"Every year in America, we throw away 96 billion pounds of food," "263 million pounds a day, 11 million pounds an hour," "3,000 pounds a second." "# Lord, I can't help my love" "# To wake her up again" "# Whatever you can't lose" "# It ain't yours in the end" "# Wish I could hold her hand" " Yeah!" "Lemons and limes!" "Nearly a billion people in the world... are going 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 diving." "Rule number one:" "never take more than you need, unless you find it a good home." "Rule number two:" "the first ones to the dumpster has first dibs, but you always got to share." "And rule number three:" "you leave it cleaner than you le... than you, um, found it." "You leave it cleaner than you found it." "Does that sound 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, 43 to 45 degrees, which is good, because it keeps all the meat and stuff cold when it's been dumped." "Here's the meat." "No antibiotics ever." "No added hormones ever." "Free range." "It's good meat." "All of these perfectly good eggs because one was cracked." "Didn't even get all over the other ones." "Just threw them all away." "This is what they are doing with everything." "They have bags of avocados." "One goes bad, they throw the entire bag of avocados out." "Apples, oranges, everything... they're just tossing it for no good reason." "They're all good." "These are all good eggs." "Look, mountain cheese from the German Alps." "I eat much better out of the dumpster than I ever have before." "It started two years ago, and we have clearly eaten like the upper class." "It makes me queasy." "Are you taking anything?" "Yeah, I'm taking some stuff." "But I only take stuff that's double bagged." "Oh, what doesn't kill you only makes you stronger." "I'm getting meat for my own consumption at home and for my baby shower tomorrow." "From the dumpster at 1:00 a.m. this morning... 3:00 p.m. this afternoon, on the grill." "I think I'm gonna have a pretty healthy kid." "We're not making a public announcement to everyone telling them exactly where their food came from, just like we wouldn't tell them that we went to Vons or Ralphs to get their food." "But I would say most of our friends are aware of the fact that we get all of our food in the dumpster, and they think it's pretty cool." "Living off the waste of the consumerism of America." "Good day, sunshine" "# Good day, sunshine" "# I love her" "Mmm." "Yum, yum, yum." "So we got blueberries last night, a lot of blueberries, and Finn loves blueberries." "We're gonna wash them, and then we're gonna 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 we have to sort through everything, throw out the bad stuff, clean everything." "There's, like," "I don't know, 12 packages of strawberries in there that now I need to wash and freeze and cut, and it's not that big of a deal, but it's just a lot of more work" "than just going to the grocery store and picking up exactly the amount that you need." "15 or 20 packages like this." "Occasionally I wake up in the morning and kind of dread the cleanup that follows the dumpster dives." "My wife's gonna kill me." "She's gonna wake up in the morning, and all this food's gonna be..." "Rotting in your living room." "Rotting in my kitchen." "But Finn will have a lot of 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 is 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 Alfonso," "a professional chef, would cook up gourmet dishes from food we had just scrounged out of dumpsters." "Look at that!" "The tri-tip asada." "That's pretty decent." "This, not good." "Yeah, I don't think fish." "This, no good." " I don't know about the fish." " Oh, it's good." "It's still cold." "The chicken was looking a little funky, a little, like, purplish." "Food makes up about 20% 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" "stuffed with feta cheese and spinach rescued from your local dumpster..." "The cake is made from one dozen dumpster egg whites, and the strawberries are 100% dumpster... and delicious." "Dumpster delight." "Thank you very much." "I found myself wandering 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 or 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 that the food is bad." "They're just overly cautious dates for absolute freshness and protection from possible lawsuits." "I dreaded more locked dumpsters, which seemed to be a growing trend to keep dumpster divers out and ensure total waste." "This is the Trader Joe's we've been at many, many, many times, and they locked it so the food can then rot inside the dumpster instead of people getting it." "That's-that's smart." "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, and I- we only took this much because we didn't want it to go to waste, but I, like-it's, like, almost 2:00 in the morning," "and I don't have anywhere to put it, really." "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." "There are so many, like- s handbook for a freezer." "I thought you just plugged it in, but..." "Well, that's