Yahoo TV

Meet the TikToker who feeds herself by scavenging waste food from dumpsters outside supermarkets - and spends just $100 a month on groceries.

Theresa Kadish, 31, has been rifling through skips for over a decade and estimates that the waste food now makes up nearly a third of her whole diet.

She picks out perishable goods like fruit, veg, eggs and meats and has even put together a filet mignon dinner for free after finding all the ingredients in dustbins.

She said: “I select food in the dumpster the same way humans have always selected food, with my senses.

“I look for fresh colours, I smell quality or decay, I taste things to see if they're good.

“I have never gotten sick eating dumpstered food, nor has anyone I've ever fed.”

"I dumpster because I am hungry, and it is an efficient way for me to acquire the food I need to stay well fed."

Theresa went ‘dumpstering’ for the first time when she was 19 and she moved into a collective house where they were hosting an activist marching bank.

She said: “We all went to an Odwalla distribution center and brought home several thousand dollars worth of fresh squeezed juice.

“I was astonished by the wealth that could be found in the dumpster.”

She scrambled into the skip that smelled of alcohol and rot, and had a fermented pool of juice at the bottom, and filled up her car with the nearly-expired cartons.

She drove home sipping a mango juice and knew she would never buy juice again – which slowly changed to never buying food again.

Theresa, who lives on a farm in the Catskill Mountains in New York, USA said: “I kept imagining all those hundreds of gallons of juice in the days after. I told all my friends about it.

“I started dumpstering frequently. Soon I was feeding my collective house out of the dumpster, and catering meals for events.”

Nowadays, Theresa sources food from skips up to twice a week with her housemates at her farm, but it depends on the season and how many mouths there are to feed.

“Every dive takes about three hours, including driving and cleaning the food,” she said.

“When I am actively feeding a large group of students, about a third of what we eat, most of our fruit and meat, comes from the dumpster.

“Another third comes from our farm, all our vegetables, and a third is purchased, like gains, oils and other bulk goods.”

She has spent over a decade honing how to choose a fruitful dumpster, and has studied how supermarkets process their waste and avoids those with compactors.

The most gourmet meal she has ever salvaged was a delicious filet mignon with potatoes and onions.

She said: "It tasted like steak. Seriously there's no difference between dumpstered and non-dumpstered food, and I don't assign preferential ethical or cultural value to either."

Theresa is aware there is an element of risk that comes with rummaging through supermarket bins, and has had run-ins with the police.

She said: “Once a store manager called the cops, and when the officer came he looked at my trunk full of fresh strawberries, and then he looked at the manager, then he looked back at the strawberries.

“’You throw all this stuff out?’, ‘Yes’, ‘Every day?’, ‘Yes’, sighed the manager.

“They let me keep the strawberries!”

She says the reason for sustaining herself this way is merely because she’s hungry, and not because she wants to make a political statement.

“I don't see myself as an activist. I just like eating good food,” said the filmmaker and educator.

“Sure, I save a bit of money, but it's not really quantifiable. Much of the stuff I get out of the dumpster I would never buy with money.

“I avoid purchasing food as much as I can, I can increase the quality of my diet with dumpstering without changing my food spending patterns.”

She began posting videos on her TikTok account, @teiresiaskadish, as she wants to share that part of her life and recommend it to others.

She said: "Try it. Go exploring!

"Don't be afraid to get dirty. Gross is a state of mind."