obama's council of economic advisors and a ph d. candidate at the university of california. and that's going to do it for now for more on the stories we covered go to argue dot com slash usa follow me on twitter at lauren lyster and come back here and a half hour at eight o'clock for more news and analysis. hey tom are in here broadcasting live from washington d.c. coming up today on the big picture. download the official ante up location giong phone called touch from the unction

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bring you the latest in science and technology from around the world. we've got the future of coverage. more news today violence is once again flared up. these are the images the world has been seeing from the streets of canada asked. change operations or on the day. here's my letter to dan bade the c.e.o. of trader joe's i've also included a copy of the good samaritan act which was signed into being in one thousand nine hundred six by bill clinton and that encourages grocery stores to donate food and

it protects them from being sued so i'm just asking him to consider moving trader joe's into the next step of simply not wasting as much food and getting it to people who need it i figured the c.e.o. of trader joe's probably wouldn't get back to me after one letter so i've decided to send. a letter a day for the next month a letter went out to t.j. c.e.o. dan bain every morning and we continued diving as normal time passed dumpsters swelled with food and then suddenly the landscape changed we began seeing more people at the dumpsters not your typical diverse people that seem to need to through it a lot more than we did. as i waited to hear back from trader joes about all the food in the trash cans the world spiraled into a food crisis a kid.

again to me to. try. to be. good. to. keep. trying. to. change change to. change. seems to me to. be a chance. to . try to come.

home. to. the us from coming. from. after sending letters for two weeks i got a call from the trader joe's headquarters allison from public relations asked me to stop sending letters and to please stop bothering me they would not be discussing wasted food or anything else with me when i insisted on a simple conversation as a concerned citizen no cameras or interview allison hung up on me she said and i quote just so you know in our communities in which we have stores we do donate food that we feel is safe to donate seven days

a week in all our stores across the country so i guess the problem is they don't feel that all this food is safe to eat up the thirty stores i called ninety five percent throw away everything except for bread so the dairy the produce to me i guess they they don't feel it's safe to consume even though they throw it away the day before it expires i guess he's bananas aren't edible are quiet bit from a wire trader joe's shouldn't be singled out it's just one company among many crowds vons safeway whole foods cosco sam's club and many others throw away staggering amounts of food every day but stores are only part of the problem of food waste all of us throughout perfectly good food on a daily basis we let it rot in our refrigerators we toss leftovers because they don't sound good or were afraid because we don't know enough about food to judge

whether or not it's edible wasting food is a bad habit that permeates all of society implicating all of us in the problem which means we're all responsible for creating a solution. but probably not a lot going on forty percent of health overall but the household up for about. a year what we saw was among younger people and you pay one point lack of. they don't know what a bad they're scared that this this half is bad i think or hear. these eggs bring up a good point about. a little bit about food safety here. i have never been sick eating dumpster food my family has never been sick and i have to be really careful i'm feeding a small child trash essentially. so you start learning more about food we don't

know exactly when these eggs were thrown out and you can't you can't really smell an egg to know if it's good or bad so i researched it and what you do is you take the egg and you get a bowl of cold water and you drop it in and if it sinks to the bottom and lays flat it's perfectly good and if it angles it's a little bit better for baking and if it floats it's terrible so these eggs are enjoy by november nineteenth today is october twenty first so i'm not sure why they threw these away but will test them and make sure they're good really slim pickens there's so much food but it's all buried underneath this mountain of trash and all crushed so basically i have. breakfast for the family cakes and toast for about a week. people kept telling me about the issue of logistics how there's enough

food available but the difficulty of storing it and transporting it to needy people make wasting food more practical. help i do you know how mean i. are loving dad was no doubt there are real complexities but my son flynn solved the problem quite easily pick up the food then take it to hungry people but this requires people caring and volunteering the public and will and political will to end hunger is is not great enough if people cared enough to make this a huge priority in our policy work. then we could we could end hunger in the u.s. i mean almost not overnight but i mean pretty graphic. and. here's what i want to know i mean. we're kind of society waste this much food.

