general grocery store rule: light bags are full of emptiness, bags that are too heavy and take a full round shape are full of things you don't want to touch (wet coffee grounds, pork blood), and medium weight bags (heavy but liftable) are the most likely candidates for the Good Stuff. what to feel for is packaging, but heft. this is theoretically obvious but not at first evident when i started dumpstering. knowing what to feel for is important at big places, like whole foods or trader joes.

and different places have quirks. at the chocolate dumpster, we came home disappointed night after night having smelled the chocolate but being unable to find it, all jack-and-the-giant-beanstalk and such. what jesse showed us was that the bags we'd been throwing away (which were, incidentally, suspiciously heavy) were filled with chocolate, consistently, at the bottom. below all the waxpaper and pepsi cups.

where are good places to dumpster? the posh and the yuppie, from grocery stores to specialty stores. bakeries, all bakeries. rory mentioned distribution centers, which seem to me like the real gold mines for expensive food. and the places where they make the food, where you can find ends, scraps, leftovers, & c. Pasta & Co, in seattle, throws away all kinds of expensive fresh pasta in bags and sacks (ravioli, linguine, everything) presumably because its not worth the money to collect the dregs of any operation. the places where they make the food obviously also occasionally throw out ingredients. pasta and co gave us a ton of eggs, currants, cherries, and party nuts (for, you know, party nut pasta) as well as an option on a few pounds of celery powder.