Skipping, it seems, is frowned upon by the police, but not by the courts.

I’m not on about jumping over a length of rope while singing Jelly On A Plate. I mean ‘skipping’ – the practice of taking food from skips or bins to eat, and to minimise waste.

It was highlighted with a recent case involving three men accused of stealing waste food from bins behind a branch of Iceland in Kentish Town. The men were facing prosecution over claims they took tomatoes, mushrooms, cheese and cakes.

Charges were dropped after the Crown Prosecution Service decided a prosecution was not in the public interest. The charges had been made by the Metropolitan Police, but Iceland said staff had not alerted police and it had asked prosecutors why action was being taken.

If food is being thrown out by a store because it is past its sell-by date, but is still fit to eat, why shouldn’t people make use of it? In a throwaway society which disposes of a bewildering amount of waste, I think skipping is perfectly acceptable.

But then I would say that – because, reader, I too have ‘skipped’.

It was when I was a student, living largely on packet soya mince and baked beans. Word got out that a local supermarket was chucking out perfectly good food in a skip, so students started raiding it after dark. I went along a couple of times, I don’t recall what I foraged, but I do remember drawing the line at prawns, which is what someone surfaced with.

We came away with enough food for days. Our kitchen cupboards were filled with bread rolls and cakes; it wasn’t even stale and it would’ve gone to waste otherwise.

Eventually the supermarket wised up to the fact that students were diving headfirst into its skip, and a huge padlock appeared on it. We missed that skip, and those free bread rolls.

Where ‘skipping’ or the ‘freegan’ movement is concerned, the real crime is the disgraceful amount of food we throw away as a nation. While an estimated one billion people on the planet are going hungry, we waste tonnes of perfectly edible food.

I used to do some waitressing for a catering company and was horrified at the amount of food scraped into bins at the end of the night.

For ‘freegans’, raiding skips is about highlighting waste. But with many families struggling to make ends meet, and homelessness rising, lack of food is a very real issue for a lot of people.

Food banks are stretched to breaking point – surely shops and restaurants could throw unwanted food their way; distributing it in an ethical way rather than simply chucking it out.