the body that will play book about a four one but they're a bit for you they are the product but again. it our own personal character but it's a bit of profit. do we value the earth. that we value all that it produces. have we lost our connection and creation. do we see its beauty. its fragility. do we care for it. for all that comes from it. do we nurture it. appreciate it. has it become just another product for us to consume.

just finished something say to a league soup made from the greens from the dumpster. and some eggs from the dumpster. i don't know if dumpster diving and eating food from the dumpster has made me value food more or value food less because it's easier now. to throw feet away because we have so much of it and so part of me i think that i'm following the food. you can. only. live my. mom i know i don't want to waste my time with. i don't

want to be there. now. you can. come here for black ice that's what i'm talking about. eat it for lunch. good luck no you eat. no wasted you get eat it. you. so today is new year's eve and i'm working on a little plan i got the idea on christmas eve when i went dumpster diving so tomorrow is christmas the twenty fifth they've thrown this away two days early because the store is closed tomorrow there's hundreds of dollars of me here tons of

bread tons of salad why wouldn't they at least attempt to give this food to the food banks the stores are all closed tomorrow too so tonight they'll be twice as much food again the plan was really ingenious my son scout actually thought. i would try going through the front door instead of scavenging through dumpsters i just talked to the trader joe's on arroyo one of the ones we dumpster dive at and they said i could come by tonight at six pm when the store closes and pick up all the food so. maybe that's better than jumping ahead tums terror for that one trader joe's gave us six grocery carts full of food and if i would've called them today i would have been in the dumpster tonight we were taking the food to the salvation army's bell shelter southeast of downtown l.a.

the bell shelter down there. where we are the shelters a halfway house offering long term treatment for substance abuse and mental illnesses they provide room board and treatment to four hundred fifty people. in this earth foundation army. yeah. ok thank you we should have had ten truckloads of food but many of the trader joes i'd call didn't want to take the time and the whole foods store backed out of the last minute. sandra the lead cook told me that getting enough food is a constant struggle especially as the country's economic crisis deepens i answer martin i'm the only good for the salvation army bell south to skid to resupply francis launching here for. forty fifty people a day if we wouldn't pick up a speech tonight at trader joe's or would have prior gone through it is it better

for you to get it i see get it thank you i can. tell you i think you're wrong thank you very much ok i think. we all felt pretty good the night had been successful though on a very small scale approaching individual stores had worked much better than going to corporate headquarters but saving perishable food requires organization and work and it's difficult convincing stores to give more than bread intented cans. most of the time wasting food is just easier. path. and that one of the trader joe's there told me that i couldn't pick up food because they were giving it to someone else and i and i looked in this one dumpster and just pulled out this fact. check. those are all fifteen dollars croyle are.

all expired tomorrow i see a lot more food down below but there's tons of nasty sticky garbage but there's a lot of food not dumpster so we could have taken that to the bell shelter tonight too we weren't always like this there was a time when we viewed food as something precious much more than a commodity food was life itself the center of community culture and home to throw it away would have been unimaginable our grandparents and great grandparents lived the virtues of waste not want not and demonstrated the proper etiquette necessary to join the ranks of the clean plate club in that era saving food was presented as part of the war effort and to do otherwise would be unpatriotic using food wisely and being aware of waste became second nature to a generation that had firsthand experience with world war economic downturn and

food scarcity. in both world war one and world war two the emerging might of american industrial and manufacturing power was bent toward the war effort and consequently to feeding the troops in a world where millions of starving america has become the bread basket of rum of the guard full of them are for free. our farmland in ranges must produce more food than ever before to supply our only and health are fighting a life. with scientific. and the greatest food producing country in the world backing him up the american soldier no matter where it may be in the jungle. in the arctic. but deadly. or in his home care can rightly consider himself the best bet soldier in the world and in the future the war born knowledge that has made him so well read over the

