Just Eat It: A Food Waste Story (FULL MOVIE)

Summary

This intriguing film explores the staggering issue of food waste as we follow the journey of a couple who decide to survive solely on discarded food. The documentary exposes the alarming rates at which food is wasted at various points in the supply chain, from farms to grocery stores. It sheds light on policies, societal norms, and misconceptions that contribute to food being thrown away. Their challenges and discoveries emphasize the importance of valuing food and adopting sustainable practices.

Highlights

• The couple in the documentary lives off food waste for the duration of the project, showing just how much edible food is discarded. 🚮
• Grocery stores throw out vast amounts of food to maintain image standards, even when it’s perfectly good. 🍏
• The stigma around donating and using 'imperfect' food contributes heavily to waste. 😔
• Detailed insights into the emotional and physical challenges faced by those attempting to reduce their reliance on newly bought food. 💪
• Discoveries about food labeling and misconceptions drive home the point about unnecessary waste. 📅

Key Takeaways

• The sheer abundance of food waste is eye-opening, with almost 40% of food going unused! 🍽️
• Grocery stores often discard food based on cosmetic standards, not actual spoilage. 🍌
• Households are a major contributor to food waste, unknowingly tossing perfectly edible food. 🏡
• Label confusion leads to premature discarding of food products. 🏷️
• Efforts like gleaning and food recovery show how 'waste' can become opportunity. 🌾

Overview

In this captivating documentary, we journey with a couple who decide to live off discarded food, unveiling a world of waste most are blind to. Their mission highlights the excess of our food systems and the waste stemming from homes, stores, and farms alike. The documentary emphasizes the importance of being conscious of what we consume and discard, and how slight changes in our habits can lead to significant reductions in waste.

The film delves deep into the reasons behind food waste, including misinterpretations of food labels and stringent supermarket standards. These practices often lead to perfectly edible food being tossed aside, only to end up in landfills. The couple’s personal experiences reveal the absurdity of such waste and call for a change in both industry and individual perspectives.

From the challenges of dumpster diving to moments of joy in discovering abundant scores, the movie showcases the roller-coaster of emotions tied to food waste. It also highlights inspiring efforts like gleaning, where volunteers help salvage crops left in fields. The documentary invites viewers to rethink wastage and become more proactive in their food choices and consumption.

Chapters

• 00:00 - 02:00: Introduction and opening thoughts on food waste The chapter begins with an introductory note on the themes of food waste. Although specific details of the discussion are not provided, it likely sets the stage for a deeper exploration into the reasons behind food wastage, its impact on society and the environment, and potential solutions. The mention of music suggests a multimedia or engaging presentation format.
• 02:00 - 05:00: Personal reflections and early experiences with food The chapter begins with a soothing music introduction that sets a reflective tone. It delves into personal anecdotes and memories related to food, exploring the sentimental and nostalgic elements of culinary experiences. The narrator shares their early encounters with different dishes and flavors, highlighting the emotional connections and cultural influences that have shaped their appreciation for food. The narrative intertwines personal growth with culinary exploration, revealing how these experiences have contributed to the narrator's current understanding of food's role in their life.
• 05:00 - 10:00: Exploration of food waste statistics and initial reactions In this chapter, the focus is on the alarming statistics related to food waste, highlighting key figures and facts that underscore the magnitude of the issue. The chapter uncovers the various facets of food waste, from production to consumption, and discusses its implications on a global scale. Furthermore, the chapter captures initial reactions and responses from stakeholders, illustrating a blend of surprise, concern, and a call for action to tackle the burgeoning problem of food waste. Various anecdotes and expert insights are interwoven to enrich the narrative and provide different perspectives on how this issue can be addressed.
• 10:00 - 15:00: Starting the experiment of living off discarded food This chapter introduces the idea of living off discarded food. The narrator reflects on their relationship with food, describing themselves not as foodies but as food fans who enjoy snacking and were always drawn to food even as a child. The narrator shares anecdotal experiences from childhood, such as raiding friends' fridges and having trouble with rationing food, which hints at an early fascination and potential dependence on food availability.
• 15:00 - 20:00: Challenges and experiences with food waste from farms to supermarkets The chapter discusses the admiration of a sibling, possibly in a photograph with candy, leading to a reflection on food waste. It highlights that 40% of food is reportedly wasted, prompting a question about the edibility of the wasted portion. The chapter raises curiosity about the metrics for determining the quality and usability of food that is discarded, possibly exploring various reasons and experiences related to food waste from farms to supermarkets.
• 20:00 - 25:00: Food waste in restaurants and food service events This chapter discusses the issue of food waste within the restaurant and food service industry, highlighting the startling fact that 40% of food produced is not consumed. While efforts are being made to encourage sustainable agriculture in the fruit and vegetable industry, such as improving water and fertilizer efficiency, the significant amount of food waste remains largely overlooked. The chapter suggests a need to address this imbalance, questioning why the focus isn't on reducing food waste when such a large proportion of produced food goes uneaten.
• 25:00 - 30:00: Reflections on food waste and an unexpected large find The chapter discusses the issue of food waste, highlighting that globally about one-third of all food produced is not consumed. It points out the challenge in addressing this issue due to its scattered nature across the system. The chapter emphasizes the importance of reducing food waste as a relatively straightforward solution to increasing food availability where it's needed. The idea of living off discarded food is mentioned as a potential action for the future.
• 30:00 - 40:00: The environmental and ethical implications of food waste This chapter explores the environmental and ethical implications of food waste. It starts with a scene set at a dinner where the concept of 'wasted food' is humorously highlighted. The narrative touches upon the idea of leftover or expired food being a subject of extra charges. A whimsical scenario unfolds where forgetting one's lunch could lead to dumpster diving during a lunch break, adding a playful yet thought-provoking element to the discussion on food waste.
• 40:00 - 50:00: Food redistribution and innovative solutions In this chapter titled 'Food Redistribution and Innovative Solutions,' Jenny and others are excited about getting food from their brother who is moving and clearing out his fridge. The conversation touches on food redistribution, as they express surprise that the food wasn't consumed in the past few days, leading to their first 'food score.' This scenario highlights the importance and benefits of redistributing unused food and implementing innovative solutions to minimize waste and support sustainability.
• 50:00 - 55:00: Concluding thoughts and call to action The chapter titled 'Concluding thoughts and call to action' discusses the allocation and decision-making process on keeping or discarding items related to independence. The dialogue suggests a reluctance to take responsibility for certain items, such as sour cream, with a conclusion reflecting a preference for not keeping it. The tone of the conversation implies a call to action in the form of decision-making on what to keep and what to discard, metaphorically linked to independence.

Just Eat It: A Food Waste Story (FULL MOVIE) Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 [Music] [Music]
• 00:30 - 01:00 [Music]
• 01:00 - 01:30 [Music] [Applause] so [Music]
• 01:30 - 02:00 yeah we're actually looking for the potatoes i don't think we're foodies i think we're more like food fans you know at parties i'm always the one who's hovering over the snack table and even when i was a kid i remember going to my friends houses and just like opening their fridge and taking food out of there as a kid i was more had problem with rationing than anything you can see that even though i've got my own candy i'm looking at his going that'd be nice my mom thinks i'm looking
• 02:00 - 02:30 at my brother admiring my brother but i know for sure that i'm admiring his candy in this photo i've read a couple news articles now that we're wasting 40 of our food [Music] my question is if that much food is being wasted how much of it is still good and can i eat it i was looking at various metrics for
• 02:30 - 03:00 sustainable agriculture in the fruit and vegetable industry and i started coming across these numbers about how much was being wasted and here we were trying to get farmers to be just a little bit more efficient with their water just a little bit more efficient with their fertilizer use and yet on the other hand 40 of the food was not actually being eaten and i just thought how is nobody talking about this so 40 of everything raised or grown
• 03:00 - 03:30 is not in fact eaten and then globally about one-third of all the food produced is not consumed it's very scattered throughout the system and it makes it hard to point a finger and it also makes it hard to see if we're wasting a third of the world's food supply and we need to increase food availability where it's needed cutting food waste is one really quite simple place to start tomorrow we start living off discarded
• 03:30 - 04:00 food so tonight for our last supper we're having all you can eat [Music] it's appropriate to eat here because because it says wasted food subject to extra charge okay so anything expired or already wasted [Music] oh my goodness if i ever get my lunch do i have to go like dumpster diving on my lunch break that's not cool you won't forget your lunch i just picture your boss seeing you
• 04:00 - 04:30 jenny okay we're super lucky our brother's moving he's clearing out his fridge and it looks like we're getting our first food score oh my goodness yeah why weren't you guys eating this in the last couple days should have been an
• 04:30 - 05:00 independence we're going to take some of it oh yeah you should take most of it no we'll just take what you think you're not going to want okay probably don't have it you have it that will keep no no no yeah smell like are you sure yes it's been there forever the sour cream we don't want you're gonna have that i hate this don't want that that's probably done
• 05:00 - 05:30 cedar salad garbage black beans from the other day do you want those [Music] oh and a nice red onion this one's fine you can have that one want some cream it's another chili or spaghetti sauce chili you can probably taste this one you know thanks for shopping at like a fridge when you go shopping and you're busy you forget what you have it's a chore
• 05:30 - 06:00 right you have to go back in your fridge find what you have and then figure out what you need to make a meal off that and go shopping and the reality is you're out shopping and busy and you're like what should we have for dinner let's get this fill it up right you just keep piling up this this collection of stuff in the fridge some of it's like i don't want that do i really want leftovers from last night nothing wrong with the food probably gonna taste okay but i had it last night and so i have to have it again tonight but we've got enough money to buy a
• 06:00 - 06:30 whole brand new meal right so that's part of it is just a wealthy society not bad this is a small one that's good and it would have been it's usually like a full santa bag so good job guys we fill our refrigerators to the point that we couldn't possibly use everything before it goes bad there was a study in new york they looked at all the food waste
• 06:30 - 07:00 in one county and the most waste came from households more than from restaurants more than from supermarkets more than from farms in our households we're wasting somewhere between 15 and 25 of the food that we're buying you know that's expensive i mean imagine walking out of a grocery store with four bags of groceries dropping one in the parking lot just not bothering to pick it up and that's essentially what we're doing in our homes today
• 07:00 - 07:30 [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] thank you thank you have a good day what do you have for calls right now so uh this okay so this one i knew it wouldn't spell when i put it out right it has this little bulb because it rained all right so they get an abnormal formation when it rains
