Dive! Eating Trash
by Stephanie Small

Last weekend at the Boulder Film Festival I watched a wonderful short called Dive!. This film follows the narrator and director, Jeremy Seifert, and his small crew of dumpster-diving friends as they explore the refuse of Trader Joe’s in Los Angeles. Night after night, they find that an abundance of food in perfectly good condition has been discarded by grocery stores. A bag of avocadoes is trashed because of one rotten fruit. Organic, free-range meat is tossed because it’s approaching the expiration date – a date manufacturers use to avoid lawsuits rather than an indication of the food’s freshness.  Seifert has to purchase an extra freezer because of all the loot he collects, and he, his wife, their 2 year old son and friends feast on this bounty.

The film goes beyond tales of the gourmet meals the divers create from trash. Seifert explains, “It’s about more than not wasting food. It’s about making sure everybody has enough to eat.” He wonders why, in a city where he can find such culinary abundance in a dumpster, thousands of people are going hungry. He attempts to reach the corporate headquarters of various supermarkets in order to ask about their practices of discarding food, but he is repeatedly stonewalled. He finds that working on the individual level is more effective. One New Year’s Eve, he connects with a local, friendly Trader Joe’s to bring their haul of dumpster-bound goods to a halfway house.

Offering statistics on world hunger and interviews with a busy, struggling food bank, the film reveals the disjointedness inherent in a culture that casually engages in massive waste, yet virtually ignores its own suffering citizens. Twenty percent of landfill is food, and much of it is edible. Seifert’s son Finn provides a ray of hope for the next generation. Tooling around in his toy car, he announces “Don’t food waste”.

I was reminded that we can all do this on an individual level.

  • Think twice before you toss. Throwing those odds and ends into a shake or stew, not the trash can.
  • Consider asking your grocery stores about their waste policies and whether they have a donation program to local food banks.
  • You might even want to try a little dumpster diving yourself. It’s not illegal to take someone’s trash (as far as I know. But if it is in your county, don’t try it)!

Here’s the link to the film if you want to learn more.

*This is not an endorsement of dumpster diving…just an exploration of alternate ways of living ;) *


 

Don’t ask me what took me so long. It’s scandalous that as a holistic nutritionist I have not yet seen FAST FOOD NATION (although I read the book years ago). But it came out in 2006, and here I am, September 2009, sitting on my porch in the dusk, gaping at my laptop as the guy who played Fez on “That 70s Show” hoses down rats with steaming hot water at a meatpacking plant in Colorado.

Here’s the trailer.

I have a feeling many people avoid the documentaries on our food industry because, well, they’re documentaries. I happen to love documentaries myself, but they require you to think. And as a nation we’ve become accustomed to going to the movies to numb out in the darkness and lose ourselves in someone else’s life. The good thing about Fast Food Nation is that it’s a story. A story directed, in fact, by Richard Linklater, with appearences from Bruce Willis, Patricia Arquette,  Ethan Hawke, Avril Lavigne, Esai Morales,  Wilmer Valderrama, and starring Greg Kinnear.

This means that it’s both a political statement – complete with graphic footage of cows being slaughtered on the “kill floor” and an undocumented Mexican worker losing limbs in the meat packing plant – and a human drama. The main storyline is that of the VP of Marketing of “Mickey’s” investigating why there is actual cow shit in the burgers. Subplots include the experiences of the Mexican immigrants working in the factory, disgruntled teens working at Mickey D’s, and aspiring collegiate eco-terrorists. It’s not a movie that would win any Academy Awards, but it serves up its point about fast food both palatably and powerfully, and I recommend it as an easy 101 for anyone interested in learning more about the creepiness of corporate food. If you’re not swayed by the fact that fast food is in large part responsible for the epidemic of obesity and malnutrition sweeping our country, perhaps you will be disgusted by the treatment of the workers, the treatment of the animals, or what really happens when your burger is being prepared behind the counter.