every year in america we throw away ninety six billion pounds of food. two hundred sixty three million pounds a day. eleven million pounds an hour. three thousand pounds a second. the . land. of. the beyond.

and the bold. claim. her comes nearly a billion people in the world are going on three every day. in the united states even our trash cans are filled with food you just have to go get it. so there are three basic rules to dumpster diving rule number one never take more than the. last you find if your rule number two first ones to the dumpster

as first did. it you always gotta share and rule number three leave it cleaner than you look when you. found it before you leave it cleaner and you found some right it's an unusual night in l.a. because it's it's freezing outside freezing for l.a. so i think it's you know forty three to forty five degrees which is good because it keeps all the meats and stuff cold is but. just me know and i buy attics ever no added hormones ever free range good meat all of these perfectly good eggs because one was cracked didn't even get all over the other ones just through all the way is what they're doing with everything they have bags of of a coddles one goes bad they threw in the entire bag of avocados out apples oranges everything just tossed in it for no good reason they're all good these are all good

exe like mountain cheese from the german alps. much better out of the dumps than i ever have for her we started two years ago and we have clearly like the upper class makes me crazy. and i'm taking some stuff but i only take stuff that's double bagged. what doesn't kill you only makes you stronger. and getting meat for my own consumption at home and for my baby shower. in the dumpster at one am this morning. at three pm this afternoon on the grill. i think i'm going to have a pretty healthy. we're not making a public announcement everyone talking exactly what they did. just like we wouldn't tell them that we went to montserrat see get their food but i would say most of our friends are aware of the fact that we get all of the dumpster and i think it's

pretty cool. living off the ways. of the consumer is the american. league. so we've got. a lot of. barriers to my washrooms.

and then we're going to have blueberry pancakes the dumpster stuff is really great . because there's such a large quantity of it it can turn into a lot of work so i. figure out the best stuff clean every day and i know there's like. strawberries and then i need to wash trays and bag and it's not that big of a deal but it's just. a lot of more work than just going to start cooking up exactly you know you need fifteen or twenty i could just like this kitchen you wake up in the morning and dread the cleanup that follows dumpster by the way it's going to kill me she's going to wake up in the morning all this food. rotting in my bitch . but fennell have to strive barriers even though we still had to buy groceries we really began living off food pulled from the trash eating food out of dumpsters is repulsive to most people but there's a certain beauty seeing garbage transformed into

a meal with friends and better meals than we could ever afford to buy especially when our friend alfonzo a professional chef would cook up gore made dishes from food we had just scrounge shot of dumpsters look at hallowed that he tried to personify. as created this in this yeah i don't think about the fish it's good it's simple the chicken was looking a little funky a little like purplish food makes up about twenty percent of landfill waste which means we're feeding our landfills as much as we're feeding our country so instead of rotting underground packed beneath the earth and producing harmful methane gas this garbage was feeding my family and friends and doing it in style. well this will be blood orange and onion salad. without trying show on. sand and stuff with. farit she's

a spinach risk you from your local dumpster. a beautiful blood orange citrus burb look. at a cake. is made from and one doesn't dumpster egg whites in the shop areas are one hundred percent. hamster. delicious. i'm strictly law i. found myself wondering through trader joe's hoping for certain items to be waiting for me in the dumpster that night i got excited when i saw a bad tomato in a pack of four or meat that had turned the slightest shade of brown anything dated for the next day would most likely be in the dumpster even though the sell by or best by dates don't mean that the food is bad they're just overly cautious states

for absolute freshness and protection from possible lawsuits i dreaded more locked dumpsters which seem to be a growing trend to keep dumpster divers out and ensure total waste. this is the trader joe's we've been many many many times and they locked it so the food can then rot inside the dumpster stead of people getting it it's. that smart. i don't know i don't know i don't even want to take all this food home it's like. i'm tired of it there's. there's too much we only took as much because we didn't want to waste but i like it's like almost two in the morning and i don't have anywhere to put it really even though i would be breaking rule number one i decided to buy a freezer for all the excess food. we rarely saw other divers around town so i knew

that most of the discarded food was ending up in landfills i had to save as much of it as i could so many. like i mix and book for a freezer i just plugged it in but that's what i did ok. i knew i wouldn't need your good. place here yet wow all thank you anyway we got in the garage for free for free donated. all right. in just over a week of nightly diving we had a year's supply of meat. it's so the freezer is totally filled up there's just. a little layer of some bread and stuff. just not because i didn't find enough meat just because. or just tired of me you

get kind of picky thank you don't want a lot of the same thing. so i was a really nice variety of meats and. rescuing food from the dumpster was great for the few of us doing it but it felt too self-serving to leave it at that the question nagged me why is all this food being thrown out and not given to people who need it. i decided to ask the grocery stores. ok so here we are a trader joe's saturday afternoon i'm going to go in and talk to them because i went to their website and their website says that they prefer to talk face to face i was also not a lot of on and on and. you know right there none of the stores none of the oh he's

going to give me the card for the place already called which refused so basically it's impossible to talk to anybody on camera i mean even off camera they wouldn't discuss details so the phone. which we got from. they won't talk to me company policy no interviews no. no interview. call this guy i got the card. for the number for the main office but she said she'll see a pallet and on that pallet are four trash cans and those trash cans are all filled with meat and all of that gets thrown away we're here. dumpster that has a lot gave another rule that i've been told is never penetrate into something that is not yours it's not mine if they don't open it and they don't they don't want me

to get into it so i just wanted to lock. but the gate is this i can respect that because what if they log this one because there's back stock and they don't want people getting into the news backstop i'm going. i'm gone. i don't understand how anyone could get upset for you stealing truck. week there's the bad. it was evil but it's the cure you're still going to waste you know this is something not. spent discarding just wants to be forgotten about. you take it check that out. i don't see how that can be conceived just be criminal in any way to see you not. if you just let it rot i mean mimes they've been shipped from mexico. like cheese from germany and meat from. chile i mean you just let it rot

because of men. or do you get it. it's kind of. like get back to your i can't i'm on a fast. i believe that dumpster diving to civil disobedience is nonviolent civil disobedience because i believe in what i do it i believe it's right and i'm willing to break the law and i don't believe i don't take it seriously to break the law but i believe it's just i believe in doing it if i get caught and arrested i should be proud to say i got arrested for eating somebody is waste i think it's just i think it's just an i'm willing to pay the consequences for that i do it openly when when when they catch me or people come i shake their hand and tell them what i'm doing. what i do and most the time they're very from. this is a pretty. big

you know minister already. but. it is. technically trespassing and it is against the law. you know you guys right now. that is where the conflict comes the conflict between what i believe is just and what is legal and this lifestyle i believe is more just. going into the store and buying stuff with money but rather this is. totally different and outside the system way of living. the more stores i've visited and phone calls i made the more silence and resistance

i received meanwhile i was attempting to educate myself and kept running into a name in almost every article i read timothy jones dr jones was former head of the garbage project at the university of arizona and probably one of the world's most knowledgeable people on waste and his sixteen years with the project dr jones found that what we throw out and it's nearly unrestricted quantity and variety reveals a lot about us as a society i gave him a call the next level you come to the commercial level there isn't even any training in. the law it's not even a concept. you know about we do. and i'm not putting them down i'm simply saying that the old they're just so different that he. would. do for the life because quite to be able to create. and we've lost that if it's more prestigious body like that but you know fifty percent of all that up

a great part of never make that you know somebody if you have that all of the production that went into it just went right oh all it took to transport. the. to increase total degradation of the fondly and everything else that if we were to cut our food lawful and half we would probably be the total of all patients fight back. after my conversation with timothy jones and i went to the l.a. food bank the second largest of its kind in the country since nearly all donated food from grocery stores goes through the food bank i hope to get a better understanding of the situation. located in the heart of downtown l.a.

near one of the largest concentrations of homeless people in the world the infamous skid row i couldn't help thinking about all this wasted food in relationship to hungry people in my own city. los angeles county we have a population of ten million people about one in every ten people are at risk of hunger in los angeles county roughly just over a million people in los angeles county at some time during the year are at risk of hunger not knowing where their next meal's going to come from the los angeles regional food bank through a network of about nine hundred charitable agency sites we reach about six hundred seventy four thousand of those people so there are still you know over a third of those people that we're not reaching so that's that's how big a problem is here even if we bank of our size hundred thousand square foot facility distributing thirty four thirty five million pounds a year still not reaching the demand here in l.a. county it's a big problem here in america where you do have all that kind of food and resources available that you still have people tell me through the cracks and that should happen in this country we export billions of pounds of food to other countries to

the top of what we g.p. are and we're still not making food available to everybody here in america which is . a sad state of affairs is that.