• 07:30 - 08:00 and i knew it wouldn't stop like as soon as i put it out i should have just composted it right that's why i'm going to give it to you you guys can totally take all this and take all the chart well you'll use one right no i won't like i can't use any of this stuff for the weekend this is a lot this is a lot of greens okay let's stop i'm gonna give you ten bucks sure that's probably too much my wife and i operate ice cap organics we're a market garden farm we sell mostly to farmers markets and a local csa
• 08:00 - 08:30 we've been doing it for five years we're all vegetables and that's what we do for a living hey dude how's it going good man we're off thursday let's let's if this was what i had and there was an hour left in the market that one bunch of charge would sit there and no one would buy it but if i had 30 bunches of chard all like bursting out i'd probably sell like 25 of those so what does that say like people are totally impulse children and they think if there's one left
• 08:30 - 09:00 that there's something wrong with it people are always looking a lot for value and for aesthetic appeal and i think a lot of it has to do with people just kind of assuming that what looks better tastes better the farmer's market has more people that are open to trying things that look different and that's kind of nice but still overall there can be a lot of a good crop at a market that won't get sold if it has just a slight blemish or something's wrong with it aesthetically
• 09:00 - 09:30 not every apple grows perfectly red and perfectly round on a tree and so when we expect that going into the store we're driving waste of the system stores are very careful to have their produce sections look beautiful and they don't want to ruin their image by having something like a bargain shelf or products that don't look perfect i went to a banana plantation and after
• 09:30 - 10:00 one day of harvest on a single plantation there was a truckload of bananas being wasted and those were being wasted solely on the basis of cosmetic standards the banana plantation was growing bananas for european supermarkets supermarkets tell you what diameter length curvature all of those parameters have to be exactly right for that supermarket so the bananas basically look the same it is deeply shocking when you see
• 10:00 - 10:30 mountains concentrated mountains of food being wasted it's something that every time i see i i still get shot by [Music] we're a very large operation for our commodity which are peaches plums and nectarines to put it in perspective i probably produce
• 10:30 - 11:00 for peaches about a third as many peaches as the state of georgia does we have ladies grading the fruit they're graters but they sort out the fruit that is not going to go into a box you know they're looking for scars like this that you and i could cut that off right there and eat it but unfortunately they don't want it in the box a lot of it's about appearance this is edible but it's not edible to the supermarkets they have state standards they have you know the usda
• 11:00 - 11:30 or federal state standards for product but the retailer standards far exceed that which is placed on us by the state the amount of fruit that's left either in the field or as discarded after it gets in the packing house i've seen it as high as 70 percent the least i've seen is 20 that gets thrown away for a lot of times no reason that a consumer would think would be practical
• 11:30 - 12:00 [Music] i'll call up the food bank and say i can get you an extra load this week because we're throwing away perfectly good fruit with nothing wrong with it there's just no market for it we don't a lot of the northern california food bank but they do not have the capacity or the infrastructure to manage the amount of fruit that we could possibly give them a jam and jelly company will take a little bit of it but there is so much of it that gets thrown away as a grower that's heartbreaking when you grow the fruit and there's nothing wrong with it then you can't sell it
• 12:00 - 12:30 that that bothers me [Music] so here's a here's a whole celery plant so on the heart machine the heart machine will cut the heart to length more or less like that
• 12:30 - 13:00 and then the crews will drop that and there's your heart look at all this we have to peel certain amount of stalks off so they can fit in the bag you know you saw me that's one square foot and i got probably two pounds of product right there you know with a little bit of peanut butter and some raisins you got ants on a log right but they're perfectly good stocks
• 13:00 - 13:30 none of us are fans of the waste that we get you know because obviously there's a lot of goods stuff here you could dice up put in soups and we've tried it just didn't even pay for the labor that it cost to pick it up so obviously it wasn't feasible
• 13:30 - 14:00 we have this culture of abundance part of being a good host is having more than plenty of food available for someone if you've ever been in that situation where you've had people over and completely run out of food at the end of the meal there's this odd sense that you have failed as a host basic general rule of thumb when you're
• 14:00 - 14:30 a chef and you're working in a kitchen don't ever run out of food ever some guests really like that bountiful plentifulness of a buffet whereas we have guests that come and stay at our hotel and dine with us quite frequently that tell us not to have a lot of food they want us to be very selective in what we're putting out and making sure that we're managing the food because they don't want to see
• 14:30 - 15:00 that waste part of my job at work is to organize events and we always have catering and i've become so conscious of the food waste and we had this event today it was so frustrating we were working with another organization and it was a big event there's like 200 people usually we order 75 of what there's gonna be but they were so paranoid about not having enough food like they said that would be the most embarrassing thing possible if we didn't have enough food and i felt so peer pressured we ended up ordering food for 190 people
• 15:00 - 15:30 when we thought we would have 200 and we had an unbelievable amount of leftovers she actually even used the analogy when we were discussing this she was like it's like when you serve someone at your house if you had just enough food that would be really embarrassing and i was like but i don't think that would be embarrassing i think that'd be awesome things are going to get harder now because i just realized we're running
• 15:30 - 16:00 lower on cooking oil where we've still got some flour out of sugar we're out of honey any sort of sweetener i'm fatigued with this project i don't really want to do it anymore it's not that fun well the point of the project is not about maintaining a certain happiness or comfort level it's about proving that there's food being thrown away yeah but this is not a lifestyle that i want to continue
• 16:00 - 16:30 well neither do i stop i don't want to stop because we haven't proved anything yet one month three months six months like okay so it's more impressive if you do it for 10 years why don't we just do it for 10 years then it's ridiculous [Music]
• 16:30 - 17:00 organic here you know so the last time i came to this place um i was in there and i was rooting around the bin and the owner was closing up i guess and threw
• 17:00 - 17:30 some garbage on top of me and he's like oh i'm sorry i was like oh like i was so that was at the lowest of the low you never told me that i know i just felt really embarrassed that i was like in his bin and then he felt like really sad for me probably like i just threw garbage on a bomb [Music] that's the lowest point
• 17:30 - 18:00 you know i didn't get anything good that night either [Music] to me it's sort of funny that wasting food is not taboo it's one of the last things you can do one of the last environmental ills that you can just get away with you know if you were walking down the street and had a can of soda
• 18:00 - 18:30 you couldn't find a trash can you're just gonna throw it on the ground i mean that is the ultimate sin in many places littering and you could actually be fined for doing that same thing with not recycling that's something that in many places could get you in trouble but throwing away food is perfectly fine wasting food is not only widespread but it's condoned [Music] so the last time we were asked to not waste food was during world war ii
• 18:30 - 19:00 and there was this sense that we had to sacrifice for the good of the country for the war effort here we we have an ordinary loaf of homemade bread [Music] watch this there madam is the amount of bread that you cause to disappear every week you must be crazy there isn't that much bread in the world there's that much less bread in the
• 19:00 - 19:30 world every week through household waste yes ladies and gentlemen it is horrifying fact that waste and there were posters like food is a weapon don't waste it and all sorts of other propaganda to really encourage the public not to waste food and since that time it's been the opposite food really became more plentiful all of a sudden we did start to see much more abundant and cheaper food our notion of what's a reasonable amount of food to eat has changed
• 19:30 - 20:00 this idea of larger portions is seeping into our households and now we're serving our friends and families too much food the joy of cooking is that venerable cookbook that's been around for ages and many of the recipes have stayed the same but the number of people that it serves has changed and so you'll have the same recipe from 20 or 30 years ago and in the current version it's only feeding two people instead of four or maybe it's four people instead of six
• 20:00 - 20:30 [Music] the average cookie has quadrupled in calories since the mid-80s and we're looking at larger portions in almost everything we're eating it happens all the time at restaurants where we're often given so much food that we can either overeat or waste food and in some cases you can actually do both [Music]
• 20:30 - 21:00 [Applause] my granddad never wasted anything he obviously grew up through that time where people were more considerate through world war ii or whatnot and we used to kind of laugh behind his back because he would always reuse his tea bag i swear that he would use it for days on end and at the time i thought that that was really i thought it was ridiculous like get a
• 21:00 - 21:30 new tea bag and he was pretty much like that with everything if he had any leftovers even if it was like two spoonfuls left and he didn't couldn't finish it he would put that in the container in the fridge and he would eat it you know he wasn't just putting his leftovers in the fridge and leaving them there he would he would finish them [Music] what i used to think was funny about what he did i now find it it's inspiring
• 21:30 - 22:00 we've had almost no luck finding food behind grocery stores they're almost always locked bins for
• 22:00 - 22:30 their compactors now we've been looking a little bit further up the supply chain in wholesale areas a little further out of the city holy cow
• 22:30 - 23:00 there's so much granola lots of salsa hurry up fudge walnut treat i think it's fascinating i i i'm starting to enjoy this
• 23:00 - 23:30 i've seen people do this in videos and i've seen photos and stuff but i didn't actually believe that this is how much one could find i thought we were gonna be [Music] struggling [Music]
• 23:30 - 24:00 hi mom so you're not um starving by this house we're not starving uh it's always a lot of one or two things and there's never we never sort of have a variety [Music]
• 24:00 - 24:30 we're over here to see family and i don't want to spend my whole time like driving around looking for food it's ridiculous and the other thing is your mom just asked us to pick up two liters of milk so i'm gonna pick up two liters of milk for her we yeah that if we go over to someone's house and we can eat their food so that we can alleviate that kind of stress of making everybody feel uncomfortable but we didn't take into account like when we go away for an entire
• 24:30 - 25:00 weekend we can't just like go to someone's house and then just eat everything they have we can't drive around a strange city and try to find some food i mean we're trying to do it now and it's not working out very well no way there's even anything in there is there any way that i could look at the stuff you've called today and buy some of
• 25:00 - 25:30 it oh possibly this is some of the salads that we pulled oh that's great sweet okay they're just dated we have pulled them off three days before should we get two salads yeah okay awesome thanks that's cool that's good is that cold stuff right there at the bottom of the rack we're not allowed to sell that stuff why not it's policy because we're known for the
• 25:30 - 26:00 highest quality like those bananas look totally good i'm just trying to do my job i know you totally are can i buy those bananas yeah you want to buy the bananas yeah that looks great those ones are okay awesome i'm not going to ask for a deal i'd rather just not draw attention to it and the food is perfectly good anyway no thank you [Music]
• 26:00 - 26:30 [Applause] [Music] all right it's for pizza chain oh my god look at it oh my god it's a mother lode okay my buddy's working on a photo shoot for a pizza chain and so they're shooting all these bits of food uh let's see what he said pre-cooked
• 26:30 - 27:00 bags of bacon chicken sausages mushrooms chicken let's go what's going on you go down there into the left keep going straight you're gonna find a green dumpster so uh go and check out what it's got in store for you i don't even know what your game is we're trying to survive off the food waste right now really yeah yeah well it's done you're going to hit the jackpot pretty soon here
