Freegans

I like this story and what these folks are doing, even if you won’t find Kris and me diving anytime soon.

A new documentary about food waste could dampen grocery chain Trader Joe’scrunchy image.

“Dive” illustrates the waste of wholesome food by following a group of “Dumpster divers,” people who mine trash bins for usable products. In the film, the divers are not homeless or even particularly poor; they just don’t like to see good food go to waste, and they like to get stuff for free.

“In the United States, even our trash cans are filled with food; you just have to go get it,” director Jeremy Seifert says during the film’s opening sequence.

The “freegan” divers – Seifert, his wife, Jennifer, and a bunch of their friends – discover large quantities of fresh meat, vegetables and fruit in bins behind a couple of Trader Joe’s stores in the Los Angeles area. Seifert is appalled that so much food that is not spoiled and not past its freshness date is being discarded.

But Seifert says the target of his film is wastefulness, not Trader Joe’s.

“In our consumerism we‘ve become wasteful,” he told CNN. “And I try to bring it back on us because of the food waste in the home.”

A typical household of two adults and two children loses $600 in food per year through spoilage and mishandling, University of Arizona professor Timothy Jones estimates.

Still, “I don’t get mad at people when they don’t think about food waste, because I didn’t think about food waste,” said Seifert, 34, who holds a master’s degree fromFuller Theological Seminary.

“I didn’t think about food waste until I started eating trash.”