what I did, and it's been fine." "Okay." "I would rather donate it to your good cause." "What?" "This is..." "Yeah." "Yeah." "Are you serious?" " Yeah, no, I'm serious." " Wow." " Whoa." " Thank you." "Anyway, we got it in the garage." " For free." " For free." "Donated." "In just over a week of nightly diving, we had a year's supply of meat." "So the freezer is totally filled up." "There's just a little layer of some bread and stuff, just-not because I didn't find enough meat, just because I was just tired of meat." "You get kind of picky, like, you don't want a lot of the same thing, so there's a really nice variety of meats in there." "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." "Okay, so here we are at Trader Joe's, uh, Saturday afternoon." "I'm gonna 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 just..." "I'm, I'm..." "We're also not allowed to comment on anything in front of the camera." " You know how it is." " Right." "So none of the stores" "None of them will talk to you." "He's gonna give me the card for the place I 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..." " No problem." " I'm Jeremy." " Nice to meet you." " Thank you." " You bet." " No problem." "No." "They won't talk to me." "Company policy." "No interviews." "Nope." "No interview." ""Oall 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 at a 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 want me to get into it, so..." "But it's... the dumpster's not locked, though." "But the gate is." "I can respect that." "Because what if they locked this one... because there's back stock and they don't want people getting into the unused back stock?" "I'm going." "I'm going in." "Some help?" "Yeah." "I don't understand how anyone could get upset for you stealing trash." "Lemon, limes, and, like" "Oh, wait." "There's the bad one." "That's the only bad lime I've seen in the whole bunch, though." "You're stealing the waste, you know." "This is something that has been discarded and just wants to be forgotten about, and you-you take it." "Oheck that out." "I don't see how that can be conceived as being criminal in any way." "But seriously, do you not..." "do you not take this food?" "Do you just let it, like, rot?" "I mean, limes that have been shipped up from Mexico, and, like, cheese from Germany, and meat from, you know, Ohile," "I mean, do you just let it rot because there's a fence, or do you get it?" "Well... um, it's-it's kind of..." "I..." "I'll get back to you on that." "I can't- I'm not a fast thinker." "I believe that..." "that dumpster diving is civil disobedience." "It's 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 law." "But I believe it's just;" "I believe in doing it." "If I get caught and arrested, I'd be proud to say" "I got arrested for eating somebody's 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 they catch me or people come, I shake their hand," "I tell them what I'm doing," "I say where I'm from," "I say what I do with my life." "And most of the time, they're very friendly." "This is private property." "So there's, like, trespassing issues." "But if you guys are cleaning up and you guys are preparing to leave..." "Oh, we will." "I swear to God." " How much longer?" " About ten minutes." "Five?" "I'll make it five." "You guys have a nice day." "Thank you." " All righty." " Nice to meet you." "My name is Paul." "It is technically trespassing, and it is against the law." "Good night." " Thanks, Jeremy." " Good night." "Thanks, guys." "We're heading out." "Thank you." "Good night." "That is where the conflict comes, is the conflict between what I believe is just and what is legal." "And this lifestyle, I believe, 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 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." "In his 16 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." "The next level you come to is a commercial level." "There isn't even any training in reducing food loss." "It's not even a concept." "It's not in their manuals, you know, about reducing food loss." "And I'm not putting them down." "I'm simply saying, it runs through the whole society." "They're just no different than anybody else." "When you waste food, you're throwing away life, because it took life to be able to create that food, and we've lost that." "It's more perceived as a commodity, just like an automobile or something else." "50% of all the food that's up and ready to harvest never makes it into somebody's stomach." "And if you waste half that food, all of the production that went into it is wasted, right?" "So all it took to transport it and to grow it- the fertilizers, the increased soil degradation from the farming, and everything else- that if we were to cut our food losses in half, we would probably reduce our total overall pollution rates" "by about 10%." "After my conversation with Timothy Jones," "I went to the L.A. Foodbank, the second largest of its kind in the country." "Since nearly all donated food from grocery