Collectively, people waste nearly 50% of global food — and in the US and Canada alone, we're wasting $6,000 worth of food every second.

Canada-based filmmakers Grant Baldwin and Jen Rustemeyer wanted to find out how much of that food is still good, and if they could eat it, so they came up with a challenge: to survive on food waste for six months.

"We went cold-turkey," they told NPR on a recent podcast. "We said we're going to consume only food that is destined for the trash or already in it. So we could pay for it, but we found that most places would not sell us dated food."

After six months of dumpster diving and searching behind wholesale warehouses, they managed to rescue over $20,000 worth of food — and spent a scant $200 on groceries.

To see how they did it, we checked out their documentary on the project, "Just Eat It: A Food Waste Story," which featured interviews with authors Tristram Stuart and Jonathan Bloom, and the Natural Resources Defense Council project scientist, Dana Gunders: