by Flack » Mon Jan 16, 2012 12:51 pm
Dive! is a 2010 documentary about people who obtain most of their food from dumpsters. We're not talking about people's fast food leftovers here; for the most part, we're talking about packaged food thrown away by grocery stores.
The filmmaker and his friends show that edible food is thrown out nightly by grocery chains. Perhaps an entire bag of potatoes might get thrown out because one is bad. Bananas get thrown out for turning brown, not for being rotten. Meat, fish, and chicken are thrown out before they go bad "just in case". So, every night, the filmmaker and his friends go dumpster diving for that day's bad food.
Throughout the film viewers are told just how delicious all this food is. One of the filmmaker's pals is a gourmet chef, who makes an admittedly delicious looking dessert from eggs and strawberries all retrieved from trash dumpsters.
There's no doubt in my mind that edible food is regularly thrown away. Smelly fish and bruised fruit won't kill you, and I have no doubt that supermarkets err on the side of cleanliness and health code violations. The documentary showed, for example, a carton of eggs thrown out because only one was broken. Wasteful? Yes.
If so much edible food is being thrown away, why aren't more people digging their groceries out of garbage dumpsters? The obvious answer is, because of the social stigma attached to doing so. The "average" person wouldn't want to admit to their peers that they raid trash dumpsters at night for their groceries instead of buying them from the local market.
And although I hate to stereotype, most of the people in this film look like people who would eat things out of trash dumpsters. They have raggedy hair, unkempt beards, ear plugs, multiple piercings and are covered in tattoos. If the filmmaker was attempting to get the average American to relate to his cause, I don't think it worked. I couldn't find anyone in the film I could relate to or wanted to be more like.
I appreciate the fact that too much food ends up in the dump, and perhaps these grocery stores could some up with an alternative to throwing all that food away -- maybe something like the "day old bread store" that my mom used to get our bread and Twinkees from. While I would agree that this country has a problem with being quick to throw things away, I'm not sure that hitting up trash dumpsters for questionable meat is the answer.
Dive! is a 2010 documentary about people who obtain most of their food from dumpsters. We're not talking about people's fast food leftovers here; for the most part, we're talking about packaged food thrown away by grocery stores.
The filmmaker and his friends show that edible food is thrown out nightly by grocery chains. Perhaps an entire bag of potatoes might get thrown out because one is bad. Bananas get thrown out for turning brown, not for being rotten. Meat, fish, and chicken are thrown out before they go bad "just in case". So, every night, the filmmaker and his friends go dumpster diving for that day's bad food.
Throughout the film viewers are told just how delicious all this food is. One of the filmmaker's pals is a gourmet chef, who makes an admittedly delicious looking dessert from eggs and strawberries all retrieved from trash dumpsters.
There's no doubt in my mind that edible food is regularly thrown away. Smelly fish and bruised fruit won't kill you, and I have no doubt that supermarkets err on the side of cleanliness and health code violations. The documentary showed, for example, a carton of eggs thrown out because only one was broken. Wasteful? Yes.
If so much edible food is being thrown away, why aren't more people digging their groceries out of garbage dumpsters? The obvious answer is, because of the social stigma attached to doing so. The "average" person wouldn't want to admit to their peers that they raid trash dumpsters at night for their groceries instead of buying them from the local market.
And although I hate to stereotype, most of the people in this film look like people who would eat things out of trash dumpsters. They have raggedy hair, unkempt beards, ear plugs, multiple piercings and are covered in tattoos. If the filmmaker was attempting to get the average American to relate to his cause, I don't think it worked. I couldn't find anyone in the film I could relate to or wanted to be more like.
I appreciate the fact that too much food ends up in the dump, and perhaps these grocery stores could some up with an alternative to throwing all that food away -- maybe something like the "day old bread store" that my mom used to get our bread and Twinkees from. While I would agree that this country has a problem with being quick to throw things away, I'm not sure that hitting up trash dumpsters for questionable meat is the answer.