a healthy and happy life then I think everyone in the country would be a lot healthier and a lot happier.
So I realize that sounds kind of ridiculous but I'm saying that we dedicate a lot of time and effort to making sure that people are making a lot of money and are running businesses and stuff.
But we don't seem to ever dedicate that amount of effort and that amount of ingenuity to just the basics to making sure that people are happy and healthy.
The crime rate would go so far down it would be mind boggling.
I believe that these things are rights. I believe that grocery stores essentially are a product of the capitalistic system that we are all playing by for some inexplicable reason because it doesn't seem to really help that many people.
It seems to really kind of oppress most people.
So I'm really not sure what that's all about but the idea that this loaf of bread that you're going to take from the bread bin out to the dumpster gets knocked down in value.
The moment you cross the threshold of the back door toward the dumpster that seems awfully strange to me.
So I've always felt that if you're hungry and that if you go into a grocery store that you may as well just take whatever you want.
I'm not saying be extravagant although I'm not saying not to be extravagant although not being extravagant help not getting caught so you might want to take that into consideration.
But just taking the food that you need that you know that you require to get through the rest of that day.
I've got no problem with that. I know a lot of people who have no problem with that.
I don't think that it's stealing from farmers. I don't think it's stealing from laborers. I think it's stealing from the lining of the pockets of the owner of that probably very major grocery chain that you've just walked into.
And frankly I think they're probably all doing just fine. I don't think it's going to hurt them that much.
So a couple of things about stealing food and clothes and other essential items. It's very dangerous. It's not a very popular idea that it's acceptable.
So it's one of those things that you should probably do infrequently and with great care.
And by infrequently I mean if you can find any other way of getting food and or clothes or whatever you need then I would opt for that because the risk in stealing is very very very great.
I'm simply saying philosophically I completely agree with it. I'm not saying that in practice it's the greatest idea ever because there are two groups of people that you're going to want to watch out for.
One group of people are the police. They are hired by a government to make sure that people do not steal things among other things but that's one of their main things.
So you have to really watch out for them. And the other group of people that you need to watch out for are vigilantes. And I don't mean vigilantes in back costumes or anything like that.
I mean like the average board person walking through the parking lot or whatever who sees you walking out with something that you didn't pay for or sees a manager yelling after you because you almost got caught by the store management which would be a very bad thing.
And suddenly decides to be the hero and tackle you to the ground and make sure that you are apprehended.
So when you're stealing things just there's not a single soul on your side. No one wants to agree that you had a right to do that. No one will agree. No one's going to help you. You're on your own. It's really really really risky thing to do. Just FYI.
If you're going to steal you need to make sure that you're aware of a lot of different things. You need to be very well versed on security systems in stores.
You need to know if cameras are present you have to assume that if a camera is present it is on. You need to assume that if they get a still frame of you appearing to place something in your backpack or your pocket then that's going to be evidence enough for them to sue you. Take you to court whatever you need to know about the different kinds of sensors at the store doorways or wherever they might be.
Sometimes they're in front of the cash register or rather at the end of the cash register line. So be aware of those things. You need to really get well versed in all that stuff.
If you're stealing not food but clothes then you also would probably want to start getting really well versed in all the different ways. They have tagging clothes with anti-seft devices.
So there are just so many wonderful ways to really get yourself into trouble if you go around stealing. Even though I fully completely agree with the idea of stealing I think it's a wonderful wonderful thing. I think it's a great example of how society is completely capitalizing on the essentials that people absolutely need.
Food clothing and shelter making away with these things for free is kind of nice but it's just really really dangerous and I can't overstate how serious people are about catching people who steal and really running them through just all kinds of legal processes.
They are not kidding about it. You're messing with their money essentially and if you know a human being and their attachment with money then you know how angry they're going to get.
They are absolutely furious if you steal and they see you stealing they will try to apprehend you they will manhandle you even if their store insurance policy says that they're supposed to let you go.
They will absolutely try to tackle you. They will yell at you. They will accuse you. They will call the police. The police will side on the business owners side. There's just no way around it. You're screwed if you get caught.
So don't get caught or don't do it. There are lots of other ways to get the things that you need for either really really cheap or for free so this would be an absolute last resort.
Yeah that's about all I've got to say about stealing and that's about all I think I've got on the whole food issue.
Aside from the the very good idea of barter so barter is bartering would be an activity where you where you might get food in exchange for for something else.
So if you've got a talent and someone else has a love for cooking then you might find that you could really help each other.
So if you've got computer lessons to someone who needs who just loves to cook and loves to feed people I mean there are people like that who really that's their art that's their passion.
And so they will love to feed people and a lot of times if it's a single person or just two people then cooking for themselves adding one person to that group isn't really that big of a deal.
So you can barter with them and say hey for a meal I will teach you how to use the internet or something like that and you can get some free food that way too.
As has been often the case I guess in this whole mini series a mixture of all the different ideas that I'm presenting here is kind of ultimately the way to make it work best.
So I wouldn't say that simply try to barter all the time for food because I don't think you're going to be eating all that often if you do that.
But a little bit of dumpster diving mixed in with a little bit of bartering mixed in with some free meals here and there from different establishments mixed in with some purchased food that kind of thing that might be the way to really make food easier to come by without a whole lot of money.
And then of course if you've got money you're kind of set and you can either buy the food from a grocery store or you can just go to restaurants and eat food there.
So I hope this has helped and been informative and next time we'll talk about money actually getting money as an urban camper stay tuned for that.
Johnny don't want the first class private in the army last year.
Now he's back to business in his father's play.
Sunday night I saw him with a smiling face.
When I asked him why did he tell poor happy Johnny talked with me.
I've got the guys.
Who used to be my captain working for me.
He wanted work.
Oh, I made him a clerk in my father's back to me and buy and buy.
I'm going to have him wrapped in work.
Up to his bro I make him open the office every morning at eight.
Then I come around about four hours late.
Everything comes to low school way.
I've got my captain working for me now.
He's not worth what I have to pay him.
What I'll never complain.
I've agreed to give him fifty dollars per.
It's worth twice as much to hear him call me sir.
While I sit in my cozy little office.
These outside working are out in the hall.
As my second home with a penadesta pending on guard.
I've got the guy.
I've got the guy.
Who used to be my captain working for me.
He wanted work.
Oh, I made him a clerk in my father's back to me and buy and buy.
I'm going to have him wrapped in work.
Up to his bro when I come into the office he gets up on his feet.
And then attention and give me his feet.
Who was it sir?
Resend it sweet.
I've got my captain working for me now.
Thank you for listening to Hacker Public Radio.
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