I'll never forget the way the French exchange students at my high school carried on about the portion sizes served at American restaurants. We would go to a restaurant, and they would laugh and gasp at the amount of food served up for a single person, taking pictures of themselves holding up the plates and pointing at the food. Our restaurant portions are a tourist attraction, I learned.

So much for trying to repel the stereotypes that Americans are fat and overindulgent.

Support these stereotypes with some truthful statistics, and it's obvious that Americans not only eat a lot and buy a lot, but we waste a lot. In 1997, the New York Times relayed that the U.S. Department of Agriculture reported that America wasted 96.4 billion of the 356 billion pounds of edible food produced each year. Naturally, with that type of food going to waste, people have started eating out of the trash.

Some rebellious citizens, called "freegans" are rejecting America's consumerism society by subsisting on other peoples' garbage. The freegans practice what has come to be known as "dumpster-diving" and "skip dipping" which are terms used to describe the process of foraging trash for edible food outside restaurants, grocery stores, homes, cafeterias, etc.

Sounds kind of gross, doesn't it?

I thought so too, until a little research told me that many of these freegans are eating better than I am. These days, with my college-student food budget for the semester dwindling, I've been eating a lot of peanut butter sandwiches, pasta and eggs. Come to find out that a little dumpster diving at a local restaurant could make for a meal of organic fruits and vegetables, expensive breads and even some edible meat. (By the way, dumpster diving is not illegal, although trespassing on private property is).

With the economy in its current state and recent efforts to recycle and preserve food, I would venture to say that perhaps if the USDA did a study today, they would find fewer amounts of food being wasted in the United States. Feeding America, an organization previously known as America's Second Harvest, is just one example of an organization working to save edible food from the trash and distributing it to the hungry.

Still, the fact that freegans exist shows that there's work to be done on the home front. The New York Times also noted in its 1997 article that the USDA estimated that "recovering just 5 percent of the food that is wasted could feed 4 million people a day." With so many going hungry each day in the world, that statistic is frustrating, though no doubt complications would stand in the way of organizing an effort to get our wasted food to hungry stomachs.

True — the statistics of our wasteful country are more than a decade old, but solutions to the issue are just being born. I admire the creativity and self-determination of the freegan lifestyle. I have to say that I am not at the point of looking at a dumpster and salivating with hunger, but I do respect that some people are out there making use of America's wasted food. Although, it's a shame that the food ended up there in the first place.

Freegans don't just eat garbage, they also wear it and share it. This is an area that I might actually look into. Freecycle.org and Craigslist offer forums where people can post items that they don't need anymore, but are willing to give to someone who does, rather than throwing them away.

It'd be interesting to see what would happen if America tried harder to "waste not." Perhaps this country and maybe others would no longer "want not." The taste of "waste not, want not," actually sounds delicious, even if it means picking through the garbage.

For more informaton on freeganism, see HREF="freegan.info">freegan.info.