Supermarket sweep

Sasha Hall only makes 600 a month in salary. It's not much to live on, especially with prices going up. So, when she saw bin bags full of discarded food being dumped outside her local Tesco, she thought it was her lucky day.

The bags were full of good things: Sasha filled her pockets with pies, waffles and ham, all within their sell-by date and still sealed in their packaging. They'd been thrown out because of a fridge malfunction at the supermarket. The food couldn't be stored, so it was simply thrown away.

'Tesco clearly did not want the food,' said Sasha later. 'They dumped it - and rather than see it go to waste, I thought I could help feed me and my family for a week or two.'

Sasha's not the only one to have found her dinner in a supermarket bin. The UK has a growing number of so-called 'freegansA person who rejects consumerism and seeks to help the environment by reducing waste, especially by retrieving and using discarded food and other goods.' who feed themselves entirely on what food retailers throw away.

One freegan, Katharine Hibbert, wrote in the papers this week: 'I have lived healthily for several years on discarded food. I take my pick from sacks full of heavily packaged sushi, bread, ready meals and fruit, all perfectly edible but dumped as they go out of date.'

Supermarkets dump huge quantities of food every day. The Environment Agency says that retailers produce 1.6 million tonnes of food waste each year - that's heavier than 200,000 double decker busses.

Some waste goes to charities, but legal regulations mean it has to be transported in refrigerated vans, which is time-consuming and expensive. A growing amount of waste goes to 'anaerobic digestersBacteria that break down organic matter-such as animal manure, wastewater biosolids, and food wastes-in the absence of oxygen.,' which convert food into electricity.

The majority, however, just ends up in landfill sites. Worse yet, as it rots, it emits methane - a powerful greenhouse gas.

But although Sasha was helping to reduce this burden of waste, she found herself on the wrong side of the law. Police arrived at her house and arrested her for 'theft by findingoccurs when someone chances upon an object which seems abandoned and takes possession of the object but fails to take steps to establish whether the object is genuinely abandoned and not merely lost or unattended..' Yesterday, she faced a magistrate's court.

So is it wrong to take food from supermarket rubbish? Many shops don't like it, and either lock their bins or deliberately spoil food before throwing it away. The big chains agree that waste is a problem, but they say they're doing the best they can, recycling where possible and trying to arrange charity deliveries. Perhaps freegans are just getting a free ride?

But freegans say supermarkets aren't doing enough. If their bins are still full of edible food, and the world is full of hungry people, it seems a terrible waste not to eat it.