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What kind of an eater are you?

From locavores to femivores, to fast food junkies and punk domestics, here are 11 labels for every kind of person at the dinner table.

12. Scavenger / Urban forager

Ethan Welty, co-founder of the urban foraging website fallingfruit.org, holds several fruity seed pods from a tree at a public park, in Boulder, Colo. Welty's website, which grew out of one of his hobbies, already points the way to more than half a million edible plants in public spaces worldwide, and it is growing. Brennan Linsley/AP

  • By Stir It Up! editors

Scavengers eat scraps. Often, their entire diet consists of left-overs, but where the original meal came from no one can say. Scavengers also have iron stomachs, and display a complete disregard for the "best by" dates listed on perishables. Chunky milk? Call it cheese. Bruised banana? Don't be a baby. Scavengers somehow always find the secret stash of sweets you keep in the cupboard or around your desk at work. No hiding spot is safe from a true scavenger.

Moochers are a subset of scavengers. They're the people who will eat your fries while you work on your burger. They're the ones who ask, "want to split a dessert?" They get their handouts in bits and pieces. Some moochers are bolder than others, but for the most part, they'll just stare at your food until you offer them some.

Urban foragers are a different breed. These people keep track of the edible plants around their neighborhood and harvest them hunter/gatherer-style. Nuts, roots, berries, fruit, mushrooms – urban foragers can identify which ones are edible, and then eat them. Sometimes they will partake in dumpster diving, searching for perfectly good food that has been thrown out by restaurants and grocery stores. As a country, America wastes about 40 percent of the food it produces. There might be enough for a meal in a dumpster near you, if you're a brave soul.

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Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

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The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

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