by Jeremy Jameson

Created on: January 23, 2007   Last Updated: April 30, 2007

One thing you can learn about people from their garbage is what they like to eat. If you find plenty of pizza boxes, Chinese food cartons, cardboard items from McDonalds/Burger King/any other fast food restaurant, you know these people hate to do any sort of food preparation whatsoever and buy from restaurants whenever possible. If you find plenty of packaging for microwavable dinners and meal kits, you know they aren't so big on restaurants but prefer a minimal amount of work making their meals. If you find packaging for raw fruits and vegetables, fresh meats, and lots of other basic, unprocessed foods, you know this is the home of a true cook who doesn't mind making things from scratch or close to it. Also, if you find packaging of high fat/calorie/salt/cholesterol/sugar/etc foods, you know this person isn't much concerned with a good healthy diet. But if you find a bunch of packages from a brand that looks to be right from the health food store, you have quite the opposite.

But garbage tells about more than eating habits. It also speaks of entertainment choices. The types of magazines you find may reveal this person's hobbies and interests. If you find newspapers, it could say any of several things: 1. the person doesn't read them but is too lazy to cancel the subscription; 2. the person buys them just for the comics and coupons and other inserts, not the news itself; 3. the person actually reads these things but doesn't save them. Ironically, not finding any newspapers there could mean someone who is rabidly interested in news/history, or just a packrat. If you always find a copy of TV Guide, you probably have a couch potato.

There are plenty of other things you could find out, but the scariest one is their actual identity. People who just throw away important documents like bank and credit card statements, tax returns, medical information, etc. are doing so at a high risk of identity theft. They are practically asking for it. That's why I have a paper shredder that I use to make confetti out of any piece of paper I don't want to file in my records that bears sensitive information like my full name, address, phone number, email, social security number, date of birth, account numbers of any kind, and so on. Shredding financial documents makes identity theft via trash diving much less likely. What would-be-ID-thief is going to bother sifting through hundreds or thousands of little shreds of paper to piece together documents they haven't even seen yet? That's harder than any jigsaw puzzle out there (believe me, I know: just recently I sent something through the shredder that I later wanted, tried to find a particular piece of info among all the shreds, and had no luck at all - surely a thief rooting through your trash will spend less time trying to put puzzle pieces together than I did in the privacy and legitimacy of my own attempt).

So I guess the lesson for the day is go buy a paper shredder if you don't already have one. Oh, and I didn't mention it in my article, but recycle if you can!

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