A dad has been slammed for serving his children food from the rubbish bin - as he claims it wasn't mouldy yet and would be a waste otherwise. He explained how he grew up poor and has tried hard to kick some of the "old habits" from his childhood - but certain penny-pinching tactics slip through from time to time.
One thing he hasn't been able to overcome is his hatred of food waste, saying "there are starving people in this world and for us to throw out perfectly fine food just doesn’t sit right with me".
However, his wife - who never went hungry as a child - is unable to understand his point of view and believes feeding their children food from the rubbish bin is "borderline abuse".
The man said: "When I was aged six our mum took a promotion and moved three hours away. We found out in our adult life, she had been hoarding her money and giving our alcoholic father a small allowance to raise us.
"With his addiction problems, it left us minimal money for essentials. By the time I was 16, we were technically on our own and was ransacking dumpsters to feed myself and my sister.
"I’m now in my late 30s, have a successful career and live quite comfortably, my sister is also well off now. My wife and I have a great relationship, I’ve worked to stop some of my old habits from my upbringing.
"Some of my penny pinching techniques, my wife graciously ignores and lets me save our money where I can. However, there’s one issue we always can’t find a compromise."
He admits he "can't handle it when food is thrown out" - and would rather donate the extra food or feed food past its use-by date to his pet chickens.
"Our daughter, 12, wanted chickens last year," he added on Reddit. "That ended up being a good idea, since our table scraps would go to them instead of being wasted to the trash.
"For the record, I hate when my wife shops are Costco. She buys too much for our family which creates a lot of waste.
"I’ve asked her to at least donate what we don’t eat, or give it to me and I can drop it off to a homeless camp near my job.
"She promised to just buy less quantity, but that didn’t last because she doesn’t like grocery shopping more than once a week."
He went on to explain how he came home from work one day to see a sealed pack of lettuce, one whole cucumber, an entire loaf of bread and potatoes in the rubbish bin.
After deciding there was nothing wrong with them, he took them out of the bin, washed them off and started preparing dinner with them.
He said: "The lettuce was expired, but looked fine. The bread was also expired, but had no mould. The potatoes had eyes, but weren’t green or rotten yet.
"I went inside and started on dinner. I grilled chicken, which was the only item not from the trash. I made a salad and added the cucumber, used the bread to make croutons. And finally, I made mashed potatoes.
"We all sat down to eat, my wife mentioned how great the food was."
However, after he told her he'd used the food she'd thrown out earlier that day, her mood completely changed.
"She was completely mortified and grossed out. I told her I washed everything off before cooking it, but she said that didn’t matter," he said.
"My point was, if the food was good enough for us to eat it should have not been thrown out. At bare minimum, she could have given it to our daughter to take to the chickens.
"She argued back, that I should have taken it from the trash and to the chickens, not to our table.
"She was irritated with me, fearing we all would have food poisoning or something. But none of us got sick from the food.
"She said regardless, it was wrong for me to prove a point in that manner and borderline abuse to serve the family food from the trash."
While some users could appreciate his hatred for food waste, others urged him to listen to his wife and try to overcome his childhood issues.
One user said: "She is right. There is so much bacteria in a trash can, you can quite well poison your family. Just because it looks good and tastes good, doesn't mean it is.
"If it was laying around in the kitchen, past date, that would be fine, but it was already in the trash."
Another user added: "You did this to prove a point and honestly you have no idea what will make people sick.
"As someone in science, I can tell you that you can’t see if some foods have gone bad and they would have to deal with the consequences of not feeling well."
A third user said: "You could do the grocery shopping yourself. Then there wouldn't be any waste, and you wouldn't have to nag her anymore."
One more user added: "He definitely needs to change his habits too, because his childhood traumas are adversely affecting his adult life and his family and it's his responsibility to work on those."
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