As much as I like to think dumpster diving is in some ways inherently political, there are times when the whole thing can feel incredibly self-involved. And so, in the perpetually problematic desire to “give back”, I’ve been volunteering in food redistribution (again).

I like this charity, even though it’s a charity and not a “movement”, more than many, because it continues a long European tradition—gleaning—and provides food that is actually healthy. Every Sunday, the “Gleaner’s Tent” takes the leftover produce from one open-air market in the 19^th and distributes it to an eclectic group of punks, retirees, and immigrants.

There’s one step I left out, though. After we get the food from the distributors, we sort it. The head of the tent is proud that the food we give out is (almost) as good as the food people are buying a few meters away. But it doesn’t come that way when we ask suppliers for their leftovers. On Sunday, we had a hyper-abundance of mangoes (hey, it’s better than cake), and I was assigned to cull the good from the not-so-good. And so I did, chucking the truly desultory and inedible fruits into a rapidly-filling organic compost bin behind me.

When I thought I was nearly done, another volunteer—a migrant from West Africa—looked somewhat bemusedly at my work. She clearly knew more about mangoes than I did, and began grabbing fruits that I thought had made the cut. A split-second of contemplation determined that two-thirds of them were unfit for human consumption, and they joined the rest in the bin. I didn’t know what to think. There were hungry people, and we didn’t have nearly enough gleanings to feed them all.

When the line finally started moving, though, I had a better understanding. Just like at the food bank, people—that is, hungry and poor people—did not just take what they were offered. They reached for the brightest, the biggest, and the freshest, and haggled and traded to get something better than what we pushed onto them. There was a lot left over—so much, in fact, that I wound up gleaning the gleanings, reaching into that compost bin and taking a half-dozen mangoes that I had been convinced someone would want but which had been left behind.

I’ve been thinking a lot about questions of “value” as it relates to waste. Originally, like a good Marxist, I concluded that we waste because, under capitalism, food is a commodity valued based on its capacity to be exchanged, not its ability to be used. I’m ready to concede that this was is a jejune and simplistic point. Sure, maybe we waste food because we don’t “value” labor, animals, the environment, or nutrition. But we also waste it because of what we do value: taste, appearance, convenience, abundance. Waste starts to seem more intractable when you look at it that way, as a “positive effort to organize the environment”, as anthropologist Mary Douglas puts it.

The mangoes were edible. They were probably even nutritious. But they tasted pretty bad. And maybe it’s only from a position of privilege that eating the crappy leftovers seems like a good idea.