• 27:00 - 27:30 so it was in the it was in the fridge all weekend okay [Music] food styling is really interesting because like anytime you see a picture of food in an ad or in a commercial somebody has spent hours preparing it and making it look just right and choosing the right tomatoes and the right piece of meat and the right pepperoni to make it look really appetizing it's a lot of chicken you want to take
• 27:30 - 28:00 all of it yeah we'll put in the freezer what are you gonna do with this many bacon bits it's gross we don't even eat bacon but we'll add it to everything we don't have anywhere to put it
• 28:00 - 28:30 so you get these tomatoes they only have a couple days on them and then you get some lettuce and it only has a couple days and like everything in our fridge only has a couple days and our whole fridge is full of stuff that like needs to be eaten tomorrow like i started making a list on the chalkboard of things that must be eaten the next day and it's like way more food than we can possibly eat when we grow food we start with the soil and some sunlight the plants grow we harvest the produce we take it into
• 28:30 - 29:00 the pack house we'll sort the ones that fit the standards of the supermarkets that it's providing and a lot of that food is wasted at that stage then through distribution it will have to survive a long journey to wherever the shop is it might sit on a shelf and some of the food might be wasted there and then the consumers come in pick their favorites and you know there's your winner makes it home but who knows what happens to it then
• 29:00 - 29:30 [Music]
• 29:30 - 30:00 don't you forget about me [Music]
• 30:00 - 30:30 when you walk away [Music]
• 30:30 - 31:00 and we fail to eat it what we have failed is an entire system which is in itself already wasteful and all of the embodied energy and the resources in that piece of food all of that has been wasted it's been in vain [Music] [Applause]
• 31:00 - 31:30 this is my favorite day of the project i found some chocolate and i found quite a bit of it is it expired or something not for a year what [Music] what if i recall
• 31:30 - 32:00 microwave barbecues not on the list not even expired so if they weren't on the federal recall list and they're not past eight then i think they're thrown out because they don't have french writing on them french labeling
• 32:00 - 32:30 [Applause] so at the beginning we had four eggs two for grant and two for me and of course he ate his right away but i've been rationing mine because i didn't know when we were gonna find eggs again like i'm saving them in case i need to bake something special i've been going to the grocery store and looking in all the cartons trying to find the ones with the cracked eggs nobody wants to buy the cracked ones so i'm willing to buy the ones that are imperfect and i haven't found any yet
• 32:30 - 33:00 though but as of today i'd say we don't have to ration anymore grant found tons of eggs in a wholesale dumpster and they still have a few weeks on the date actually i think we're going to have the opposite problem now now we have so many eggs it's like a race to eat the eggs we've been putting them in a glass of water to make sure that they sink because that means that the eggs are good to eat
• 33:00 - 33:30 but there's still a lot of eggs for two people [Music]
• 33:30 - 34:00 our farm and all the farms that are like ours when we have a lot of stuff left over or if crop doesn't work out it's not such a big deal it's a loss of time and money but it's not waste as such because we still use it we compost it and we actually put it back into the dirt and it's really valuable for us we it's to the point where we actually buy compost having compost on the farm is also really valuable zucchini is always a good example because it
• 34:00 - 34:30 it produces so much at its peak production time that in the shoulder seasons it's barely keeping up to demand and then once it really ramps up and starts producing the maximum amount it triples the amount of demand if we grew less zucchini then we'd have less zucchini waste but then we wouldn't be able to meet demand in the early summer and spring and then in the later summer when things cool down
• 34:30 - 35:00 we sell right to the people that are eating the food so there's actually very little opportunity for the food to go bad we harvest on friday we sell it on saturday well it's gonna last for two weeks in your crisper so you're gonna have a lot more opportunity to use that vegetable [Music] it tends to be 14 to 16 hours a day
• 35:00 - 35:30 seven days a week during the harvest season our harvest season is condensed in this part of the world so we really have to go for it when things are yielding to put enough away for the winter to survive [Music] [Music]
• 35:30 - 36:00 [Music] abundance is the success story of the human species
• 36:00 - 36:30 you look back to the creation of agriculture 10 12 000 years ago that was all about creating surplus creating more food than you need in any individual moment that allows you to store food over the winter it allows you to store food in case there's a bad harvest it allows you to trade food to have feasts which is a really important part of human society those are all wonderful things and in the past if you had even more surplus than you could possibly use maybe it didn't matter so
• 36:30 - 37:00 much the problem is now that all rich countries in the world in north america and northern europe have between 150 and 200 of the food that they actually need think that environmental problems are about smoke stacks about roads about
• 37:00 - 37:30 factories about cities and concrete and for sure those are significant but if you look at the earth from the sky what you see is fields and it is there that we have had the biggest impact wasting a third of the land and all of that energy that we currently use by wasting the food that we've produced is one of the most gratuitous aspects of human culture as it stands [Music]
• 37:30 - 38:00 today [Music] [Music] so [Music]
• 38:00 - 38:30 at the moment we are trashing our land to grow food that no one eats i really see preventing food waste as a parallel to energy efficiency if you think about both energy and food their resource intensive
• 38:30 - 39:00 industry is facing an increase in demand as population grows and as the world population increases in affluence [Music] from an energy perspective there's an estimate that about four percent of all u.s energy consumption is embedded in the food that we ultimately toss so four percent of all the energy we're using is being thrown away
• 39:00 - 39:30 [Music] it's difficult to think of water as a precious commodity especially for many people who don't live in desert or drought-ridden communities but the water that's embedded in the food we throw out could meet the household needs of 500 million people [Music]
