The New Foragers : Economy: Hard times are pushing some members of the middle class to line up at supermarket dumpsters to look for food. Some say the discards are perfectly good. Others call them a health hazard.

Several years ago, Rafi Kechichian saw one of his employees leave through the rear door of his Reseda dry cleaning shop and a minute later return with some cheese and other food. Curious about its source, Kechichian was shocked when the employee told him he had taken it from trash bins at a Vons supermarket next door, and he forbade the employee to do so again for fear the employee would get sick.

After that incident, though, Kechichian began noticing a steady parade of cars to the trash bins, day in and day out. “They’re always looking through the trash and taking food out. They dress like you and me, in regular clothes. Not homeless types,” he said. “One guy drove up in a Cadillac.”

These days, seeing someone in tattered clothing and dilapidated shoes forage through a trash bin is all too common. But the jarring spectacle of people driving up in cars, including late-model sedans, and pulling out food can be witnessed at supermarkets in middle-class San Fernando Valley neighborhoods.

The phenomenon, noted by local providers of social services, appears to be the result of a faltering economy that is pushing those on the fringes of the middle class to the brink of poverty. Although grocery companies dismiss these middle-class foragers as retired people with too much idle time on their hands, or people who feed their animals discarded produce, a different story emerges from those taking food from grocery store trash bins and supermarket employees who observe them.

“My husband lost his salaried job three years ago, and since then we’ve both been working part time,” said a woman in her 40s who takes food from dumpsters at the Vons at Tampa Avenue and Victory Boulevard in Reseda several times a week. “I wouldn’t do this unless I had to,” the woman said, declining to give even her first name.

“I used to drive by and see people doing this and say, ‘Oh God. How could they do this?’ ” the woman said. “But it saves about $40 a week in groceries. I can use that money to buy clothes for my kids.”

She always keeps plastic grocery bags in the trunk of her Hyundai Excel so that when she finds an edible batch of produce--such as she did on a recent Thursday morning when the trash bins were topped with normal-looking beets, broccoli and mushrooms--she can get the food home neatly.

Another frequent forager at the Vons in Reseda is an 81-year-old man who drives a beat-up Ford Maverick. “I don’t need this,” he said of the bread, Pepsi and packages of dried fruit he had loaded into a box, but his worn clothes and car left a different impression.

“The stores throw out tremendous amounts of good food,” said Gina Leita, food pantry coordinator for Meet Each Need With Dignity, a nonprofit Pacoima organization that helps low-income people. “There are people who make daily rounds of supermarkets and pick up boxes of food for their families.”

Leonard Schneider, dean of the School of Social Welfare at UCLA, says that since the 1970s the quality of life in the United States generally has been in a steady decline. “We’re worse off now than in the ‘80s because we are so burdened by debt and deficit we can’t expand public programs to help the unemployed and their families,” he said.

According to Schneider and other social service officials, the middle class is bearing the brunt of economic changes in society.

“We’re seeing many more people who were gainfully employed and now are having hard times because of unemployment,” said Dorie Gradwohl, director of the Jewish Family Service Valley Storefront, which provides aid, including food, to seniors and younger families. “They’re amazed at finding themselves in this position and have had a difficult time coming in and asking for aid. They feel very ashamed.”

With the unemployment rate marching upward--in February, the state’s jobless rate hit 7.4%, the highest level since October, 1985--Teresa Abbott, supervisor of the county Department of Public Social Services information line, has noticed an increasing number of calls for food stamp assistance from the “newly poor,” especially after substantial layoffs in Southern California’s aerospace industry.

“The newly poor are people who have lived a middle-income existence and acquired some things and are now out of work,” Abbott said. “To them, applying for aid is a denigrating experience.”

But many who would swallow their pride and apply for food stamps don’t even qualify because their incomes exceed governmental guidelines. For a family of two, net income must be below $702 a month; for a family of four, below $1,059.

“I can’t get food stamps. My husband and I both work part-time jobs and our incomes are too high to qualify,” the woman at Vons in Reseda said.

The woman, who said she has four children living at home, noted that her family doesn’t approve of what she’s doing. “My 14-year-old son lies down in the back seat of the car if I bring him here. My husband won’t do this,” she said as she poked at discarded bags, boxes and wrappers with a broomstick fitted with a hook at the tip.

She appears to know many of the foragers who show up regularly at the Reseda Vons. One, a well-manicured blond woman in her 50s who drives a burgundy Honda Civic, wouldn’t talk to a reporter.

But another identified himself as Rudy, an 81-year-old Canoga Park resident. Rudy, who drives a shiny Toyota pickup, said he picks up food for the nearby Guadalupe Center, a nonprofit community service center that gives food and meals to the needy. In his glove compartment are a wad of receipts for food that he carries from the bins to the center. But he also admitted to taking some food home to his wife. “We wouldn’t starve, but it’s a nice addition to the meal.”

With five cats and two dogs, Rudy said he hunts for unlabeled cans, which often turn out to be pet foods.

