I'd like to start by saying a few things.

1. I have not gone crazy.  
2. We are not rich, but we are not starving.
3. We are not idealists, but we do believe there is something wrong with the "American Dream".
4. We are not reckless, but life is too short to live by the status-qou.

All that being said (typed), last Friday night I took the leap.

Into a dumpster.  Yes.  You read that right.  Actually, it was several dumpsters.

The first one had little to be reclaimed.  There was a broken rocking chair and one of those things you put on the roof of your car for long trips to put your luggage in.  Oh, and there was a Christmas tree too.  My diving buddy, who we'll call Bonesaw for reasons undefined, wanted to set it up in the parking lot we were in but decided not to.  After we decided there was nothing of worth there, we made our way closer to the Mediterranean market we were scouting out. 

Behind the store we found what I was anticipating.  Earlier last week I had scoped out a few other stores to see what we were up against, only to discover that every store had a compacting dumpster with a chute either directly connected to the back wall of the store or with a locking door outside with no access to the internal contents.  My theory is that this is to deter the exact efforts we were attempting to explore.

So, we made our way to the side of the building where Bonesaw (who we'll just call BS) found a whole onion.  And, I'm not just talking about your average onion.  We're talking 6 inches across kind of onion... with only about an inch of in-edibility, in the bushes. Not to mention, if you were into thievery, there were roughly two truckloads of refrigerators just sitting in the open with tarps on them.  It is a good thing that I developed my new motto before temptation set in:

I'm only here for trash.  Not theft.  (A man's gotta have boundaries.)

After our first treasure, the onion of great treasure, BS spotted the bagel shop across the street.  We parked in the apartment parking lot next door and stopped first at the trash bags behind the optometrist's.  I got about 30 5-day supply boxes of prescription contact lenses and BS got 2 huge boxes of envelopes.  He also tracked down 5 bagels that never should have made their way to the trash.  Mmmmm, bagels.

Next we hit a local Sprouts with no luck.  Read: Chuted dumpsters.  The dumpster behind the local furniture store, however, provided great amusement for BS, with its Styrofoam trampoline/ball pit experience.

La Madeline across the street had accessible dumpsters and we hoped to score big here because of their wonderful pastries and breads.  Unfortunately, scoring was not in the cards.  We did, however, discover that they do not lock their outdoor storage area where they keep not only food and drinks, but expensive carbonating tanks for soda/beer taps.  Good thing I've got a motto and I'm not hard-up for homebrew supplies.

We then made our way to Central Market where we found the same "chuted" experience we'd run into at Sprouts and earlier in the week.  Undeterred, we walked the length of the building only to discover the south end of the building where they keep the "Organics Only" disposal.  Roughly thirty trash bins, each labeled by department (MT= meat, FS= fish/stanky, and FL=floral, BD= bread, etc.) and all of them empty... except the floral department.  And yes, the flowers from this trip are still on our window sill, thank you very much.

Hoping against hope, before we went back to the car, I took one good saunter around the chuted dumpster.  When I got to the area just below where the chute connects to the dumpster, I noticed something unusual.
A gap. 
With food sliding out. 
This is where I saw them. 
And they were beautiful. 
They made me wonder with extreme sadness all that was locked up inside this container of metal and "waste" (oh, the irony that we call it waste).  And what was this thing of beauty, you ask?  Well, I'm glad you asked.

They were grapes.  One bunch of grapes.  About 25 total.  Perfectly edible.  Not a scratch on them.  Not a briuse.  So perfect in fact, BS and I each ate one on the way back to his car.  And we're still alive.

Our last stop of the night was a fluke.  We had decided to head back to the house.  After all, 2 hours of frolicking in the late night wild had landed us at 4am and BS had been awake for 22 hours at that point.  But the sign the read "Donut Shop" seemed to evoke some sort of pirmal urge in him.  We made an illegal right turn from the left lane and made our way behind the 7-11 to the dumpster.  When I lifted the lid, my first thought was, "Mother lode..." when I took the first sweet-scented whiff.  The first thing I saw was what turned out to be four 6-packs of 16 oz Sprite.  As I was in process of transporting them to the car I heard a thud, followed by, "No way!"  This my friends was the Mother lode.  30 pounds of donuts in one bag.  What were we going to do with 30 pounds of donuts?  Who cares?  It was 30 freaking pounds of donuts and we did not pay for them.  Granted, they were smushed together and a day old, but it was 30 FREAKING POUNDS OF DONUTS!  When have you ever had 30 pounds of donuts at your disposal for free?

When we finally made it back to the house we were exhausted.  We celebrated with splitting a Sprite and a toast... to Provision.

Since then, we've enjoyed a few donuts.  The bagels (onion, sesame seed, pumpernickel) were great toasted with some butter.  The onion was great saute'd with my eggs on Saturday for lunch.  Everyone enjoyed a grape or two.  And BS will never have to waste another tree buying envelopes.

All that said, I wonder just how much is really out there in dumpsters that could be used by people who don't care where it came from, only that it did and they were fed.

And I wonder how many people I know can say they've been dumpster diving.