review the latest in some instances. from. the future of. welcome back you're watching r t you know here's a recap of the main stories we're covering today nato says it will continue its presence in libya as long as it needs to despite also saying to get off the regime is now a thing of the past. palestinian alert israeli defense forces reportedly prepare for an uprising handing out tear gas and stun grenades to sudden worse as the you want to vote for palestinian statehood approaches. american oil giant exxon mobil and russia's ross now strike a historic cooperation deal paving the way for a joint oil exploration from the gulf of mexico to russia's vast project shop. and

up next our special report about a group of activists who rummage in the rubbish of los angeles supermarkets to find out just how much food is wasted each day that's up next. 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 . current.

soup bowl. 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 dive rule number one never take more than you need. unless you find if your rule number two the first one is so the temperature has first tips and you've always got to share and rule number three leave it cleaner than usual and you. found it before you leave it cleaner and you found that it's alright. 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 and down. there's. no antibiotics 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 of a coddles one goes bad they threw 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 aches like not and cheese from the german alps. much better out of the dumps than i ever have for her it started two years ago and we have clearly like the upper class makes me crazy. now i'm taking some stuff but i only take stuff it's double bagged oh it doesn't really only makes you stronger. and getting me for my own consumption at home for my baby shower tomorrow from 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. time making

a public announcement everyone telling exactly what they did i'm just like we wouldn't tell him that we went to montserrat also get their food but i say most of our friends are aware of the fact that you get all the good and i'm sure it's people. living off the ways. of the consumer isn't the american. league.

so we got. a lot of. them i wash arms. 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. far out of our stuff clean every day and. there's like. cherries and then now you're washing praising god and i miss not having to deal with it it's just that a lot of more work than just the universe started picking up exactly you know you need fifteen or twenty five kids it's like this occasionally you wake up in the morning and kind of trend cleanup that follows the dumpster guys the way it's going to kill me she's going to wake up in the morning on the streets. riding it like it's good. but fatal have the other strivers and 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 alphonse or a professional chef would cook up gore made dishes from food we had just scrounge out of dumpsters look at hallowed to try to personify. a pretty decent this yeah nothing good about the fish it's good it's simple the chicken was looking a little funky a little like purplish and 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 nothing 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. sand and stuff with feta cheese and spinach rescue from your local dumpster. and a beautiful little orange citrus bird luck. take his lead from one dozen times or egg whites to the strawberries 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 more 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 best by 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 lock them stores which seem to be a growing trend to keep dumpster divers out and ensure total waste. this is the trader joes rip it out many many many times and they locked it so the food can then rot inside the dumpster set of people getting it that's that's smart. i don't know i don't even want to take all this food on the side. i'm tired of it there's. there's too much 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 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 wanted to handbook for a freezer i just plug it in but that's what i do you know ok. i knew i wouldn't need your good. graces here yes oh a few 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. still in the freezers

totally filled up as just. a little layer of some bread and stuff. just not because they didn't find enough meat just because. or just tired of me kind of picky like you don't want a lot of the same thing so i was a really nice friday you meet. 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 to the 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 i was on off on and on and on and right now none of the stores none of my coffee is going to give me the card for the place already called which refutes so basically it's impossible to talk to anybody on camera i mean even off camera they wouldn't discuss details of the phone on which you got from. so 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. dumpster that

house 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 it's on the lawn. but the gate is this 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 next 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 lawyers a little bit of the cure here still going to waste you know this is something that . has been discarded and just wants to be forgotten about you know you take it check that out. i don't see how that can be to just be criminal in any way but

seriously do you not do you not think that you just let it rot i mean mines have been shipped up from mexico like cheese from germany and meat from. chile i mean you just let it rot because of the fans. or do you get it. it's kind of. like get back to your i can't i'm on a fascinating. 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 to break. ok i believe it's just i believe you do it if i get caught 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 i'm 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 one and two minutes away from home i so want to do it most the time they're very firm. they give them a stick. it is technically trespassing and it is against the. very very guys right now. that is where the conflict is a conflict between what i believe is just and what it's legal and this lifestyle you believe is it's more just. going into the store and buying stuff with money but rather this is a totally different and outside the system way of living.

the more stores i visited in phone calls i made the more 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 and variety reveals a lot about us as a society i gave him a call the next lot where you come to a commercial level there isn't even a trolley in. the lot it's not even a cough it's not sure about what you pulled off and i'm not. at

the hopeful side that. would you. do it for a lot because quite to be able to create a whole. lot that it's more prestigious a body to fly at all it will be no fifty percent of all the food that the credit will never make it but. if you happen to call a halt the production that went into it this way right so all they have to transport. the fertilizers to increase. the fog mean everything else that if we were to cut or build losses and half we would probably be going for total overall creation but. 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 but one in every ten people are at risk of hunger los angeles county is roughly just over a million people once angeles county at some time during the year are at risk of hunger not knowing where their next meal is 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 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 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 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.

these vast empires of fluky 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. there and 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 we 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 actually 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 we're picking on trader joe's because they happen to be the best store to dumpster dive that so. we know we've pulled a lot of food out of their dumpsters a particular a 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 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 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. people in the us are actually going hungry to find out saying they're just not going to eat today so. they can't confirm. the fed you count to ninety six billion. the out. 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 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 box cars that's a train long enough to stretch from los angeles to new york city and all the way back. but if all this food were then unloaded and fed to 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 lighter 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 lang 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 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 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 globe. hungry for the full story we've got in first hand the biggest issues get

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