• 39:30 - 40:00 one of the problems when food waste started being picked up by governments and they started doing studies on where food was being wasted and what kind of food was being wasted it immediately became apparent that by tonnage fruit and vegetables were being wasted the most and so a lot of campaigning went into focusing on fruit and vegetable waste and that's not a bad thing i mean of course we need to not chuck away a whole load of carrots just
• 40:00 - 40:30 because they're not straight but although the tonnages for meat and dairy products being wasted are much smaller the resource use represented by that waste of meat and dairy products is far greater you use vastly more land and other resources to produce your meat and dairy products than you do your vegetable products just last night i was at a barbecue and there were all these extra hamburgers for each one of those hamburgers the water that went in
• 40:30 - 41:00 to producing it is equivalent to taking a 90-minute shower we have to use our land in a sensitive way to plan and to manage it in a way that ensures that people are fed and ensures the long-term health of the ecosystems that we depend on for our survival
• 41:00 - 41:30 okay let's go it's a lot different than i thought i thought we would really be scrounging for food but instead it's it's more like mass quantities of certain foods but the scale of the stuff that we've seen so far is pretty shocking and i think we've only seen like the littlest
• 41:30 - 42:00 bit it's been impossible to track how much we found often when we find a pile of food we're just looking at the
• 42:00 - 42:30 top few inches and it's eight feet deep so we don't even know what's down there it's been challenging enough trying to vlog everything that we've actually [Music] taken
• 42:30 - 43:00 [Music] 225 grams two limes orange i've been trying to track how much food we find and in the first month alone we brought home 1127 of food and even though we were trying to pay for it we only ended up spending 33 dollars and then after that i just kind of got out of control and i couldn't even monitor it anymore
• 43:00 - 43:30 it's starting to lose the excitement of finding tons of food like this but ultimately it's the fact that what we're doing it's not reducing the amount of waste somebody's losing money on this when it gets thrown out [Music] i mean on the one hand i'm happy because we found food and it's really exciting and then on the other hand i feel so guilty for even feeling excited because it's such a shame that so much food is going to waste and it's it's really depressing actually
• 43:30 - 44:00 [Music] highs and lows of the project you know highs and lows there's a high point i'm pretty sure that people think that we're eating food scraps scrapings off people's plates or something because when i tell them about the project i just get this weird look i mean if they could see the quality of the food that we find and the amount we've been eating pretty well
• 44:00 - 44:30 [Music] [Music]
• 44:30 - 45:00 you're welcome to grocery shop at our house take what you need we have too much where'd you find this it's all in the dumpster man it's all in the dumpster sweet organic free range cheese okay sure that looks good sweet are you sure you can part with all this or oh yeah yeah
• 45:00 - 45:30 so none of this is open it's like perfectly there's nothing wrong with any of this [Music] cool [Music] disking in food or plowing it under is certainly helpful to the soil it gets the nutrients back to the soil
• 45:30 - 46:00 and helps the soil become more fertile but when you think about the resources that go into producing our food if we're to rescue those foods and channel them to people who need it that's a much better use of the resources and nutrients than just simply plowing it under [Music] now [Music] bleeding is the practice of going out
• 46:00 - 46:30 into fields where there have been harvests already and recovering goods that otherwise would be plowed under i go gleaning because it's a nice way to practice what i preach and to actually do something to recover food and get it to people who need it it's a little more participatory and active than just writing books and giving talks so we're headed to a sweet potato fields
• 46:30 - 47:00 the society of st andrew runs this cleaning outing and they run most leaning outings in this state [Music] you guys want to stick around until 7 pm we can go to the turkey shoot the barber town turkey shoe i've heard good things [Music] yeah i've been good i'm glad you could come they're perfectly good sweet potatoes and we put them to very good use and when we deliver them they will literally be on somebody's table tonight
• 47:00 - 47:30 oh wow that's great which is kind of a cool thing [Music] and he did now and he didn't know [Music] [Music] the term gleaning dates back to the old testament and it used to refer to the practice of the hungary folks going to the fields
• 47:30 - 48:00 and picking what had been left behind and many farmers would not harvest certain parts of the field but obviously there have been some changes since that time and now gleaning looks a little bit different where it's essentially volunteers harvesting food for the hungry
• 48:00 - 48:30 there's a secondary motivation in that it's a whole lot of fun it's really neat to get out into the fields and get your hands dirty and really play a role in our food system and also connect to where your food comes from push my fingers too
• 48:30 - 49:00 [Music] just a farmer who wasn't going to use them and he was nice enough to let volunteers come glean this is good for me
• 49:00 - 49:30 before i started cleaning i hadn't grown my own food i didn't really know what a broccoli plant looked like i didn't know what collard greens look like in the field and i certainly didn't know how hard it was to pick sweet potatoes
• 49:30 - 50:00 [Music] i've gained 10 pounds you can see it there's definitely a curvature an extra
• 50:00 - 50:30 i think it's a combination of more processed food but also just stuffing myself when we've got copious amounts of one thing you know i don't like yogurt i think there's probably about maybe nine or ten yogurts in the fridge right now this size if not bigger the race is not trying to find food it's
• 50:30 - 51:00 like trying to not waste it again but you don't have to take so much that's the thing you don't need to get 10 yogurts i can't see it's just so disheartening knowing that that if we don't take that food that's there right then it's gone go to landfill next morning so since the beginning of the project jen um has been missing one food
