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. nearly

a billion people in the world are knowing hungry 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 the. last you find if you're rule number two the first one is so the temperature as first did. it 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 some right it's an unusual night in l.a. because it's it's freezing outside freezing for away so i think it's you know forty three to forty five degrees which is good because it keeps all the meat and stuff cold is but. there's. no antibiotics ever no added hormones ever free range good me all of these perfectly good eggs because one was cracked didn't even get all over the other ones just threw them all the way is what they're doing with everything they have bags of of a coddles one goes bad they threw in the entire bag of avocados out apples oranges everything just tossed in it for no good reason they're all good these are all good exe look about and choose from the german alps. much better out of the dumps 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 taking some stuff but i only take stuff that's double bagged. what doesn't kill you only makes you stronger. and getting meat for my own consumption at home and for my baby shower. in 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 talking the doctor with it. just like we wouldn't tell him that we went to montserrat see get their food but i would say most of our friends are aware of the fact that we get all of this dumpster and i think it's pretty cool. living off the ways.

of the consumer is the american. league. so we've got. a lot of good days and spent most. of my wash arms. and then we're going to have blueberry pancakes the dumpster stuff is really great but because there's such a large quantity of it it can turn into

a lot of work so i. figure out the best stuff clean every day and i know there's like. strawberries and then i need to wash trays and bag and it's not that big of a deal but it's just. a lot of more work than just going to her she started picking up exactly the amount that you need fifteen or twenty i could just like this kitchen you wake up in the morning tred clean up the problems dumpster by the way it's going to kill me she's going to wake up in the morning spirit. rotting in my kitchen. but fennell have a strivers 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 shot of dumpsters look at hello that he tried to piss out of. that's pretty decent this guy good yeah don't think about the fish it's good it's simple the chicken was looking a little funky and 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 packed 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. without trying show one of. salmon stuff with. farit she's a spinach risk you from your local dumpster. a

beautiful blood orange futurist burb look. at a cake is made from and one doesn't dumpster egg whites 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 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 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 we've been many many many times and they locked it so the food can then rot inside the dumpster stead of people getting it it's. smart. i don't know i don't know i don't even want to take all this food home it's like. i'm tired of it there's. there's too much we all they 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 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 handbook for a freezer i just plugged it in but that's what i did ok. i knew i wouldn't need it you're going. yeah. yeah right here yes wow all 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. they are 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 meats and they're.

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 on a lot of on and on and. you know right there none of the stores. 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 so the phone. which we got from. they won't talk to me company policy no interviews no. no interview. call this guy i got the card. for 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 has a lot. 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 then they don't they don't want me to get into it so long long. but the gate is this i can respect that because what

if they log this one because there's back stock and they don't want people getting into the news dexter i'm going. i'm going. i don't understand how anyone could get upset for you stealing trash. we there's the bad one that's really bad luck it was evil but it's the pure you're still going to waste you know this is something not. spent discarded and just wants to be forgotten about you if you take it check that out. i don't see how that can be sued just be criminal in any way but to see you not because you just let it rot i mean minds that have been shipped up from mexico like cheese from germany and meat from. chile i mean you just let it rot because of the plants. or do 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 break the law but 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 somebody is 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. yes and learn from this what to do and why and most the time they're very friendly. this is pretty.

big you know the next day already. it is technically trespassing and it is against the law. you know you guys right now. that is where the conflict comes as a conflict between what i believe is just and what is legal and this lifestyle you believe is is more just than. 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 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 well you come to the commercial level there isn't even a detroit. law it's not even a concept. about we do. and i'm not putting them down i'm simply stating what the old saw i did there just so that he. would be. for the law in the. to coopt the crate. and we've lost that it's good it's more prestigious a couple oddity to fly that automobile but you know fifty percent of all the food cooked up a grab a bit hard will never make that up but if you white half that all of the

production that went into it that way right so all it took to transport. the fertilizers to increase. from the farming and everything else that if we were to cut our food lawful and half we would probably be the total overall patient right. 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 about one in every ten people are at risk of hunger in los angeles county roughly just over a million people in 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 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 the problem is here even if we bankrupt our size and a 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 tell me through the cracks and that should happen in this country we export billions of pounds of food to other countries to on top of what we g.p. are and we're still not making food available to everybody in america which is. a

sad state of affairs in the.

last entires of duty 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 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. 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 the tide 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.

of trader joe's which i will do for picking 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 a 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 phrase but 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. to find that saying they're just today.

to ninety 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. what if all this food were then unloaded and fed to pigs is swill 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 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 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 whang sixty pounds so one acre equals twenty four hundred pounds of wheat putting our annual food waste into acres of wheat would 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. 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.

today's news and this week's top stories libya's new leaders tried to bring calm to tripoli after capturing the capital but the massive flood of weapons on the streets means stability could still be a long way off. moscow slams the e.u.

is new with sanctions on syria while a lack of accurate media coverage coming out of the country raises questions as to who's to blame for the bloodshed. a burning controversy ukraine threatens to take russian support over gas prices but the kremlin says it's on solid ground in the latest round of an old battle. and at night of rage in israel hundreds of thousands rally in the nation's biggest protests demanding that the words turn their attention from security to social justice. this is actually going to live from moscow with joshua welcome to the program the libyan rebels are closing in on her look at our visa last major stronghold and hometown of sirte they say time is running out for the former libyan leader and his loyalists.