This article was originally published July 3, 1987.
Coming of age during the mind-altering ’60s may have something to do with Michael O’Callaghan’s perspective on life. Or maybe it was the seventh grade teacher who encouraged skepticism and taught him to read newspapers between the lines. Or his understanding of basic human need, learned from living beneath a tarp in a city park, surviving on nuts and raisins he bought by recycling aluminum cans.
Chronologically, he should be a yuppie along with other aging hippies who’ve decided oyster shooters and self improvement seminars are more gratifying than trying to save the world. But O’Callaghan’s social consciousness has withstood all cultural assaults. It never stopped bothering him that people were going hungry.
It came to O'Callaghan's attention long ago that grocery stores were throwing out food that could be put to good use. Fruits and vegetables too ugly to sell were perfectly edible after a little cosmetic surgery with a paring knife. Stores were throwing away dairy products with expired purchase dates even though they still had some life left. They were tossing out milk cartons that leaked. Squished bread. Loose grapes.
Two and a half years ago, O'Callaghan convinced the management at Carrs to save bruised, outdated, leaky and smashed groceries, as well as leftovers from its salad bars, for distribution to the poor and hungry. In the process, he created a food network involving about a dozen nonprofit agencies, like the Brother Francis Shelter and the Family Food Center. The program, he estimates, distributed about 450,000 pounds of food last year, enough to feed every person in Anchorage twice.
O’Callaghan, 43, champion of local down-and-outers, has captured the attention of people in pinstriped suits in New York City. Newsweek magazine has called him one of America’s unsung heros. He’s been saluted in an article along with 50 other modern-day heros, one from each state and Washington, D.C. including the man who created the Smokey the Bear campaign, a nun who counsels sexually abused women and a man who was shot in face while trying to lure wayward kids away from street gangs. The issue hit local newsstands this week.
At first, the recognition had O'Callaghan feeling a bit overwhelmed. Now he's shrugging it off. "Whatever," he says.
Somewhere between unshaven and sprouting a beard, O'Callaghan is tall, thin and powerful. He's been known to tow 250 pounds of food around town on a bicycle. When he built a family cabin in Trapper Creek, he cut the logs by hand with an ax. "It only takes a few minutes to fell a tree with a chain saw," he explains. "A tree deserves more respect than that."
O’Callaghan, you might say, lives an urban subsistence lifestyle. He’s a dumpster diver. When he needs something, building materials for instance, he waits until dark, then climbs the fence at the dump and helps himself to the trash. And he’s been feeding his family out of dumpsters for years.
“Oh, I’ve gotten amazing scores out of the dump boxes,” he says. “What are those big roasts they serve in restaurants? Prime rib? Once I got like maybe a 15-pound prime rib. . . . It’s really a whole lot like Christmas. You never know what you’re going to find.”
O'Callaghan gets cash by doing odd jobs, like shoveling snow, landscaping and working as a fishing guide. His wife, Lydia, works part time as a graphic artist and computer consultant. Because the O'Callaghans prefer personalized education over "crowd control," Lydia teaches two of their four children at home.
They met 15 years ago in Oregon feeding birds in a park. On their first date, they fixed a sink together. Two months later they were married. Now they live in Fairview in a house painted dandelion yellow with grass green trim. A plastic shortnose bill fish scored at the municipal dump is perched in a tree in their front lawn. Their house has down-home Alaska charm. The linoleum on the kitchen floor is warn out, and two dead Dodge Darts keep the weeds company out back.
O’Callaghan figures his family gets by on about $8,000 a year. Although they’re buying the house they live in now, for years they lived rent free. They’d find abandoned houses, hunt down the owners, then offer to fix the places up in exchange for free rent.
"A long time ago, I started thinking, the more you make, the more you spend," O'Callaghan says. "Everybody knows that. So there isn't any sense in making more. So if that's true, there must be sense in making less.
“You can’t learn to do this by making $40,000 a year, because you’re a paycheck junkie. You get a fix every Friday. But you pay your dues, like any club. When you join society, you pay your dues with your inflexibility, and in this, you pay your dues in that you don’t have what you want all the time.”
This man is the product of traditional family. His father worked construction and didn’t believe much in laid-back living. But a year and a half ago, as his father lay dying in Oregon, O’Callaghan had all the time in the world to spend with him. Although he never understood his son’s lifestyle, the old man appreciated that.
For O'Callaghan, the road of life took a major detour back in college. At the beginning of his senior year at the University of Oregon, O'Callaghan was closing in on four different degrees. He decided to go for political science, then quit one term short of graduation.
