in the tradition ramona close of the maiden so to believe that the leader medicine sure was fun it's a very precocious. here with r t a live from moscow our top stories this monday water and food shortages bring libya to the brink of a humanitarian crisis as the opposition against it will not negotiate with a fugitive colonel gadhafi. more violence is reported in syria amid government attempts to implement reforms that's wall of solution to the country's longstanding crisis becomes an apple of just four between russia and its western partners. and the e.u. calls with a special meeting of the box top level financial officials to resolve growing differences on how to hold that contagion sweeping of what comes. next

a special report on campaigners in america trying to cut and huge amounts of food wasted in the country and how they're happy to forge through trash to do so. 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. hand . to. her.

to. the long. plane. comes nearly a billion people in the world are going hungry every day. in the united states even our trash cans are full of the food you just have to go get it.

so there are three basic rules to dumpster dive rule number one never take more than you. let's you find out if you're rule number two the first ones to the temperature as first did. you always gotta share and rule number three leave it cleaner than usual and 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. there's. no antibiotics ever no added hormones ever free range could mean all of these perfectly good eggs because one was cracked in 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 card those one goes bad they threw in the entire bag of all because out apples oranges everything is tossed in it for no good reason are all good these are all good exe but not and she's from the german alps. much better out of the dumps than i ever have for her he started two years ago and we have clearly only the upper class makes me queasy. and i'm taking some stuff around with free stuff that's double bagged oh it doesn't you know you only makes you stronger. and getting meat for my own consumption. and for my baby showers more for 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 find exactly with it i'm just like you wouldn't tell him that we went to montserrat see get there but i'd say most of our friends are aware of the fact that you get all those people downstairs and i think it's pretty cool. living off the ways. of the consumer isn't the miracle. league.

so we've got. a lot of variation. you know 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. they're out about stuff clean every day and i'll just say i don't. raise them and then i never wash raising cattle and it's not that he would deal with it it's just that a lot of more work i'm just going to push started picking up exactly nothing in the fifteen or twenty i could just like this occasionally wake up in the morning and kind of tread cleanup that follows the dumpster guys away it's going to kill me she's going to wake up in the morning all this group is going to be. rotting in my kitchen. but phil have to struggle years 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 out of dumpsters look at hal i did try to personify. a pretty decent this year and i think this about the fish it's good to pull the chicken was looking a little funky a little like purplish the food makes up about twenty percent of the landfill waste which means we're feeding our landfills as much as we're feeding our country so instead of rotting underground acts beneath the earth and producing harmful nothing gas this garbage was feeding my family and friends and doing it in style.

well this will be blood orange an onion salad. with a trunk show on of. sounding stuff with feta cheese in spinach riskier from your local dumpster. and a beautiful little orange citrus were blank. today cake. is made from an abundant dumpster egg whites and champagne is higher than one hundred percent. hamster. delicious. to answer de la 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 when

a pack of four for me 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 morelock 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 out many many many times and they lock it so the food can then rot inside the dumpster set of people getting it that's that's smart. i don't know hire i don't even want to take all this good home inside. 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 guess it's like almost two in the morning and i don't have anywhere to put it 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 a mixer and book for freezer they just didn't but that's what i think ok. i mean i wouldn't need your. place here yet. thank you anyway we got in the garage for free for free donated time. in just over a week of nightly diving we had a year's supply of meat. i. saw the freezers

totally filled up as 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 friday you need some. 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 once on a lot of on and on and on you know right there none of the stores on the coffee 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 and even off camera they wouldn't discuss details so. i think you've got to come. and. go they won't talk to me company policy no interviews no. no interview. call this guy i got the card. but 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. some story 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 love. but the gate is a bit like it was like that because what if they allowed this one because there's that stock and they don't want people getting into the new xbox i'm going. i'm going. i don't understand how i don't want to get upset for you stealing trucks. we there's the bad one so we don't look it was evil but it's the pure stealing the waste you know this is something not. going to scarred and just wants to be forgotten about. and you take it take that out. i don't see how that can be through just being criminal in any way but to see you not

because you just let it rot i mean mines that have been shipped up from mexico like cheese from germany and meat from. chile i mean you just let it rot for the fans. or you get it. it's kind of. like get back to your liking i'm on a fast. i believe that dumpster diving to civil disobedience is nonviolent civil disobedience because i believe in what i'm doing i believe it's right and i'm willing to break the law and i don't believe i don't i take it seriously to break the law but i believe that's just i believe a do if i get caught and arrested i should be proud to say i got arrested for eating some of his ways i think it's just i think it's just an unwilling to pay the consequences for that i do it openly when when when they catch me or people cause i

shake their hand and tell them what i'm going from i said what i do and most the time they're very from. this is a pretty. big no minister right. to hold it. technically trespassing and it is against. the big guys right now. that is where the conflict comes it is a conflict between what i believe is just and what is legal and this lifestyle believe that it's more just. going into the store and buying stuff for money but round there this is. totally different outside the system

way of living. the more stores i visited in phone calls i made 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 war will you come to a commercial or there isn't even a train but at last it's not even a profit not in your bag you know about we can pull it off and i'm not putting him down i'm simply saying but the whole side they're just so different that he. would

you waste. your thought of what life because for clive to be able to create a family plot but it's more prestigious a property like that but you know fifty percent of all the food gets up a great deal howard will never make it but it doesn't if you waste half that through all of the perception that went into it just like right oh it's transported . the furred why the increase total to education for thought mean that everything else that if we were to cut our food walking at half we would probably be a total alteration right back at. after my conversation with timothy jones 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 population of ten million people about one in every ten people are at risk of hunger los angeles has roughly just over a million people los angeles county at some time during the year are at risk of hunger not knowing where their next meal is going to come from so 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 i think a promise here even if we bank our size of a thousand square foot facility distributing thirty forty 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 falling through the cracks and that should happen in this country we export billions of pounds of food to other countries to top of what we keeping here and we're still not making food available to everybody here which is. the sad state of affairs is that.

these vast entires of food be 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 it's 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. in ways 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 the 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 we're picking on trader joe's because they happened to be the best store to dumpster dive so. we know we 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 and global hunger there are a hundred 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 face but say thirty five and a half million people in the u.s.

don't know where their next meal is coming from. but. people in the u.s. are actually going hungry and that's to find that saying they're just not going to eat today so they can't get. so fed. up to ninety six million.

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 actually measure ninety six billion pounds of food waste because of the endless variables in size in which 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 indirect 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 cons 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 boxcar 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 talks cars that's

a train long enough to stretch from los angeles to new york city and all the way back. when if all this food were then unloaded in fed to pay exists will 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 pounds slaughter weight and five months redirecting our annual from the waste and the grateful pigs 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 at 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 weighing sixty pounds so one acre equals twenty four hundred pounds of wheat putting our annual food waste into acres of wheat or 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. 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 vegetable shortening 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 of exist side by side as with the needy and marginalized in our own wealthy country. is 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.

to the. wealthy british style. guides.