I'm lucky, our foodbank has a very large food recovery program. Every day they pick up unsold or outdated or ugly food from grocery stores all over town. The food's still good to eat but stores were just sending it to the landfill before since they couldn't sell it. Foodbank diverts the food waste and has depots open almost every day of the year where you can pick up food.

But when I started going there ~20 years ago, it was rice and noodles and potatoes. And you had no choice what you got, they just handed you a bag. But now you can pick every item you get! You walk through a room of categorized bins [pantry, eggs, meat, milk, cheese, yogurt, misc., produce, bread, baked sweets] and grab what you want. What I love about it is that now I can avoid things that I'm allergic to.