Another elderly man frequents the Vons at Ventura and Topanga Canyon boulevards in Woodland Hills for what he says are health reasons. “I had open-heart surgery. I pick up cans for the exercise,” he said, holding a pole with pincers at the tip.

As he spoke, a woman who had been yanking food out of a dumpster climbed into a Honda Accord--so new it didn’t have license plates--and drove off.

An employee at the Woodland Hills Vons said a variety of people drive up and poke through the bins. “I must know 10 people by name,” he said. “I had one lady show up in black spandex pants. She was driving a new family van. One man in a suit and tie comes regularly and jumps right in.”

An employee at the Lucky Food Center on Victory Boulevard in Woodland Hills said, “I see a lot of Volvos and even Cadillacs back there” at the trash bins.

The regular foragers are easy to spot. Most wear gloves or carry long poles with pincers, hooks or steel pins on the ends. At the Reseda Vons, “they’re very polite to each other,” said Kechichian, who routinely observes them. “If someone is looking through the dumpster, the other one will wait in the car until that person is done.”

Not so at the Vons on Ventura Boulevard. “We’ve had people fighting in the garbage,” an employee said.

What people find in trash bins and the shopping carts full of discarded items that surround the bins are foodstuffs ranging from vegetables, fruit and dairy products to dated bags of raisins, hot dog buns and tortillas.

These middle-class foragers say the food is perfectly edible. “I take care in getting food from here. See, this Parmesan cheese container is dented, but it’s not cracked open,” said an elderly man who distributes food to retired neighbors. “When I take them this stuff, they know what they’re getting.”

While spokespersons for major grocery-store chains maintain that the food tossed into the trash bins is unfit for human consumption, employees, especially those who work in produce, say there’s nothing wrong with some of it.

“A fruit or vegetable might have a spot on it, but there’s nothing wrong with it,” the Lucky employee in Woodland Hills said. “You wouldn’t buy it if you saw it here at the store, but you would eat it if you had it at home. You just cut around it.”

Pointing to a trash bin, the Vons employee in Woodland Hills said, “You can find food good enough for dinner in here.”

Supermarket management takes a different position. “A lot of people feel that a lot of food that’s thrown away can be eaten. But what’s in that dumpster is there for a reason--we’ve determined that it’s a bad product,” Vons spokeswoman Vickie Sanders said from her office in Arcadia. “It’s quite possible that the product is safe; a person is not going to die if they eat it. But we have deemed that . . . there’s a serious question about its edibility.”

As examples, Sanders cited rust that can build up inside a dented can, or botulism that can grow inside a can with a bulge. “The man who took home the dented Parmesan cheese container may not have been poisoned, but one day it could happen. It just has to happen once,” she cautioned.

Sanders said, too, that some food is thrown away if a dairy case loses power for several hours, or if customers take refrigerated foods and, changing their minds about buying them, leave them in unrefrigerated areas of the store.

“Some people don’t know about the perishability of food. Someone may see a package of cheese in a dumpster and it looks perfectly good, but they don’t know that it’s been sitting wedged between two magazines the whole day,” Sanders said. “Some of it may possibly be edible, but I guarantee 90% of it isn’t.”

Because Vons and other chains donate millions of dollars worth of their products to food banks each year, Sanders said it is unlikely that markets throw away significant amounts of edible food.

“Last year, we gave away nearly 9,000 tons to food banks,” Sanders said, and the grocery chain continues to do so. The donated products include cereal, bread, canned goods and nonperishable items. Lucky gave away $6.7-million worth of food and general merchandise items, such as diapers, in 1990, spokeswoman Judy Decker said.

An Alpha Beta spokeswoman, Helen Kling, said, “We donate all of our dated food--cheeses, canned food, lunch meats.” But Kling said some food, namely Alpha Beta bakery products, is tossed.

“Obviously, there are some foods we can’t donate because of spoilage and coding issues,” Decker said, referring to the “Sell by” code on each item of perishable food.

Sanders, Kling and Decker said their respective markets try to control the amount of food that is thrown away, but visits to numerous grocery trash bins in the Valley found considerable produce that looked edible.

Indeed, one man spotted at the trash bins of the Reseda Vons said he drives from his Van Nuys home to that Vons and the one in Woodland Hills because he thought their discarded produce was better than that at the markets in his neighborhood.

Although Vons doesn’t have any warning signs posted at its Reseda and Woodland Hills stores, the sign at the Alpha Beta on Topanga Canyon Boulevard in Woodland Hills--which reads: “Waste products are unfit for human consumption. DO NOT REMOVE. Violators will be prosecuted”--apparently doesn’t dissuade some foragers.

“We do everything we can, but we can’t be police officers,” a management employee at the Woodland Hills Vons said. “We used to have plastic covers on our trash bins, but people would burn them to get in.”

Some supermarkets lock their trash bins, but that’s a hassle for employees who have to constantly throw away food. Other supermarkets have installed costly trash compactors, but each store manager has to budget for it. Also, in some cases where Vons is a lessee and not a building owner, the landlord might not allow Vons to install a compactor.

Ralphs Grocery Co. has kept foragers out of its trash bins by putting them behind locked gates.