After 4 Months of Food Rescue, I Didn't Save Any Money

If you don't have a mortgage or useless things like a car loan or enrichment classes for your kids, then food is most likely your single biggest expense to tackle. So, when I quit my job last year, I had this grand idea that I'd feed myself and Jon with rescued food.

After all, that's practically the tagline for the freegan lifestyle. This freegan spent only $8 on food in a year; this other early retired dude lives on rescued food. Seems easy enough.

After doing different types of food rescue for 4+ months, I realised that my savings have actually been negligible. Here are some reasons why food rescue doesn’t actually save me much money.

1. There’s a lot of food waste, but it’s mostly unhealthy.

So first of all, there's a shocking amount of food being rescued from the bins every single day.

This group I'm in, which only does small-scale rescues, rescued 10 TONNES (10,000kg) of food in December alone. That's 322kg a day — crazy!!! (And this group only focuses on individual restaurants and shops; rescues are typically handled by individuals with just trolleys and IKEA bags. We don't even touch supermarkets or fruit and veg wholesalers which require vans and lorries.)

I read that food rescuers in Singapore don't go hungry, but get fat. It's scary but true. A lot of the food that's thrown out daily are high in fat and/or carbs: bread, desserts, pastries, rice, curry, cooked food, etc.

Okay, I'm not saying they're flat-out unhealthy, but these things need to be consumed in moderation. So that's one obstacle to saving money via food rescue. Unless you want to become very unhealthy indeed, it's not a good idea for this kind of rescued food to form the bulk of your diet.

Which means you might only consume a small amount of what you rescue but still need to spend on regular groceries.

2. I’m not high up enough in the fruit & veg rescue chain.

Of course, there are also copious amounts of fruits and veggies that get thrown away on a daily basis. The amount is likely to be much, much higher than the 322kg/day I quoted earlier.

Generally, only people who drive cars, vans, or lorries can do this kind of rescue because the quantity is so huge; they usually need to work with teams to receive, sort, and distribute the produce too. I don't drive, so there's little I can do to help rescue; sometimes I help out on the sorting and distribution side instead.

One problem is that the perishables, well, perish quickly once distributed. Most likely they were already ripe to begin with. Then you add on the over-handling during the packing and sorting process and that does 'em in. Plus I'm paiseh to get first dibs on the veggies so I only ever go to the community fridges after the rest of the aunties and uncles had a go.

TL;DR there is fresh produce to rescue, but it’s time-sensitive and those at the start of the chain (e.g. transporter role) get the quality stuff.

3. Rescuing food involves hidden administrative & transport costs.

So far the best place I've found for perishables (given my limitations) is for Olio. The Olio partner gives away a lot of veg not because they're past prime, but because they don't have space in their fridge already. BUT there's a lot of admin to do — you have to distribute the items on Olio and make energy-sapping arrangements with Olioers. It feels like a job.

Not all food rescues are as onerous as Olio, but I've found that there's usually some kind of admin to do. There's pre-rescue admin, like "camping" for collection slots, and post-rescue admin, SOPs like recording weights and taking photos.

Now, I get that the admin is important for tracking purposes, but sometimes I'm just not motivated enough, especially if the value of the rescued food is not high. It's easier, I admit, to simply buy food because at least you don't have to report anything.

The other costs are more obvious: transport (eh, not cheap in Singapore, sometimes outweighs the value of the food!), effort (I suspect I've gotten repetitive strain injury in the shoulders when I carried too heavy loads for too long), time (which has an opportunity cost).

Doing food rescue can be a major source of stress as well. Because it requires commitment, I've rescued even when I wasn't feeling well, when it felt like a murderous 40 degrees out. Sometimes I get swayed by the group mentality and "help out" with an unpopular rescue even when I get zero benefit from it. And I know it can strain relationships with partners, too.

TL;DR food rescue isn't entirely free; there are plenty of hidden costs to weigh. It sometimes makes a lot more sense to simply buy food.

4. There is no impact on dining-out costs.

We usually dine out a few times a week and that didn't change with my food rescue activities. It’s not like Jon is so into food rescue that we’d make it a social or date-night activity.

That said, although doing food rescue may not fully remove the need to buy food, it does scratch the itch to acquire foodstuff. I didn’t go to the supermarket or buy groceries online as frequently as before.

My personal food rescue guidelines:

• Types of food: I prioritise fruits, veggies, and grocery items from sources that I trust and know I WILL use. Sometimes I do rescue cooked food but at most once a week. No desserts! God knows I don't need an unlimited free source of sweets...

• Extent of commitment: If I dread it, I ditch it. No point volunteering your time if you're not gonna enjoy it. I try my best to ignore calls to "help" at certain sites unless it's really convenient for me.

• No compromising family: Jon and my pets are my top priority and I do not want food rescue to take time away from them. It's been helpful to limit rescues to only daytime ones so evenings are blocked out.

• Cost vs benefit: I make sure the benefits outweigh the costs. Sometimes food rescues barely break even, but I don't mind if I can benefit a bunch of other people at an acceptable cost to myself.

REGARDLESS, Mobile Kaybie rocks.

Mobile Kaybie is a van that visits various neighbourhoods in Singapore to distribute rescued fruits, vegetables and bread. It’s fronted by local freegan, Daniel Tay, who’s known for eschewing the whole make-money-spend-money thing to dumpster dive and rescue food instead. I must admit it was cool to see a real-life early retiree up close.

I like the ethos behind this project. It seems that the organisers want to spread awareness and appreciation of rescued food across socioeconomic strata. This is a welcome relief from the dominant narrative in mainstream media around food rescue: oh, look at these kind-hearted volunteers giving out binned breads to migrant workers, low-income families, and other “unfortunates”. I will leave it to you to decide what’s wrong with that picture.

Sure enough, the Mobile Kaybie crowd was mostly middle-class, English-speaking, digitally-literate, and obviously well-off enough to pay for food. But nobody felt the need to virtue-signal by talking about “sharing food with the needy” and other charity-type comments. Everyone in line had a gleam in their eyes that showed they were focused on food and only food: class, money, salary, social status etc. were far from their minds.

Some things that impressed me, in no particular order:

• Pre-event briefing painstakingly read out each and every time

• We were split into groups, each with a leader who subdivided us into pairs 

• Event was complete with SafeEntry check-in and social distancing

• Max. 2 people at van at any one time

• Max. 1 person at each van door

• Each pair is given 3 minutes to pick their items

• There’s a digital timer keeping time

• Produce are all sorted and laid neatly in boxes

• Each box has a label saying how many you can take of the item (e.g. 2 pieces, 5 pieces, unlimited). This system keeps distribution fair

• Each person is given a shopping basket and can only fill up one. See above point

• Communications were kept strictly pragmatic with no ideological content 

I wouldn’t be surprised if the team get Ops-related job offers all the time. It made me think about how people/project management skills and leadership abilities needn’t only flourish in the workplace. In fact, maybe ground-up initiatives – being messy and lacking the structural discipline of an office or school – are the superior training ground for such skills. So if anyone ever suggests to me that being unemployed, doing food rescue, etc. equates to being an unskilled loser living on the fringe of society, I’m gonna bring them to the next Mobile Kaybie to show them what’s what. 

Link to learn more about Mobile Kaybie (Kaybie = KB = Kampung Bishan): https://www.facebook.com/KampungBishan/