thanks for being with us on how classy our own parents are all g. and here are your headlines broke in new strong allies to resign from al-jazeera accuse station bosses of proper cable the ports for up has their view rather than show what's really happening in conflict or in syria and confirms footage coming out of the country is making it easier for spin doctors to manipulate the facts for political and it's. kind of goals in their courts as for iraq obama and david cameron over their afghanistan strategy after the massacre of sixteen people by an

american soldier in the country both leaders say they're not be with progress on the war just fight fury among afghans over recent outrageous. china warns of the urgent need to slow down its economic growth and bring in political reforms to avert political and financial disaster this comes up at a time when debt ridden europe because of the world's second largest economy as a potential parent. and coming up next is an award winning documentary on how so-called rummaging in the garbage can salvage a thousands of dollars worth of good at a go through. 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. hand . her. long. suit mom.

playing. the bombs nearly a billion people in the world are knowing some cream 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 don't. rule number one never take more than you. yes you find it if your rule number two the first one is so the dumpster as first did. it you always gotta share and rule number three leave it cleaner than you look when 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 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. there's. no antibiotics ever no added hormones ever free range could mean all of these perfectly good eggs because one was cracked didn't even get all over the other ones just through all the way is what they're doing with everything they have bags of avocados one goes bad they threw in the entire bag of all because out apples oranges everything is tossed in it for no good reason they're all good these are ok they look not and she's from the german alps. much better out of the dumps than i ever have for her we started two years ago and we have we really like the upper class makes me crazy. now i'm sick and stuff so i only take stuff that's

double back oh it doesn't kill you only makes you stronger. and getting meat for my own consumption at home and for my baby shower tomorrow 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's like this doctor with a big problem just like me 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 kids and i'm sure they think it's pretty cool. that i'm. living off the ways. of the consumer is the american.

league. so we got. a lot of fan love. can i wash arms. and then we're going to have we're going to think it's the dumpster stuff is really great. because there's such a large quantity of it can turn into a lot of bricks and i'm. proud as stuff clean i mean i know there's like and i have reason and then i wash trays and act and it's not that big

a deal it's just. a lot of more work than just when you first start heating up exactly you know you need fifteen or twenty actually just like this occasion you wake up in the morning in control and clean up the colors some strides away it's going to kill me she's going to wake up in the morning all this food to be brought rotting in my kitchen. but fennel have the strawberries 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 seen 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 scrounged out of dumpsters looking at hello that he tried to pass out of. as pretty decent

this good thing is about the fish it's good 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 that crunch show on. sand and stuff with. fairy cheese. spinach risk you from your local dumpster. and a beautiful blue orange citrus problem. to the cake. is made from and one doesn't come straight or egg whites to the strawberries are

one hundred percent. dumpster. delicious. i'm strictly law it's. the sound myself and 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 the 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 on stores 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 i locked it so the food can rot inside the dumpster sort of people getting it it's that 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 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 a little handbook for a freezer they just didn't but that's what i do you know ok. i knew i would need

a good. place here yes wow well 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 thank you don't want a lot of the same thing so i was a really nice for me to.

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 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 the website says that they prefer to talk face to face i was i'm one of on and on and. you know right now none of the stores none of my oh 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. we can go from. we

can. 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 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 locked gate and 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. but the gate is this i can respect it 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 gone.

i don't understand how i want to get upset for you stealing from. we there's the dad. so we don't lose a little bit of the cure you're still going to wait you know this is something not . been discarded and just wants to be forgotten about. you take it check that out. i don't see how that can be conceived just be criminal in any way but susan do you not think that you just let it rot i mean minds have been shipped of mexico like cheese from germany and meat from. chile i mean you just let it rot because of the plants. you get it. it's kind of. like get back to your liking i'm on

a fast. i believe that dumpster diving the 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 the i believe it's just i believe in doing it if i get caught and arrested i should be proud to say arrested for eating some of his ways i think it's just i think it's just an underling to pay the consequences for that i do it openly when when when they catch me or people cause i shake their hand and tell them what i'm doing the same way from what i do. most the time they're very from. this is part. of. the. make it so nice to write. it. is technically trespassing and it is against. the very guys

right now. that is where the conflict combs is a conflict between what i believe is just and what is legal and this like believe it is more just. going into the store and buying stuff with money but rather this is. totally different outside the system way of living. the more stores i 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 in its nearly unrestricted quantity and variety reveals a lot about us as a society i gave him a call but that's where you come to a commercial level there's been a trade and. a lot if not even a profit us you know about the law and i'm not. but the whole plight. would you waste food you thought the life. aquatic to create that. we've lost but it's but it's more prestigious oddity the fact that all of the fifty percent of all the people who get up a great power will never make it. if you happen to call it the production that went into it that way right so all it took to transport. the bird was the increase. for performing at everything else that if we were to cut our

food losses and half we would probably call placed by bucket. after my conversation with timothy jones and i went to the l.a. food during 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 ny we have a population of ten million people roughly one in every ten people are at risk of

hunger in a serious case 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 is going to come from so los angeles regional food bank through a network of nine hundred charitable agency sites you 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 i think the promise here even if we break our size a 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 coming 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 see peter 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 empires 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. karan 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 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 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 i 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 pick 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 and particular i 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 quotable hunger there are 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 and the us are actually hungry to find that saying they're just not going to do today so. they can't confirm.

the fed. to thank you six billion. 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 they interact 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. but if all this food were then unloaded and fed to pigs this will like they used to do in the old days with some 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 whang sixty pounds so one acre equals twenty four hundred pounds of wheat putting our annual food waste into acres of wheat which 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. 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 turd 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 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. i'm.