How did Jeannette and Brian keep from going hungry?

Jeannette and Brian did the best they could to forage for food. They hunted for berries and searched for food in the trash at school.

Brian and I became expert foragers. We picked crab apples and wild blackberries and pawpaws during the summer and fall, and we swiped ears of corn from Old Man Wilson's farm. The corn was tough— Old Man Wilson grew it as feed for his cattle—but if you chewed it enough, you could get it down. Once we caught a wounded blackbird by throwing a blanket over it and figured we could make a blackbird pie, like in the nursery rhyme. But we couldn't bring ourselves to kill the bird, and anyway, it looked too scrawny to eat.

When other girls came in and threw away their lunch bags in the garbage pails, I'd go retrieve them. I couldn't get over the way kids tossed out all this perfectly good food: apples, hard­boiled eggs, packages of peanut­butter crackers, sliced pickles, half­pint cartons of milk, cheese sandwiches with just one bite taken out because the kid didn't like the pimentos in the cheese. I'd return to the stall and polish off my tasty finds.

There was, at times, more food in the wastebasket than I could eat. The first time I found extra food—a bologna ­and­ cheese sandwich—I stuffed it into my purse to take home for Brian. Back in the classroom, I started worrying about how I'd explain to Brian where it came from. I was pretty sure he was rooting through the trash, too, but we never talked about it.