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today violence is once again flared up. these are the images the world seeing from the streets of chatter that. operations are. every year in america we throw away ninety six billion pounds of the. two hundred sixty three million pounds a day. eleven million pounds an hour. three thousand

pounds a second to. the big . man. her. place. the beyond. long. suit mom. 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 need. yes you find if your rule number two the first ones to the temperature as first did. that you always gotta share and rule number three you leave it cleaner than you think you. found it before you leave it cleaner and you found the right it's an unusual night in l.a. because it's it's freezing outside freezing for l.a. i think it's you know forty three to forty five degrees which is good because it

keeps all the meats and stuff cold it's been. used to me know and i buy attics ever no added hormones ever free range good me all of these perfectly good eggs because one was cracked in even get all over the other ones just thrown all the way is what they're doing with everything they have bags of avocados one goes bad they threw the entire bag of all the couples out apples oranges everything just tossed in it for no good reason they're all good these are all good aches look about and she's from the german alps. much better for the dems 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 sick and stuff but i only take stuff that's noble by. oh it doesn't really only makes you stronger.

and getting me for my own consumption i hope for my baby showers more from the dumpster at one am this morning. at three pm this afternoon on the grill but. i think i'm going to have a pretty healthy. we're not making a public announcement everyone talking exactly what if you just like we wouldn't tell him that we went to montserrat see get their food but i say most of our friends are aware of the fact that you get all of it i'm sure they think it's pretty cool. living off the ways. of the consumer isn't the american. league.

so we've got. a lot of fans. can i wash arms. and then we're going to have banking x. the dumpster stuff is really great. because there's such a large quantity of it it can turn into a lot of work so. far out of our stuff clean every day and i know there's like a more. reason and i know they're washing trays and act and it's not that big of a deal but it's just that a lot of more work than just going you are should start picking up exactly you know you need fifteen or twenty i could just like this occasion you wake up in the

morning you can address the cleanup that follows the dumpster guys or it's going to kill me she's going to wake up in the morning on the streets be. rotting in my. book finally have a good struggle years and even though we still had to buy groceries we really began living off food cold 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 hallowed i did try to personify. a pretty decent this good 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 acts 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. with a trunk show on. salmon stuff with feta cheese in spinach risk your from your local dumpster hat and a beautiful blood orange futurist but look. take. this lady from and one dozen times tr ed why has the strawberries higher than one hundred percent. hamster. delicious. to construct

the law i. think. 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 fight dates don't mean 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 rebuilt many many many times and they locked it so the food can then rot inside the dumpster sort of people getting it it's i have smart.

i don't know i don't even want to pay all those good comics like. i'm tired of it there's. there's too much well we only took this 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 or 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 made and book for a freezer and just plug it in but that's what i mean ok. i knew i would need a good. place here yes oh thank you

anyway we got in the garage for free for free donated. in just over a week of nightly diving we had a year's supply of meat. still in 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 think you don't want a lot of the same thing so ours are really nice for you meats and.

rescuing food from the dumpster straight 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 of the not given to people who need it. i decided to ask the grocery stores. ok so here we are at 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 i was on a lot of fun and i think. you know right there none of the stores. he's going to give me the card for the place already called which reproduced so basically it's impossible to talk to anybody on camera i mean even off camera they wouldn't discuss details of the phone. which are going to come. and. go they won't talk to me company policy no interviews no. no interview call this guy i got the card.

and the number for the main office but she said she'll see a pallet and on that collar for 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 locked gate and another rule that i've been told is never penetrate into something about it's not yours it's not mine if they don't open it then they don't they don't want me to get into it so it's on so long. but the gate i can respect that because what if they like this one because there's back stock and they don't want people getting into the news dexter i'm going. i'm going oh. i don't understand how i want to get upset for you stealing from. we there's the

bad. so we've got losing the budget that you're still going to waste you know this is something not. just been discarded and just wants to be forgotten about you when you take a check that out. i don't see how that can be conceived as being criminal in any way but seriously do you not think that you just let it rot i mean minds have been shipped up from mexico and like cheese from germany and meat from. chile i mean you just let it rot because of the fans. but you get it. it's kind of. like get back to your i can't i'm on a fast. i believe that 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 debris. well i believe it's just i will even do it if i get caught and arrested i should be proud to say i got arrested for eating some of his waste i think it's just i think it's just and i'm willing to pay the consequences for that i do it openly when when they catch me or people come i shake their hand and tell them what i'm doing the same way from my so when i do i and most the time they're very from. this is. a good place to raise. money. it is technically trespassing and it is against. your guys right now. and that is where the conflict comes it is

a conflict between what i believe is just and what is legal and this lifestyle i believe is it's more just there 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 visited in 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 in its nearly unrestricted quantity in variety reveals

a lot about us as a society i gave them a call the next level you come to a commercial level there isn't even any training in. law it's not even a crock of. shit about what do you pull off and i'm not. the hopeful side there's just no difficulty. would you waste. your thought about life because quite to be able to create it. and we've lost it it's more prestigious a body like an automobile you know fifty percent of all the food up a credit card will never make it but if you have that called the production at the end of it this way right so all they have to transport. the fertilizers to increase. the farming and everything else that if we were to cut a good lawful and half we would probably we can go totally open all right back.

to 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 but one in every ten people are at risk of hunger in los angeles county roughly just over a million people nancy angeles county at some time during the year are at risk of hunger not knowing where their next meal's going to come from so the los angeles

regional food bank through a network of about nine hundred travel agency sites we reach about six hundred seventy four thousand of those people so they're still you know over a third of those people were not reaching so that's that's how big a problem is here even if we bank our size hundred thousand square foot facility distributing thirty four thirty five million pounds a year still not reaching the demand here and i like i 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 too on top of what we g.p. are and we're still not making food available to everybody here in america which is . it's a 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 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 a 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 eighteen million pounds of food saving just one percent of valets food waste will 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 a 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. trader joe's which i will do for picking on trader joe's because they happen to be the best store the dumpster dive that so. we know we've pulled a lot of food out of their dumpsters a particular so couldn't believe that they 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 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 first let's 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 hungry and that's to find that saying they're just. so. they can't confirm.

you count to twenty 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 actually 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 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 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. 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 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 me 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 langue sixty pounds so one acre equals twenty four hundred pounds of wheat putting our annual food waste into acres of wheat with 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 her 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 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 around in 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

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