THERE was a brief period when, as a cash-strapped student, I ate out of a skip.

It’s not quite as ‘misery memoir’ as it sounds. When word got out that a local supermarket was throwing out food barely past its sell-by date, it didn’t take long for some of the town’s student population to descend on a skip round the back of the store after it closed. My flatmates and I retrieved enough food - mainly fruit, vegetables and bread - to last several days.

There was quite a range of food in there, all perfectly edible. We grew fond of that skip - I have a lasting memory of a couple of lads foraging head-first in it, their legs sticking out - but after a week or so the supermarket got wind of our nocturnal foraging and slapped a padlock on it.

What hit home during my stint as a scavenger - or ‘freegan’ as I prefer to call it - was the shocking issue of food waste. That store was throwing food away because it was past its sell-by date, yet it was still fit to eat. It’s something households do on a daily basis. How many of us have glanced at the ‘best before’ label on a packet of something in the fridge and chucked it in the bin, even though it may only be a day over?

Many consumers, it seems, are confused by the difference between ‘best before’ and ‘use by’ dates on food packaging, leading to items being thrown away while still edible. Now Tesco is removing ‘best before’ labels from many of its fresh produce, including potatoes, tomatoes, apples and onions, to tackle such food waste.

Since ‘best before’ merely indicates that quality may deteriorate after the date - rather than becoming less safe, as in ‘use by’ - this seems a sensible move. Tesco customer feedback shows that many people assess fruit and vegetables by the look rather than the ‘best before’ date anyway, which is how it should be. Consumers are grown adults - surely they can decide for themselves what is fresh and fit for consumption.

Hopefully it will go some way to tackling the nation’s casual disposal of perfectly good food which is not only a terrible waste - in a world where, according to the Food Aid Foundation, around 795 million people don’t have enough food - but also dents the household budget. Even vegetables that look a bit tired and past their best are fine in a stew. If in doubt, bung ‘em in the slow cooker! I was brought up in a house where meals were made from scratch, using largely cheap, fresh ingredients, and there was little waste. Reared by a “make do and mend” housewife during the rationing years, my mother was known to scrape a layer of mould off jam - often jam she’d made herself, from berries picked in a local car park or the canal towpath. She ignored ‘use by’ labels, and none of us perished. My parents had jars and tins dating back months (even years) in their kitchen cupboards.

I try not to throw food away if it’s avoidable, although I hold my hand up to milk, which I can’t bear even slightly on the turn. For this I blame 1970s school milk. I still remember the clammy dread when a crate standing in the sun all morning was brought in and those horrid little milk bottles were handed around the classroom. I loathed it so much I eventually had a “milk note” so I didn’t have to drink the stuff. Even now I can only stomach it in hot drinks, and I’m invariably left with half a pint in the fridge which gets poured down the sink. I feel a guilt pang every time.

Overall though, most food I buy is used. It’s a quiet victory when a lone onion languishing in the bottom of my fridge ends up chopped up in a casserole. Well, it’s better than ending up in a skip...

* HEAR, hear to Alan Titchmarsh, who says parents are doing their children a disservice by not allowing them to get dirty.

Speaking at the Chelsea Flower Show, the Ilkley-born gardener/broadcaster said: "For God's sake connect them with the outdoors, get them away from screens for a few hours."

He added that children need to "get dirty, have fun, a spark in their eyes". And he warned that, instead of protecting youngsters, the obsession with antiseptic wipes is stopping them from developing antibodies.

"I grew up in a different age, we played out all day, came back in the evening, or for tea at 5pm," said Alan. Me too. Children need to play out and get dirty. Smothering them with wipes does them no favours.

* I CAN’T imagine how the past 12 months have been for those whose loved ones went to a pop concert and never came home.

Manchester Cathedral was filled with love and emotion this week as the 22 people who died in the city's Arena bombing were remembered on its first anniversary. I thought of the moment I heard my niece’s voice a year ago - exhausted, bewildered, but thankfully alive. She was just a teenage girl in the crowd that night. Now she lives with the memory of what happened next. But love prevails, and those around her who lost their lives are forever in her heart.