• 51:00 - 51:30 that's feta cheese and the coolest thing is the best by day isn't from a year from now well it's not cool it's thrown out but it's cool for jen it's a bit of a surprise you can come in now
• 51:30 - 52:00 i want to do something what is it oh it's feta cheese thank you that's awesome that's what i've been craving doesn't expire until december next year we have more than a year on it wow i didn't know the federal lasts that
• 52:00 - 52:30 long that's amazing about 60 of consumers are throwing food away prematurely because they don't understand what the dates are telling them it's been shown that a million tons just in the uk of food are wasted in people's homes because of day labels there's two buckets of dates out there there's your sell by dates that are really a communication between the manufacturer and the store saying
• 52:30 - 53:00 hey if you sell this product by this date i promise that when your consumer gets it home it will still have a shelf life left that date shouldn't appear visibly it should be encoded so that only staff understand it because it confuses people they say display until they see a date they think can't eat it after that day then there's this whole other bucket of dates which consumers are meant to see and that's used by best buy enjoy buying guaranteed fresh buy and those dates are indicators of quality and not safety
• 53:00 - 53:30 there is no regulation that prevents them from selling it after the best before date because there is no safety concern with that product i've talked to manufacturers of pies for example and their use by date isn't the date that they think that it's going to become dangerous in that scenario they think it's the date that they think that pastry will stop being perfectly crisp they often create this sense that we
• 53:30 - 54:00 can't possibly use an item one minute after midnight on the day of the stamp on the package the only thing required by federal law in the u.s to have an expiration date label on it is infant formula other than that there's really no other food product that has a federal regulation last night i went out looking for food
• 54:00 - 54:30 in a place that i've gone a few times and found a few things but i came around the corner and they had brought in a special dumpster and it was the size of a small swimming pool and it was completely filled with hummus it's unlike anything we'd seen so far and initially i thought oh it must have all gone bad they're throwing it out
• 54:30 - 55:00 and when i looked at it i had three and a half weeks left on the best before date i mean i took three or four home and you can only eat so much hummus i mean when we started the project i expected to find some waste and i really have prepared myself to see it but when you're actually standing in front of something like that it was totally different
• 55:00 - 55:30 [Music] there's this misconception that simply throwing something away isn't a big deal because food is biodegradable yes that's true if you were to throw an apple core just out into the woods it's not a big deal the problem comes when all that waste is aggregated and it decomposes without air that anaerobic condition is what creates
• 55:30 - 56:00 methane which is a greenhouse gas that's more than 20 times as potent as co2 at trapping heat so essentially we're creating climate change from our kitchen waste bins putting food into landfill is just a huge waste of resources nothing else i mean those are nutrients that we can be capturing and reusing so there's this hierarchy of uses for our food obviously at the top would be feeding people that might not be just feeding your family
• 56:00 - 56:30 maybe it's trying to donate food and this applies to restaurants and supermarkets as well if we can't feed people then we should try to feed animals feeding livestock or chickens or whatever it may be certainly an age-old solution to the scraps and food waste that we have on hand if you can't do that then creating energy from it is the next best thing then composting get the resources back into the soil only if we can't do any of the above should we be landfilling or incinerating
• 56:30 - 57:00 or sending our food to the wastewater treatment plant in real life it's flipped around and the majority of our food waste does end up going to the landfill in the u.s it's about 97 of all the food waste that's created ends up in a landfill or an incinerator [Music] we need a robust system for ensuring the food waste can be recycled can be fed to livestock and turned back into a resource that we can use
• 57:00 - 57:30 [Music] our city is built on access everything
• 57:30 - 58:00 we realize it must be though to bring the people here we are taking a source that most people would throw away and we're feeding it to livestock which naturally is making protein for humans it's the best source for the food scraps humans are first we're about seven miles to the heart of las vegas
• 58:00 - 58:30 pig farming is our way of life i started working for the rc farms in about 1969 and i was secretary for many many years and then i ended up being boss of rc farms because i married bob if you believe in your product you ought to advertise it father and mother they they brought me up on a scrap feeding farm in san diego
• 58:30 - 59:00 but then i went my dad found las vegas and they had an abundance of supply here's some of the food scraps food that you didn't eat left over from your plate we'll turn it back into a wholesome protein we process to a boil just kill all patterns and the pigs love it
• 59:00 - 59:30 30 tons a day thousand tons of money some of it never been touched they're all out through the inventory now is around 2520 of the ranch
• 59:30 - 60:00 can hear him can you hear him eating yeah i'm just chomping yeah that sounded like a nice brook over rocks to me i was beautiful he loves it and i think it's just kind of in his blood he would go out in 114 degree weather and been a hard worker all of his life
• 60:00 - 60:30 never seen him slack at all over here is bread return bread [Music] cakes and so on yeah this is me every week [Music] we've had numerous offers to sell this property and offer us many many millions of dollars
• 60:30 - 61:00 and go off on cruises that's not our lifestyle we like our old farmhouse we like our work and he more likely will [Music] die with his boots on feeding food scraps to pigs
• 61:00 - 61:30 we've been saving all of this chocolate because we want to give it out to people so at halloween we thought it was perfect opportunity and we're going to hand it out to the kids there's nothing wrong with it or anything so we're going to give out these full-sized chocolate bars like when i was a kid that would have been the ultimate oh hey guys nice part pick a bar
• 61:30 - 62:00 [Applause] will share that one with i'm you of worried because i think people are gonna think we're really rich or something oh my goodness too far we're getting generous at this point in the night
