The gleaners

After the harvest, with the straw bales still in the field, jackdaws come to pick up the stray grains of corn. This was once routine in the countryside, when the women and children of the poor would spend the days bent double to collect the individual kernels from the ground, and it was the landowners' duty to permit this as an act of charity. In the Bible the gleaner Ruth symbolizes the humble, virtuous practices of thrift and resourcefulness.

There's a famous painting, The Gleaners painted by Francois Millet in 1857. At the time it was considered shocking: it was an unwelcome reminder of the rural poor whose faces and figures were deemed to have no aesthetic appeal in the art world.

More recently the graffiti artist Banksy (if he exists) produced a witty update of Millet's painting for an exhibition of his work in Bristol.

Gleaning is often described as an obsolete practice. True, it's only birds we see scavenging on our stubble lands nowadays but all over the world - in Brazil, Peru, Cambodia, Gaza, Albania, Kenya - people live on vast rubbish dumps and make a barely-subsistence living scavenging for saleable trash.

At the same time, waste-conscious freegans and skip-divers in the richest nations rescue, redistribute and recycle thrown-away food and furniture that would otherwise be dumped.

Who says gleaning is dead?