Book Analysis: On Dumpster Diving By Lars Eighner

In a country where a significant percentage of the population is homeless (approximately 600,000 (endhomelesness), but the exact count is unknown since it is so difficult to accurately measure), it is important that everyone understands the typical experiences and plight of a homeless person. Since most people likely do not have regular face-to-face interactions with the homeless, their perception of the homeless will be based around the stories they hear and read. Thus, it is important to analyze those popular stories and memoirs and determine if they accurately reflect the typical homeless individual. One of those popular stories is Lars Eighner’s On Dumpster Diving. In his memoir, he lays out an image of homeless life which I think is atypical

I’d like to start by examining Mr. Eighner’s qualities as a person using evidence from his essay. From the start, we see that he is a very big proponent of what he calls scavenging when he mentions that “I began Dumpster diving about a year before I became homeless” and “I think it [scavenging] a sound and honorable niche,” (Eighner 1). From this we can gather that he certainly is a scavenger, and enjoys doing it, since he began a year before he truly had need of performing the art. I would label this as being unnecessarily frugal, since he was scavenging and salvaging not out of pure necessity, but likely because he enjoyed it. However, regardless of whether or not he enjoyed it, the becoming a scavenger was a self-inflicted lifestyle decision. From there, he goes on to describe his three principles of eating safely from Dumpsters, “using the senses and common sense to evaluate the condition of the found materials, knowing the Dumpsters of a given area and checking them regularly, and seeking always to answer the question ‘Why was this discarded?’” (2) From these three principles, we can see that he is very meticulous, a quality which is reinforced as you read on and he explains all of his conditions for safe food of every type. A little bit later on in the essay he becomes very hypocritical,