the vast enquires of the part of the solution. many of them already work almost every major grocery stores on the l.a. food banks list of donors the question is could they do more and from the amount of food thrown into dumpsters every night the answer is yes. darryn told me that the l.a. food bank is short eleven million pounds of food every year if the entire country throws out ninety six billion pounds of food every year what about just los angeles county i'm going to use this whipped cream i got out of the dumpster the other night to do the math to see how much food l.a. county throws away every year every year in l.a. county we throw away twenty four billion pounds of trash. according to the e.p.a. twelve percent of that is food waste that means we throw away two billion eight

hundred and eighty million pounds of food saving just one percent of valets food waste would equal nearly thirty million pounds of food that's almost triple what the food bank is short every year. food waste happens on all levels of production and consumption on farms in transit in the making of highly produced foods in grocery stores in restaurants and in our homes but grocery stores are the obvious choice for redirecting wasted food to hungry people. i decided to go to the trader joe's headquarters since it's only a fifteen minute drive from my house but i was a bearded mangy dumpster diver and thought i'd better clean up before talking with sophisticated businesspeople about policy changes in their companies a haircut and a shave in the tie did absolutely nothing for me we didn't have a camera rolling or anything we just walked in and i asked to speak with someone and they said we're going to have to ask you to leave because you can't be asking

questions about trader joe's i can write a letter to the c.e.o. of trader joe's which i will do for picking on trader joe's because they happen to be the best store to dumpster dive so. we know we've pulled a lot of food out of their dumpsters in particular i still couldn't believe that there were actually hungry people in the united states the richest country in the world so we stopped by the regional offices of bread for the world an organization working through political means to end global hunger there are hungry people in the u.s. i'd say there are about thirty five and a half million people in the u.s. who are food insecure that's a silly phrase going to say thirty five and a half million people in the u.s. don't know where their next meal is coming from. but about people in the us are actually going hungry and that's to find that saying they're just today so. they

can't get. to ninety six billion. numbers in the millions and billions are hard to imagine and can feel meaningless without a way to picture them so what does ninety six billion pounds of food look like it's impossible to accurately measure ninety six billion pounds of food waste because of

the endless variables in size and weight one pound of steak takes up less space than one pound of bread but you have to look at the food behind the food the end losses through feed grains used to produce meat a cow which should be eating grass in the first place consume seven pounds of grain to produce one pound of meat so a pound of wasted me actually represents seven pounds of food waste. but if we stick to the lower estimate of ninety six billion pounds what does that amount of food look like on a freight train. the average box car can hold up to two hundred eleven thousand pounds of cargo if you filled each one to capacity you would need four hundred fifty three thousand two hundred fifty. seven box cars that's a train long enough to stretch from los angeles to new york city and all the way back. what if all this food were then unloaded and fed to pigs is swill like they

used to do in the old days with food scraps a three pound piglet needs an average of thirty pounds of food per week to reach its massive two hundred sixty five pound slaughter weight in five months redirecting our annual food waste into grateful pigs mouths would raise one hundred twenty million piglets and the massive hogs producing enough meat to give everyone on the planet three pounds of pork. but meat is costly to produce both financially and for the environment and two hundred twenty two pounds of meat per person per year in the us we have far exceeded what is healthy and sustainable for the planet . so instead what would ninety six billion pounds of wheat look like on average one acre produces forty bushels of wheat each bushel whang sixty pounds so one acre equals twenty four hundred pounds of wheat putting our annual food waste into acres of wheat would total forty million acres that's

a wheat field nearly the size of the state of oklahoma enough wheat to feed everyone on the planet three one pound loaves of bread per day for an entire week. or maybe a better way to picture how much food we waste would be to travel just six hundred miles from our southern shores to the tiny country of haiti. with our ninety six billion pounds of food waste the entire country of haiti could be fed for five years or more. here in the poorest country in the western hemisphere twenty five percent of children are chronically malnourished. reduced to eating mud cakes made from dirt salt. in filthy water to curb their hunger pangs. unfortunately we can't simply put our wasted food on a boat and feed haiti. and that's not what haiti needs to become whole again.

but the contrast of our excess and their lack exist side by side as with the needy and marginalized in our own wealthy country if nothing more it is an unsettling reality that calls into question our flippancy with food waste. and in spite of the complexities surrounding food production consumption and waste we can no doubt eliminate both food waste and hunger in the united states as a start while looking more seriously at the dire needs of neighbors around the globe.

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