diff --git a/scrapy/trunk/scrapy/utils/misc.py b/scrapy/trunk/scrapy/utils/misc.py
index 696c30f8c..7a3965cb9 100644
--- a/scrapy/trunk/scrapy/utils/misc.py
+++ b/scrapy/trunk/scrapy/utils/misc.py
@@ -199,10 +199,3 @@ def string_camelcase(string):
     return CAMELCASE_INVALID_CHARS.sub('', string.title())
 
 
-def item_to_dict(item):
-    """Returns a dict representation of an item"""
-    res = {}
-    for field in item.fields:
-        res[field] = getattr(item, field)
-        
-    return res