• 62:00 - 62:30 [Music] it was okay but after all that build up and we're like oh we gotta save the chocolate for halloween and we only got 19 kids
• 62:30 - 63:00 it's like the exact opposite of what you usually look for i'm usually looking for the newest stuff i don't even usually look at dates at all oh no it's still good this is all still good and bread right here we go gently that's close dated or
• 63:00 - 63:30 any calls no we can't do that you can't nope it's a food health and safety issue it's the safety you can do you guys donate it then or you don't donate so it goes right in the garbage can it goes during the garbage yeah so you do it because you have too many lawsuits there's too many lawsuits have you guys been sued before i don't know to tell you the truth oh okay but it's a health and safety issue if it's close dated if it's like within two days out the door goes what about any ugly vegetables
• 63:30 - 64:00 i don't know of a single instance where a company has been sued by somebody who has been the recipient of free donated food so i think very often they're using the fear of being sued to cover their shame
• 64:00 - 64:30 so in the u.s anyone who wants to donate food can do so free of fear from being sued there's a federal shield law called the good samaritan act that protects people who give food that they deem to be in good shape from my perspective it's a completely unfounded fear
• 64:30 - 65:00 i think that companies are morally responsible for ensuring that the food in their custody gets to people who need it and doesn't end up in the bin and we the public have a responsibility to demand that that takes place i felt like i'd been reading about food
• 65:00 - 65:30 waste but i hadn't actually been doing anything about it so i've been volunteering once a week at the quest grocery store [Music] if you're low income or you feel like you're in need you can apply to shop at quest and they stock the whole store with donated food so they can sell it at a really reasonable rate and it's a really good bridge in between the food bank and the regular grocery store
• 65:30 - 66:00 it's great to see that there are grocery stores that donate i used to be a cashier i really liked it actually when i was in university as a cashier no it's good it's like a nice break like at my job job i like sit in front of a computer right so it's a nice break to come here one afternoon a week and do something where i get to like move around and move boxes and like do something with my body you know
• 66:00 - 66:30 quest saves roughly four million dollars a year in food we only have a little peanut butter everywhere you look my name is ken march i'm a warehouse supervisor at quest nobody can walk in off the street and shop at quest you have to be designated because the goal is to help those in need and not those that have what we've got is things like coconut milk cranberry sauce
• 66:30 - 67:00 candy chocolate spritzers tomato basil soups rice crackers cereals organic cereals repack raisins risotto butter beans sun-dried tomatoes no peanut butter peanut butter more peanut butter if we didn't salvage this all of this food would either end up in the landfill or be destroyed in some way i've worked in the trucking warehousing and packaging field for more than 30 years you wouldn't want to
• 67:00 - 67:30 know how much product we would dispose of [Music] you imagine that there are warehouses that are a million square feet of food products [Music] so if something happens in that product whether it be dated damaged or whatever the easiest most convenient thing to do with it is dump it [Music]
• 67:30 - 68:00 and a large part of dumping is simple [Music] economics i really like the concept of quest and something i never would have known and all the years that i have turfed goods out the door [Music] i wish i would have known and that's a big thing
• 68:00 - 68:30 knowing that you can get rid of stuff comfortably people can use it [Music] what we need is to believe that wasting food is not acceptable it comes down to citizen morals it comes down to cultural attitudes essentially there are all sorts of changes we can make in our own personal lives to just start chipping away at how much
• 68:30 - 69:00 food we're wasting first of all use our freezers more you can freeze almost anything and it's a really great last minute thing to do when you think you're not going to get around to eating something if you're someone who likes to just shop once a week then it's really important to plan out meals and make a detailed shopping list and then really stick to that list in the store or it might make sense to have smaller more frequent trips and just buy what you need i think we can start making dinner by
• 69:00 - 69:30 thinking of what we have and less about what we're in the mood for it doesn't require a complete revolution in terms of the way we treat food it's just tweaking it slightly and usually in delicious ways so we're having 20 or so friends over tonight to celebrate the end of the project and everything on the menu is rescued
• 69:30 - 70:00 food i'm so excited to be near the end um and i bet we'll still eat a lot of the same food i think i'll still try to buy food that's imperfect and look for those items that i think that other people wouldn't buy honestly the best part about this project is that grant took such an interest in the kitchen so he used to look in the fridge and be like there's nothing to eat i'm gonna go for sushi
• 70:00 - 70:30 and there'd still be tons of food in there but it just had to be prepared and he wasn't willing to do that you're so happy i made a crumble i've never made crumble before in the end of everything that i learned through this project my new sense of value for food is what's going to stick with me the most he actually even made recently this little bin and it says eat me first on it we put all the food that's the leftovers and like the half onions and like things that need to be used first into that bin and then he'll go there first and make a lunch out of that
• 70:30 - 71:00 um thank you for for coming and uh helping us finish off all this food that we need to get rid of and i guess this is the end grand
• 71:00 - 71:30 dumpster i definitely won't miss having to go and search your food that's gonna be great but i'm probably gonna still have a peek from time to time i mean how can you not [Applause]
• 71:30 - 72:00 [Music] just by being aware of it you almost automatically make a difference because you can't help it cause all of a sudden you start to see it everywhere you go food waste we can handle you know something we can actually do something
• 72:00 - 72:30 about we can do something about it now [Music] so [Music]
• 72:30 - 73:00 so [Music] do [Music] [Applause] [Music]
• 73:00 - 73:30 [Music] you