What I found ‘dumpster diving’ in supermarket bins

The story

‘Skipping’ or ‘dumpster diving’ is when people go out and look through supermarket and shop bins, to find out if they have thrown anything usable away.

On a cold evening, our reporter Jacob Jarvis headed out with a couple who do this around Leicestershire, and he was taken aback by what he found.

Eating food from out of a bin. I mull the thought of it over in my head and no matter how I try to make sense of it, I struggle to.

I’m wasteful with what I buy from the supermarket, I have to admit, and I throw my fair share of fruit and veg away.

I buy it with the best intentions, eat one portion, then chuck it because it goes mushy and off.

Some shops, though, throw out a lot of food that’s fine to eat, by plenty of people’s standards.

That’s not me jumping on the environmentalist bandwagon, and I’m not trying to shame these conglomerates or shock you. It simply does happen.

I know this because I went out with two ‘skippers’, who go and rescue castaway food from bins at shops before it gets thrown away, and found plenty.

Click here to read the full story.

How I got the story

Around the start of the year I saw Michaela Smith post a picture of hundreds of oranges she was donating to charity. I wondered how she came about having them, so I got in touch with her. She then explained to me how she and her partner go ‘skipping’, or ‘dumpster diving’. Then she invited me to go along to write about it, on the conditions that I didn’t name her partner or the specific locations we visited.

So late one night, I met her outside a pub in the west end of Leicester, jumped in her dark blue estate car, and we headed off.

I wrote a first person piece about the experience, with some pictures and video from the night, a feature interview with Michaela, compiled a list of everything we found and wrapped it up by contacting every major supermarket for their responses to what I had found.

Jacob Jarvis