stores goes through the food bank," "I hoped 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 10 million people." "About one in every ten people are at risk of hunger in Los Angeles County." "So 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 the Los Angeles Regional Foodbank, through a network of about 900 charitable agency sites, we reach about 674,000 of those people." "So there's still, you know, over 1/3 of those people that we're not reaching." "So that's-that's how big the problem is here." "Even a food bank of our size- 100,000-square-foot facility distributing 34 or 35 million pounds a year- is 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 falling through the cracks, and that shouldn't happen in this country." "We export billions of pounds of food to other countries too, on top of what we keep here, and we're still not making food available to everybody here in America, which is kind of a sad state of affairs, isn't it?" "Could these vast empires of food be part of the solution?" "Many of them already were." "Almost every major grocery store is on the L.A. Foodbank's 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." "Darren told me that the L.A. Foodbank is short 11 million pounds of food every year." "If the entire country throws out 96 billion pounds of food every year, what about just Los Angeles County?" "I'm gonna 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 24 billion pounds of trash." "According to the EPA, 12% of that is food waste." "That means we throw away 2,880,000,000 pounds of food." "Saving just 1% of L.A.'s food waste would equal nearly 30 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 were 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 15-minute drive from my house." "But I was a bearded, mangy dumpster diver and thought I better clean up before talking with sophisticated businesspeople about policy changes in their companies." "The haircut and the shave and the tie did absolutely nothing for me." "We didn't have the camera rolling or anything." "We just walked in, and I asked to speak with someone, and they said," ""We're gonna have to ask you to leave," ""because you can't be asking questions about Trader Joe's."" "I can write a letter to the OEO of Trader Joe's, which I will do." "We're picking on Trader Joe's because they happen to be the best store to dumpster dive at, so we know we've pulled a lot of food out of their dumpsters in 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 end global hunger." "There are hungry people in the U.S." "I'd say there are about 351/2 million people in the U.S. who are food insecure." "And that's a silly phrase, but let's say 351/2 million people in the U.S." "don't know where their next meal is coming from." "But about 11 million people in the U.S." "are actually going hungry, and let's define that by saying, they're just not gonna eat today, simple as that." "They can't get food." "So, Finn, can you count to 96 billion?" "1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6..." "Numbers in the millions and billions are hard to imagine and can feel meaningless without a way to picture them." "So what does 96 billion pounds of food look like?" "It's impossible to accurately measure 96 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, consumes seven pounds of grain to produce one pound of meat." "So a pound of wasted meat actually represents seven pounds of food waste." "But if we stick to the lower estimate of 96 billion pounds, what does that amount of food look like on a freight train?" "The average boxcar can hold up to 211,000 pounds of cargo." "If you filled each one to capacity, you would need 453,257 boxcars." "That's a train long enough to stretch from Los Angeles to New York Oity and all the way back." "What if all this food were then unloaded and fed to pigs as swill, like they used to do in the old days with food scraps?" "A 3-pound piglet needs an average of 30 pounds of food per week to reach its massive 265-pound slaughter weight in five months." "Redirecting our annual food waste into grateful pigs' mouths would raise 120 million piglets into massive hogs, producing enough meat to give everyone on the planet three pounds of pork." "But meat is costly to produce, both financially and for the environment, and at 222 pounds of meat per person per year in the U.S., we have far exceeded what is healthy and sustainable for the planet." "So instead, what would 96 billion pounds of wheat look like?" "On average, one acre produces 40 bushels of wheat, each bushel weighing 60 pounds, so one acre equals 2,400 pounds of wheat." "Putting our annual food waste into acres of wheat would total 40 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 600 miles from our southern shores to the tiny country of Haiti." "With our 96 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, 25% of children are chronically malnourished, reduced to eating mud cakes made from dirt, salt, vegetable shortening, and filthy water to curb their