The Gleaners

The Washington Post has a piece called "Diving for Dinner" on people who 'dumpster dive' in the DC area. Often less hardcore than the name sounds this is just when people take food from a supermarket that is in the process of throwing it away because it has reached the "sell by" date (they don't have "use by" in the States).

The Web Editor from Sojourners who I work pretty closely with, Ryan Beiler, gets a mention in the article too. He wrote a piece on it for the magazine a little while back.

As the brilliant documentary The Gleaners and I was able to show dumpster diving is the urban equivalent of gleaning the unharvested crops from the fields. In France both still occur with some crops too difficult to harvest with machine and others not considered desirable shapes or sizes and simply dumped many poor still glean from the excess of the harvest to survive. Meanwhile in the cities the poor and those opposed to a disposable society 'glean' the goods that can't be sold in time by supermarkets.

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