I 23 (NB) came downstairs in the morning to bin something. When I opened the bin I found a full bag of unopened fresh oranges sat at the top of bin. I was confused so I picked them up and they were perfectly fine. I washed them and left them on the counter (I know it’s kinda weird of me but you don’t eat orange skin, if it was an apple I probably wouldn’t have). I asked my housemates whose oranges they were and why they were in the bin. I discovered it was my roommate Sam’s (24m). He stormed in the kitchen and asked why I was “dumpster diving through the bins like a freak”. I asked why he binned them and he said he “had too many oranges”. I expressed that he could’ve offered them to someone in the house. I explained to him that throwing out perfectly good food was wasteful. He then yelled at me and said I’m not his mother and can’t tell him what to do. He told me to get out of his ass and stop overstepping boundaries. He then took the oranges and threw them in our outside bin so no one would get them out again. So Reddit, AITA for overstepping and dumpster diving?
Edit for clarification: it wasn’t Sam’s bin. It was our communal kitchen bin.
I think you made a typo, Sam is 14, not 24.
Nta
But, you and Sam definitely win the award for most nonsensical use of the term boundary….neither of you know what you are talking about, sigh
Rather than saying you find throwing away food wasteful, the better approach would have been to say you would eat them and thank make a nice salad or just eat them. Making a moral judgment about it was unnecessary, but taking perfectly good oranges out of trash was fine.
I didn’t think this was a boundary I was just using his words. He said it crossed his boundaries.
Oh ok good, well Sam sounds kind of exhausting if he thinks this is a “boundary”. You did nothing wrong
Nta picking stuff off the top of the trash isn’t dumpster diving but even if you had been true dumpster diving nta. Sam however is selfish and wasteful, not to mention rude af for calling you ‘a freak’. He’s not going to go through life with many friends if he keeps that attitutde
NTA – People throw away perfectly good things all the time. I got a nice glass and chrome desk w/ sliding trays because someone was moving, didn’t want to take it and it was left out for bulk trash. Not a single thing wrong with it.
Once he threw it away, it became community property. I would demand money now from him since he threw away **your** oranges. Go get them again from the bin, juice them and freeze some OJ.
I don’t know why he didn’t think of this. I grew up in Florida and we had 2 juice trees. We would end up having 10 gallons of OJ we froze because couldn’t go through it fast enough.
NTA — not even a little bit. You were hardly dumpster diving! If you had actually gone through the trash and fished out something of his from deep in the bin, he’d be justified in feeling violated. But fresh oranges at the top of the bin? Totally fine and very normal for you to take them out. I would do the same thing.
Sam sounds very unstable. Taking the oranges back from you and throwing them in the outdoor bin was absolutely wild. That would be immature behavior from a 10-year-old, much less a grown man.
Keep your distance. He’s not OK.
My husband still laughs about the time I took a roll out of my boss’s trash can… Boss went gluten-free and had tossed a roll (in a bag) into a small trash can that only had a few papers in it. I was a poor intern and grabbed it out and ate it. Fortunately for me my boss thought it was hilarious (and that the gluten was going to kill me…eyeroll…)
I think you’re NTA and Sam is super weird for wasting perfectly good food. And I think once it’s in the trash it’s fair game so you weren’t wrong to grab it.
However, if I was you I definitely wouldn’t grab anything out of Sam’s trash again. He’s unstable.
NTA but your house mate sounds toxic
NTA. If you’d fished around for his credit card statements or whatever, that’d be overstepping. Rescuing perfectly good oranges isn’t that. Lecturing him could have been a little annoying, but he’s in the wrong here.
NTA:
One man’s trash is another man treasure. I say it’s fair game.
NTA. This Sam character sounds like the sort of prick who would pour bleach on food ‘waste’ that was being thrown into a dumpster at the end of the day, instead of leaving it edible for dumpster divers or giving it away to people in need.
You have a toxic roommate. NTA
NTA This is literally that Seinfeld episode with the eclair in the trash.
“It was not in the garbage, it was above the garbage!”