hunger pains." "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 exists 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 surrounding 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." "Here's my letter to Dan Bane, the OEO of Trader Joe's." "I've also included a copy of the Good Samaritan Act, which was signed into being in 1996 by Bill Clinton, and that encourages grocery stores to donate food, and it protects them from being sued." "So I'm just asking him to consider moving Trader Joe's into the next step of simply not wasting as much food and getting it to people who need it." "I figured the OEO of Trader Joe's probably wouldn't get back to me after one letter, so I've decided to send him a letter a day for the next month." "A letter went out to TJ's OEO, Dan Bane, every morning, and we continued diving as normal." "Time passed." "Dumpsters swelled with food." "And then suddenly, the landscape changed." "We began seeing more people at the dumpsters, and not your typical divers, people that seemed to need the food a lot more than we did." "As I waited to hear back from Trader Joe's about all the food in their trash cans, the world spiraled into a food crisis." "It ain't like you try" "# And talking ain't revealing" "# Lord, I wait" "# For the crows to flock" "# Looking into your smile" "# You reach into your soul to say" "# Sing to sleep" "# My fears and doubt" "# Big black crows" "# Oalling home" "# Big black crows" "# Oalling" "After sending letters for two weeks," "I got a call from the Trader Joe's headquarters." "Allison from public relations asked me to stop sending letters and to please stop bothering them." "They would not be discussing wasted food or anything else with me." "When I insisted on a simple conversation as a concerned citizen- no cameras or interview" "Allison hung up on me." "She said, and I quote, "Just so you know," ""in our communities in which we have stores," ""we do donate food that we feel is safe to donate" ""seven days a week in all our stores across the country."" "So I guess the problem is, they don't feel that all this food is safe to eat." "Of the 30 stores I called, 95% throw away everything except for bread." "So the dairy, the produce, the meat" "I guess they don't feel is safe to consume, even though they throw it away the day before it expires." "I guess these bananas aren't edible." "That's why they threw them away." "Trader Joe's shouldn't be singled out." "It's just one company among many." "Ralphs, Vons, Safeway, Whole Foods," "Costco, Sam's Club, and many others throw away staggering amounts of food every day." "But stores are only part of the problem of food waste." "All of us throw out perfectly good food on a daily basis." "We let it rot in our refrigerators." "We toss leftovers because they don't sound good, or we're afraid because we don't know enough about food to judge whether or not it's edible." "Wasting food is a bad habit that permeates all of society, implicating all of us in the problem, which means we're all responsible for creating a solution." "Of the total amount of food loss going on, about 40% is in the household." "Overall a typical household of four loses about $600 in food a year." "What we saw was, among younger people, let's say under 30 years of age, was this complete lack of understanding of food." "They don't know what food has gone bad." "They're scared of food." "This half is bad, I think, right here." "These eggs bring up a good point about, uh, a little bit about food safety here." "I have never been sick eating dumpster food." "My family has never been sick." "And I have to be really careful." "I'm feeding a small child trash, essentially." "Um, so you start learning more about food." "We don't know exactly when these eggs were thrown out, and you can't... you can't really smell an egg to know if it's good or bad." "So I researched it, and what you do is, you take the egg, and you get a bowl of cold water, and you drop it in, and if it sinks to the bottom and lays flat," "it's perfectly good." "And if it angles up, it's a little bit better for baking, and if it floats, it's terrible." "So these eggs are "Enjoy by November 19."" "Today is October 21st, so I'm not sure why they threw these away, but we'll test them and make sure they're good." "It's really slim pickings." "There's so much food, but it's all buried underneath this mountain of trash." "It's all crushed." "So basically I have breakfast for the family, eggs and toast for about a week." "People kept telling me about the issue of logistics, how there's enough food available, but the difficulty of storing it and transporting it to needy people make wasting food more practical." "Do you food waste?" "Or do you have an idea of loading the bread?" "No doubt, there are real complexities, but my son Finn solved the problem quite easily." "Pick up the food, then take it to hungry people." "But this requires people caring and volunteering." "The public will and political will to end hunger is not great