for policy studies for her thoughts on this sticky situation coming up in the next half hour and that is going to do it for now but for more on the stories we cover to go r.t. dot com slash usa or youtube dot com slash r t america eistein for the. wealthy british. market. find out what's really happening to the global economy with much stronger for a no holds barred look at the global financial headlines tune into cars a report on our cheap.

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clements. 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. zero zero zero zero zero zero zero. zero zero.

zero. zero zero zero zero. zero zero. zero. zero zero. zero . nearly a billion people in the world for knowing every day. in the united states even our trash cans are filled with. you just have to go get it.

so there are three basic rules to dumpster dive rule number one never take more than the. less you find if you're rule number two the first ones to the temperature as first tips but you've always got to share and rule number three and leave it cleaner than you look and you. found it before you leave it cleaner and you found that 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 spend down. there's. no antibiotics ever no added hormones ever pre-arrange good meat all of these perfectly good eggs because one was cracked in even get all over the other

ones just threw them all the way is what they're doing with everything they have batch of avocados one goes bad it through an entire bag of all the colors out apples oranges everything is tossed in it for no good reason are all good these are all good aches look mountain cheese from the german alps. i much better with the dumps than i ever have before her we started two years ago and we have we really like the upper class makes me crazy. now i'm taken some stuff but i only take stuff that's double buy. what doesn't kill you only makes you stronger. and getting neat 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. and.

i think i'm going to have a pretty healthy. we're not making a public announcement everyone signed exactly with it i'm just like we wouldn't tell him that we went to montserrat also get there but i'd say most of our friends are aware of the fact that you get all those people on stern and i think it's pretty cool. that. i'm. living off the ways. of the consumer isn't the american. league.

so we got. a lot of very unfair. can i wash your arms. and then we're going to have thank you the dumpster stuff is really great. because there's such a large quantity of it can turn into a lot of work so. far out of our stuff clean every day and. there's like and. i raise them and i never wash trays and. i mean it's not that big of a deal but it's just. a lot of more work than just going you are she sort of picking up exactly you not that you need fifteen or twenty i could just like this occasionally wake up in the morning and contract the cleanup that paulus dumpster buys or it's going to kill me she's going to wake up in the morning it's going to be rotting rotting in my kitchen. but fennel have to

strive for is 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 a gourmet dishes from food we had just scrounge out of dumpsters little hallow that he tried to piss out of. that's 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 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 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 the french showing. salmon stuff with feta cheese in spinach rescue from your local dumpster. and a beautiful blood orange futurist problem. with a cake is made from one dozen dempster egg whites mistry berries are one hundred percent. hamsters. 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 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 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 many many many times and they locked it so the food can then rot inside the dumpster instead of people getting it it's not smart. i don't know i don't even want to take all this food on my side. i'm tired of it there's. there's too much we only took as much as we did my ways but

i did 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 handbook for freezer they just didn't but that's what i know kind of what. i mean i wouldn't need your. place here. 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. i. saw the freezers

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 ours are really nice for 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 type in because i went to their website and their website says that they prefer to talk face to face i was i'm on a lot of on and on and on in the right so none of the stores i'm talking 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 of the phone. which you got from the. 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 it's 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 if i'm wrong. 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 new xbox i'm going. i'm going oh. i don't understand how anyone could get upset for you stealing trash. a week there's the bad one that's the way dad lives a little bit of stuff you're still going to waste you know this is something not. spent 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 to see you not take it you just let it like rot i mean minds that have been shipped up from mexico in my cheese from germany and meat from. chile i mean you just let it rot because of the plants. or 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 do it 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 bring. well 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 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 when they catch me or people come i shake their hand and tell them what i'm doing i say where i'm from i say what i do and most of the time they're very firm. this is a pretty. big companies do. it is technically trespassing and it is against. your guys right now. that is where the conflict comes it is a conflict between what i believe is just and what it's legal and this lifestyle i believe it's 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 in variety reveals a lot about us as a society i gave him a call but that's what will you come to the commercial though there's if you need to be trained in. law it's not even a cough it's not a question about within the law and i'm not. saying it right so

there's just no difficulty. so you. do sort of what life. took wife to create that. here we've lost that if it's more prestigious thought it like that but you know fifty percent of all the food stuff that ready to howard will never make it into something if you waste half back through. the production that would include his wife write a lot of picture transporting. the bird wife to increase total degradation for the dog mean everything else that if we were to cut our food waffle and half we would probably be a total overall creation by about. after

my conversation with timothy jones i went to the l.a. food than 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 i will population of ten million people 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's going to come from so 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 back 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 that's a big problem here in america where you do have all that kind of food and resources available that you still have people coming 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 keep a year and we're still not making food available to everybody in america which is. the 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. 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 eighteen 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 our 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 better clean up before talking with

sophisticated businesspeople about policy changes in their companies a haircut and a shave in the time i 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 what they can 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 it's 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 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 going hungry to find that saying they're just not going to eat today so they can't confirm. the fed you count two ninety six million.

he found. 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. what if all this food with an unloaded and 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 pound slaughter weight and five months redirecting our annual food waste and a grateful pigs mouths would raise one hundred twenty million piglets and a 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 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 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 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. 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.

marvin here broadcasting live from washington d.c. coming up today on the big picture.