If date night has gone from margaritas and tapas at a hip restaurant to spag bol and cask wine at home, you're no doubt blaming the GFC. An American Express survey of restaurants found 83 per cent have noticed a fall in spending since the start of the economic crisis. And in a study of 5000 Aussie families led by Kidspot.com.au, 46 per cent said they're cooking at home more. Together with global warming and our ever-increasing interest in nutrition, tighter budgets have given birth to food fads. We check out some of the newest trends to see what you can learn.


THE TREND Dumpster diving
What the?! "Divers" rescue items, usually edible, from skips, like those outside supermarkets. But they're not hobos - an Australia Institute study reported many divers are "well-educated urban dwellers, often in well-paying jobs" and that their aim is to challenge "the socially sanctioned revulsion around waste". Supermarkets are less than keen about it due to health and safety concerns. But is it legal? Depends, says Terry McCabe, from McCabe Terrill Lawyers in Sydney: if someone intentionally abandons something on public property, it can't be stolen because it's no longer owned; but if the property belongs to someone or the dive happens on private property, a diver may land in choppy waters.

WH VERDICT "Junk food" isn't everyone's cup of tea, but dumpster divers have a point: Planet Ark says Aussies chuck 3.28 million tonnes of food (much of it edible) a year - 62 times the weight of the Sydney Harbour Bridge. And divers, like IT worker Joel Hill from Sydney, prove a lot of it is good to eat: "I used to dive because I couldn't let free food slide; now I do it so I eat like a king. Anything less than scotch fillet is a waste of fridge space." So when considering to chuck or not, is mould a definite sign you should? Clinical nutrition specialist Dr Michael Greger says while you must toss soft foods at the first sign of mould, trimming it from firm foods like cabbage, capsicum and broccoli makes them safe. As for diving - the WH jury is out.


THE TREND New communes
The word commune conjures images of naked hippies tie-dyeing bed sheets in teepees. But the new communes - sometimes called intentional communities or co-housing - are clusters of private abodes where residents share resources, particularly food, to save money and time and reduce their carbon footprints. And lentils aren't always on the menu. Co-housing is now a well-established housing option for professionals in Denmark, and in the US there are about 150 co-housing communities. Where there's co-housing, there's usually a communal kitchen where people take turns preparing meals for everyone. So, you might have to cook dinner for 40 people, but only once a month, and every other night you get cooked for. Intrigued? Google "co-housing" to find out about various communities popping up around Oz.

WH VERDICT Pooling food, even with a couple of mates, can help avoid wastage. For instance, you could order home-delivered boxes of organic fruit and veg to halve with a neighbour if you've never eaten your way through a whole box before it turns blue and hairy. WH money expert Justine Davies, author of How to Afford a Baby ($27.95, ABC Books), has formed her own intentional community - a dinner club: "It involves casual and relaxed evenings where 10 of us get together and take it in turns to cook for everyone." It lets her spend less time in the kitchen and more time socialising... That's our kind of club!


THE TREND Bulk-buying
Sure, it costs less at the time to buy a small bottle of olive oil than a mega tin. But the bigger option (just like a mega bag of rice) has a higher food-to-packaging ratio, so it required less processing, produced fewer CO2 emissions, and will leave less of a mess behind for the planet. Bulk-buying does make a big difference to your trolley-load's carbon footprint, says WH eco expert, Greens Senator Sarah Hanson-Young. And you're not paying for so much packaging. It seems we're catching on to these facts - the Kidspot.com.au survey found bulk-buying has come into vogue since the downturn.

WH VERDICT We went shopping at homeshop.com.au to test out whether you can really save much by buying in bulk. We bought: 2L Olive Grove Oil Extra Virgin and saved $1.74 per 250ml compared to the price of the 250ml bottle; 5kg of Sunrice Sunwhite Calrose Rice and saved 80c per kilo compared to the price of the 1kg bag;825g Kelloggs Corn Flakes and saved $1.77 per serve compared to the price of the 30g single-serve box.

So yep, although you might not immediately notice more cash in your wallet, you'll save a heap in the long run if you bulk-buy things that keep in airtight containers after being opened, like rice, cereal, nuts and oil, and things that freeze, says Davies. "At my butcher, eye fillet steak is around $30 a kilo, but the bulk-size vacuum packs are $14 a kilo - less than half the price. So I freeze it into handy meal-sized portions," she says.


THE TREND Food makeovers
You're probably hooked on "fortified foods": milk with added vitamin D, cereal with folate, OJ with iron. But the world of foods with extra benefits expands almost weekly. This year, by feeding their chooks a fortified diet, Aussie egg producer Farm Pride launched eggs with more than twice the omega-3s. As well as adding nutrients, food scientists are reducing things, such as the GI rating of sugar - LoGiCane, produced in Oz, is the world's first low-GI all-natural cane sugar. Aussie boffins are also developing a super-low-gluten beer that coeliacs can chug. And the Dutch just solved the problem of soggy sambos by breeding the first non-leaking tomato. Loving that.

WH VERDICT We wondered how naturally modified foods differ from genetically modified foods... "With GM foods, scientists actively change genetic material to create the characteristic they want," says WH nutrition expert Sharon Natoli. With naturally-modified products like the non-leaking tomato, they grow tomatoes, and when fairly non-juicy ones grow, they breed them to get an even less juicy one; they continue this process until they get a leak-free fruit - just as speedy horses are bred together to produce Phar Lap-like champs. So, what's our expert's view of tweaked foods? "I don't support foods enhanced with nutrients that aren't naturally present in the food, eg, orange juice doesn't naturally contain iron, whereas grains do, so increasing the iron content of cereals or breads makes more nutritional sense," says Natoli. So they're the ones to get hooked on.