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Last Thursday, I had the opportunity to attend a screening of the award-winning documentary, Dive!: Living off America’s Waste (Amazon afflilate link), with the director/writer, Jeremy Seifert in attendance, hosted by the Blanton Musuem and Capital Area Food Bank. Seifert did a wonderful job with his first documentary that I’ve found myself telling everyone I’ve had a conversation with about the experience.
Jeremy Seifert takes us along his journey on feeding his family healthy and safe meals with the food he salvages from Trader Joe’s dumpsters. Saving hundreds of dollars on groceries, he starts to explore the culture of waste in America. As a country, we throw out 96.5 billion pounds of food per year, half of what we produce. 19 percent of our fuel consumption is spent on the food industry. 1 out of 6 Americans are “food insecure,” meaning they do not know the what, when, or where of their next meal. You put just those stats side by side to each other and it paints a very heartbreaking story.
How did we get here? We throw out half the food we produce while other countries are feeding on dirt pies, pies literally made from dirt to assuage hunger pains. We throw out half the food we produce while we have masses of people in our own country who do not when they’ll be eating next. The documentary explores what we can do personally to help fix our part of the mess. It really starts at home. Another stat offered from the film: the average household throws out 600 dollars of food a year. The call to action isn’t really to go to your nearest dumpster and start diving, but to waste less and start asking more from our grocery stores and policymakers.
I urge you to take the time and watch Dive!, and then take an honest look at how you view food in your own home.
Check out Captial Area Food Bank’s blog post about this event for more tips from the panelists.
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