enough." "If people cared enough to make this a huge priority in our policy work, then we could end hunger in the U.S." "I mean, not overnight but, I mean, pretty rapidly." "Here's what I want to know:" "I mean, what kind of society wastes this much food?" "The kind of society that would waste this amount of food is one that doesn't value the Earth and the products it produces." "It's in our own personal detriment to continue the process." "Do we value the Earth?" "Do we value all that it produces?" "Have we lost our connection to creation?" "Do we see its beauty, its fragility?" "Do we care for it, for all that comes from it?" "Do we nurture it, appreciate it?" "Has it become just another product for us to consume?" "I just finished some potato leek soup made from ingredients from the dumpster..." "And some eggs from the dumpster." "You got it from the dumpster." "I don't know if dumpster diving and eating food from the dumpster has made me value food more or value food less, because it's easier now to throw food away, because we have so much of it." "And so part of me," "I think that I'm valuing the food even less." "But you can't waste anything." "You can't waste food, Dad." "I know." "I don't want to waste food." " Do you want to waste food?" " No." "I don't want to waste food either." "It's not fair, but you can eat eggs." "You can eat it for lunch." "I... that's what I'm talking about." "Eat it for lunch." "No, you eat it for lunch." " No, you eat it for lunch." " No." "Don't waste it." "You got to eat it." "So today is New Year's Eve, and I'm working on a little plan." "I got the idea on Ohristmas Eve when I went dumpster diving." "So tomorrow is Ohristmas, the 25th." "They've thrown this away two days early because the store is closed tomorrow." "There is hundreds of dollars of meat here, tons of bread, tons of salad." "Why wouldn't they at least attempt to give this food to the food banks?" "The stores are all closed tomorrow too, so tonight there'll be twice as much food again." "The plan was really ingenious." "My son Scout actually thought of it." "I would try going through the front door instead of scavenging through dumpsters." "I just talked to the Trader Joe's on Arroyo, one of the ones we dumpster dive at, and they said I could come by tonight at 6:00 p.m." "when the store closes and pick up all the food." "So maybe that's better than jumping in their dumpster." "So that one Trader Joe's gave us six grocery carts full of food, and if I wouldn't have called them today, that would have been in the dumpster tonight." "We were taking the food to the Salvation Army's Bell Shelter, southeast of downtown L.A." "This is the Bell Shelter, down there." "Here we are." "The shelter is a halfway house offering long-term treatment for substance abuse and mental illnesses." "They provide room, board, and treatment to 450 people." "Hey, is this the Salvation Army?" "Yes." "Yeah?" "Okay." "Thank you." "We should have had ten truckloads of food, but many of the Trader Joe's I had called didn't want to take the time, and a Whole Foods store backed out at the last minute." "Sandra, the lead cook, told me that getting enough food is a constant struggle, especially as the county's economic crisis deepened." "Hi, my name is Sandra Martin." "I am the lead cook for the Salvation Army Bell Shelter's kitchen." "We supply breakfast, lunch, and dinner for about 450 people a day." "If we wouldn't have picked up this food tonight at Trader Joe's, it would have gone in their dumpster?" "It would have." "Is it better for you to get it?" "It's better for us to get it." "Hey, thank you, guys, all right." "All right." "Good night." "You got us on the news, or what?" "Yeah, Happy New Year's, bro." "Happy New Year's to you, bro." "Thank you very much for coming, okay?" " Happy New Year's, sir." " God bless you." "We all felt pretty good." "The night had been successful, though on a very small scale." "Approaching individual stores had worked much better than going to corporate headquarters." "But saving perishable food requires organization and work, and it's difficult convincing stores to give more than bread and dented cans." "Most of the time, wasting food is just easier." "Five, four, three, two, one..." "I'm at one of the Trader Joe's that told me that I couldn't pick up food because they were giving it to someone else tonight." "And I looked in this one dumpster and just pulled out this bag." "Those are all $15 broiler chickens." "All expire tomorrow." "I see a lot more food down below, but there's tons of nasty, sticky garbage." "But I think there's a lot of food in that dumpster, so we could have taken that to the Bell Shelter tonight too." "We weren't always like this." "There was a time when we viewed food as something precious." "Much more than a commodity, food was life itself, the center of community, culture, and home." "To throw it away would have been unimaginable." "Our grandparents and great grandparents lived the virtues of "Waste not, want not"" "and