"I thought, what am I ever going to do with a political science or a geography or a sociology or a psychology degree? Nothing. So I quit. It never would have helped me all these years. You've been exposed to higher forms of thought, which is what it's about rather than a piece of paper."
Once O'Callaghan dropped out, he never quite dropped back in. He still talks about anarchy and CIA conspiracies, as he did in the '60s. And he harbors the kind of environmental philosophies that Mayor Tony Knowles has politely referred to as "interesting" and the city's top health official, Dr. Rodman Wilson, has labeled the product of "a fertile brain."
Want to reduce Anchorage’s air pollution problems? Tax people for driving, O’Callaghan suggests. Or require all vehicles to have 12-foot-tall exhaust pipes. This would reduce air pollution by 20 percent, he says in his “Treatise: To Clean Air,” a proposal submitted to the municipality a few years back. “Besides, it would give me something to hang my rebel flag and coon tail on.”
O’Callaghan did manage to sell the municipality on one pollution solution program. With a city grant, he rounded up a fleet of bicycles in hopes of luring people out of their cars. During summer months, for a $5 refundable deposit and a piece of identification, people can use a bicycle all day for free.
O'Callaghan's nonprofit corporation has been overseeing the Earth Cycle program for 10 years. But these days, most of his energy goes into garbage.
O'Callaghan discovered dumpster diving about 10 years ago. His first dive was behind Don's Produce Stand, where he surfaced with a couple cases of mushrooms.
"We decided, well, hey, this is a pretty neat way to get food. So then we went to Proctors at Northern Lights and C Street and jumped in the back of there and found something like 10 to 15 pounds of cheese. Cheddar cheese. So we went home and broke the stems out of all these mushrooms and put blocks of cheese in there and stuck them in the oven. Pretty much sold me right there. Wow. Free food. Because we've been down and out."
At first O'Callaghan just dove for food for his family. Then he started picking up groceries for friends and neighbors. Soon he was feeding about 30 people. The food distribution program he calls "Earth" evolved from there.
In the beginning, store managers didn't know what to make of this guy rummaging through their garbage. O'Callaghan's dumpster raids got him arrested three times, although charges were later dropped. He finally decided to take a more businesslike approach to his mission. He focused his efforts on Carrs, made an appointment and showed up wearing a threepiece suit from Bishop's Attic. "It cost me $20, including my wing tips," he says. "Nice suit. All wool.
"I'm a minister in, like, the Mother Earth Church and the Church of Gospel Ministry. You know, send away a dollar. So I went in dressed in my suit as Rev. O'Callaghan. . . . I said, "You know, we've dug out of your dump box behind your store before, and I can tell you know much you throw away.' "
O'Callaghan was able to convince the management to save produce they couldn't sell. Then he started working on the various department managers to save their outcasts, too, first dairy, then bakery and on to frozen foods and nutrition. Now that the program is rolling, a typical haul includes yogurt, cheese, milk, bagels, muffins, raisin bread, apples, mangos, onions, potatoes, deli pizzas, leftover soup and salad everything imaginable except meat and seafood. But O'Callaghan waits to "oooh" and "ahhh" until out in the parking lot.
"In a company of our size, it's obvious some product could go to waste," says John Cairns, executive vice president of Carrs. "Nobody likes to waste anything . . . when there are people in this country and right here in Anchorage that are hurting. (O'Callaghan) is providing a worthwhile service. We feel good about it."
It’s been about 2-1/2 years since Carrs agreed to help O’Callaghan with his food program. About 50 volunteers do pickups, and O’Callaghan mostly troubleshoots for the network, like deciding what to do about the leftover cheesecake from the salad bar.
"By the time you get through pouring it into bags, it's just mush," he says. "We have our marketing problems. Yes we do."
O'Callaghan still picks up three stores himself, four days a week just to keep his finger in the dumpster, as he puts it. That entitles him to first pick, so the only groceries he needs to buy are rice, granola, honey and an occasional stick of butter. The neighbors who donate use of their pickup truck to the program get second pick. The rest goes in a wooden box out back. Throughout the day, people wander by and help themselves to groceries. Whoever wants food takes what he needs and leaves the rest for others.
"We do all this with no money," O'Callaghan says. "The groups with money, what do they do? They create a bureaucracy, hire administrators, get a board of directors, make policy. We just give away food.
"If we can help one hungry, needy person a month, a year or whatever, the purpose of the program has been filled."
(Bill White also contributed to this article.)