 For a 24-year-old Maximus Taylor, dumpster diving was a way of life, and he didn't just do it for food. He did it to make a statement about food sustainability. September of my freshman year, you know, someone from class was like, Hey Max, do you want to go dumpster diving? And so we drove out to the Odwala Distribution Center. Huge dumpster, you know, the dumpster, the size of a bus. And I remember jumping in and, you know, in about 10 minutes we pulled out about probably $1,500 worth of juice. Like it was mind-boggling. What started as a fun evening in college lets one of Maximus's passions. The first couple of years that I was dumpstering it was mostly a social thing. It was something fun and, you know, a little bit, you know, different or radical to do with friends over the weekend. And it took me a while to sort of get a hang for it and also just get a feeling for the diversity of dumpsters that were in the Boston metropolitan area to sort of realize that I could get everything that I needed to eat out of the dumpster and eat better than most people. Maximus not only focused on acquiring the food, but also on sharing it with others. The entirety of human evolution, minus the past 200 years, all of human life has been revolving around the acquiring and processing and preparing and sharing of food with one another. I mean that's what life was and so everybody had this deep intimate relationship with the food that they were eating because they were producing it. And now most of our society is not involved in the production of food and so we get alienated from it. For Maximus, preparing food from scratch is very important. That's why he cooks almost all of his meals from what he finds in his garden. The way that cookbooks are set up is they sort of imply consumerism. They compel you go out to the store, buy X, Y, and Z and then you can come back and measure them out in these specific quantities and then you'll have your perfect dish. But that's not the way that we need to be thinking about food. Food is a process. However, he views food as not only an agricultural issue, but a political one as well. The food production has been outsourced. It's been specialized to particular farmers out in the middle of the Central Valley. One person is in charge of 10,000 acres or something like that. And those farms are necessary, but it's also necessary that everybody in the world has an understanding that food comes out of the dirt. From dumpster diving to food activism, Maximus' passion has driven him to publish a book, A Curious Harvest, where he cooks healthy meals with minimum ingredients. What this book tries to encourage is instead of asking what do I want, you say, what do I have? And you look in your fridge and you say, oh, I've got some cabbage and I've got some pasta and I've got some tomatoes. Okay, I'm going to make this dish. And so you know what you have and you have an idea in your mind of all the different things that you can do with what you have available and what goes well with what, and then you can prepare it. And so it's not a recipe book. It's more like a cooking algorithm or a cooking philosophy. It's a way of understanding what your food is and how it relates to your body. While most of us see the value of our food in terms of money, Maximus Taylor has learned to grasp the real value of food.