This week's Festival of Frugality is hosted by My Dollar Plan. Once again, there is a lot of great reading for the frugal-minded and those interested in living a life of Savvy Frugality. Savvy Frugality's post Where to Find the Cheapest Travel Deals is included in this week's Festival.

Other posts of note:

No Credit Needed presents Beware Of The Laundry Detergent Cap posted at No Credit Needed. He found the recommended amounts for detergent are not what the lines look like on the cap! Personally, I always use the half of the amount of a product as what is called for on the label. It works just fine. I think most manufacturers suggest using a certain amount of product in an effort to make you go through it faster and therefore have to buy even more.

Faron Benoit presents My Dad – Frugal, Generous and my Hero posted at Financial Learn. There is some excellent advice here. My favorite: never pay full price. Remember, retail is for suckers.

Ron presents 5 Ways I Plan To Survive The Recession posted at The Wisdom Journal. If you are gainfully employed or otherwise earning an income, it is never too late to take steps to ride out the current economic downturn. My family has been just fine, but we also started preparing months ago.

Be This Way presents I’ve Finally Found the Line posted at Are You Going To Be This Way The Rest of The Time I Know You?. This is actually a reaction to my post about Freegans. I like Be This Way's take. I wouldn't eat food from the trash either!

This is an update to my earlier post about Freegans...people who live off the trash other people throw away. Yes, this includes food. Freegans are trying to draw attention to the amount of waste people create, and how people in countries like the U.S. consume more than they really need to.

Not to be outdone, the folks in Great Britain are also shedding some light on the subject. For those of you have have BBC America on your cable system, you can check out "Dumped", a four-part mini-series with an episode airing tonight at 10 pm EST.

During the mini-series, 11 people spend three weeks in a garbage dump, living entirely on what others throw out in their trash. Aside from the question of whether they will be able to find enough edible food to survive, I'd like to know how they will deal with the smell.

Last night I was channel surfing when I came across the latest episode of Oprah, and something caught my eye...something that exposed me to a side of frugality I wasn't really aware of until I saw this show. Now, as a forty-something-year-old man, I'm not a regular viewer of Oprah, but I was intrigued.

The show was about something I can only describe as "extreme frugality": freegans, or freeganism. Freegans are people who believe that Americans, while being the biggest consumers on the planet, are also the most wasteful. Each year, billions of dollars worth of food is discarded into the trash, even if it hasn't yet hit its "sell by" date. Freegans say that's a terrible waste of our food and resources, and they are there to make use of it.

That's right, Freegans regularly "dumpster dive" to get the majority of their food, home furnishing and clothing. At first, I was extremely repulsed by the thought of eating food that came from the trash. However, I was also surprised at some of the things the Freegans found: unopened canned goods, sealed vegetables, bread, lunch meat, seafood -- all dug out of the trash to become some Freegan's free meal. One Freegan had not purchased new clothing in three years because she regularly found designer duds discarded in the trash.

A group of Freegans in New York even sponsored a sort of dumpster-diving tour of the city. They scrounged through trash bins and dumpsters and found all sorts of food they said was perfectly fine and edible. They found an entire 30-gallon bag of bagels in front of a bakery, destined to become part of some Freegan's frugal breakfast. While I truly believe New York bagels are the best in the world, I'm not brave enough to eat baked goods pulled from the trash.
You might think from my description of Freegans that they are trash-eating, dreadlocked, homeless hippies who refuse to work for a living and would rather live off the cast-offs of others, but you would be wrong. Many of the Freegans were people who worked as engineers, doctors or some other lucrative position. They said it wasn't about saving the money they would otherwise spend on food. It was about preventing edible food from hitting the landfill and recovering other perfectly useful items that would otherwise be wasted.

There is no doubt there is a lot of waste in the U.S. I furnished one of my son's bedrooms with a futon mattress that I found sitting on a curb. There was nothing wrong with it. The previous owner was moving and just trying to get rid of it. I'm afraid I have to draw the line at food when it comes to my dumpster-diving.

If more people adopted the frugal mantra of "buy it for less, make it last longer, use it more", there would be a lot less waste in the U.S....but the Freegans would also have to start paying for a meal.

Last year, Raina Kelley, using the moniker Freegan Girl, blogged about her experiment to live as a Freegan for 30 days. It looks like she nearly went insane by Day 30. Apparently, you can't find a good cheeseburger in the dumpster. There is also a web site where you can find more info about Freegans, but the folks who run the site seem a bit more anti-social than the merry trash-pickers I saw on Oprah.

Savvy Frugality Tip: Some things, like cheeseburgers, are worth paying for.