Sharing the free-food lifestyle

I met a Dumpster diver yesterday morning in a coffee shop. I was interviewing him for a story on something other than food waste, but he mentioned he has been searching through Dumpsters for edible food for several years and has actually depended on that food because of sporadic work opportunities.

He took this photo of the stuff he found and sent it, along with permission to share, writing, “Casual publicity of food waste can only hurt us gleaners, but I’m curious to see the result regardless.”

Here’s his e-mail to me:

"I ran an errand in the strip after we met this morning, and picked up some things from a produce Dumpster.

- three bunches of parsley
- three oranges
- tomato
- large onion
- two bags of grapes

“Most of the parsley was good. Half the onion, part of an orange, and more than half of the grapes are in the compost now. There were probably a dozen bunches of parsley, fifty bags of grapes, and twenty bags of tomatoes and peppers that remain in that dumpster.”

I’m not disclosing locations because I don’t want to give food purveyors a prompt to secret their Dumpsters; I want gleaners to have the opportunity to rescue food.