world can guarantee that no one under the rubble from malnutrition fall from hard. ironically the advances in reducing food waste and increasing production through new food science efficient packaging and distribution laid the foundation for modern agribusiness and ultimately a broken food system that wastes one half of all that it produces. food has often been linked to war and its accompanying in the tree the polian bonaparte's famous quote an army marches on its stomach found its world war one iteration with is ammunition don't waste it part of a massive campaign to educate citizens to conserve food for the war and to raise awareness that individual consumption had an effect on a global scale. much of the war propaganda of the day urged people to buy a local fresh and seasonal food to plant edible victory gardens to eat less meat

and more veggies to raise chickens for eating food scraps and providing a to can preserve and dry excess food for the coming months and not only were people urged to clean their plates that was less on them to begin with largely due to the war rationing portion sizes were much smaller and people were urged to eat a very diet of whole healthy foods rather than consume oversized portions with little or no nutritional value. although our tastes and habits have changed many of the ideals embrace their great grandparents generation haven't the language of the past may be couched in war terminology but the parallels between that time and ours abound we are experiencing a new resurgence of the same type of consciousness that existed then the main difference being now it's happening on a grassroots level the rise of edible gardens in urban environments and increased

emphasis on sustainable living a growing trend of keeping backyard chickens and a widespread shift towards buying organic seasonal and local products all directly reflect the fundamental principle that food is precious food is not ammunition food is life and it should never be wasted and if saving good food is a value that resonates deeply in our national character. shouldn't the establishment that provide us with food reflect that value and shouldn't we be practicing it in our homes and communities as well. and wastefulness now seems to be

a defining factor among the wealthy nations of the world with very few exceptions in the u.k. over eighteen billion pounds of food is thrown out by households every year. and the european union wastes nearly two hundred billion pounds of food annually. but we don't have to waste food this is one simple thing that we can change the impact of which will reverberate throughout the entire planet. we are on our way to a food bank called god provides i discovered them when i was trying to block the new year's eve truckload of food to the bell shelter and these guys apparently pick up food from a lot of trader joe's stores and a lot about the grocery stores so they're doing exactly what needs to happen food

that would go to the dumpsters getting it to people who need it god provides hands out over eleven million pounds of food every year they serve four thousand families from six hundred just a few years ago primarily we get our food from a fresh rescue program with trader joe's albertans don's trader joe's was the first really big chains to really jump ship from being afraid to give the food away they can it's difficult clinton passed the good samaritan act when it's really close to the expiration dates we have to freeze it which time locks the expiration dates be freezer they go great and dairy and food if you guys didn't pick up that food and you didn't have that set up that food would most likely go into the don'ts yes and if we're not on time for a few hours later it's in the dumpster most families to give them so much food buy cases of produce that we tell them that we hope will give you so much food you have to go next to your neighbor that you don't talk to and give them some food god

provides open me up to the good some grocery stores are doing for trader joe's stores contribute every day as well as many albertson's which i learned as a leader in food waste reduction with its nationwide fresh rescue program a simple program that could easily be imitated by all grocery companies we also experienced firsthand how hard the work is without volunteers none of this food would be rescued in redistributed to people who really can't live without. out it we have to help each other that's what we're here for to help everybody and if everybody can affect an attitude you know i think we'd be much better. sometimes i wish we could take back all of this waste that trash cans and dumpsters

and landfills would give up their food to those from really needed. that we could erase all the damage of our bad habits but i know that's impossible we can't go backwards the problem won't conveniently solve itself either. we have to move forward creatively start living differently so that everyone has a chance to live fully it's about more than not wasting food it's about making sure everyone has enough to eat clearing our plates is a good place to start but it's not going to put food in hungry mouths or stop massive waste in grocery stores or throughout the food industry. noam chomsky said changes and progress very rarely are gifts from above they come out of struggles from below the answer to what's next depends on people like you. it's a must stop world but it's the only one we've got and we have to wake up and start

carving out a new way of being maybe we can begin to help create a world for our children and their children and their children a world where all of creation than all of life is sacred and beautiful and valued for what it is. almost a journey as ever since she started this documentary the dumpster diving just been terrible thanks paul.

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