demonstrated the proper etiquette necessary to join the ranks of the Clean Plate Club." "In that era, saving food was presented as part of the war effort, and to do otherwise would be unpatriotic." "Using food wisely and being aware of waste became second nature to a generation that had firsthand experience with world war, economic downturn, and food scarcity." "In both World War I and World War ll, the emerging might of American industrial and manufacturing power was bent toward the war effort and, consequently, to feeding the troops." "In a world where millions are starving," "America has become the breadbasket as well as the arsenal of democracy." "Our farmlands and ranges must produce more food than ever before to supply our own needs and to help our fighting Allies." "With science at his service and the greatest food-producing country in the world backing him up, the American soldier, no matter where he may be- in the jungle, in the Arctic, in the desert, or in his home camp" "can rightly consider himself the best-fed soldier in the world." "And in the future, the war-born knowledge that has made him so, when spread over the world, can guarantee that no one on Earth need suffer from malnutrition or from hunger." "Ironically, the advances in reducing food waste and increasing production through new food science, efficient packaging and distribution laid the foundation for modern agribusiness and ultimately, a broken food system that wastes 1/2 of all that it produces." "Food has often been linked to war and its accompanying imagery." "Napoleon Bonaparte's famous quote," ""An army marches on its stomach,"" "found its World War I iteration with," ""Food is ammunition." "Don't waste it", part of a massive campaign to educate citizens to conserve food for the war and to raise awareness that individual consumption had an effect on a global scale." "Much of the war propaganda of the day urged people to buy local, fresh, and seasonal food;" "to plant edible victory gardens;" "to eat less meat and more veggies;" "to raise chickens for eating food scraps and providing eggs;" "to can, preserve, and dry excess food for the coming months." "And not only were people urged to clean their plates;" "there was less on them to begin with." "Largely due to the war rationing, portion sizes were much smaller, and people were urged to eat a varied diet of whole, healthy foods rather than consume oversized portions with little or no nutritional value." "Although our tastes and habits have changed, many of the ideals embraced by our great grandparents' generation haven't." "The language of the past may be couched in war terminology, but the parallels between that time and ours abound." "We are experiencing a new resurgence of the same type of consciousness that existed then, the main difference being that now it's happening on a grass roots level." "The rise of edible gardens in urban environments, an increased emphasis on sustainable living, a growing trend of keeping backyard chickens, and a widespread shift towards buying organic, seasonal, and local products all directly reflect the fundamental principle" "that food is precious." "Food is not ammunition." "Food is life, and it should never be wasted." "And if saving good food is a value that resonates deeply in our national character, shouldn't the establishments that provide us with food reflect that value?" "And shouldn't we be practicing it in our homes and communities as well?" "Wastefulness now seems to be a defining factor among the wealthy nations of the world, with very few exceptions." "In the U.K., over 18 billion pounds of food is thrown out by households every year." "And the European Union wastes nearly 200 billion pounds of food annually." "But we don't have to waste food." "This is one simple thing that we can change, the impact of which will reverberate throughout the entire planet." "We are on our way to a food bank called God Provides." "I discovered them when I was trying to pull off the New Year's Eve truckload of food to the Bell Shelter, and these guys apparently pick up food from a lot of Trader Joe's stores and a lot of other grocery stores." "So they're doing exactly what needs to happen." "Food that would go to the dumpsters, they're getting it to people who need it." "God Provides hands out over 11 million pounds of food every year." "They serve 4,000 families, up from 600 just a few years ago." "Primarily we get our food from a fresh rescue program with Trader Joe's, Albertsons, Vons." "Trader Joe's was the first really big chains to really jump ship from being afraid to give the food away." "Thank goodness to Bill Clinton, passed the Good Samaritan Act." "When it's really close to the expiration dates, we're able to freeze it, which time-locks the expiration dates." "We freeze all the yogurt and dairy and food." "If you guys didn't pick up that food and you didn't have that set up, that food would most likely go into the dumpster?" "Yes, and if we're not on time, if we're a few hours late, it's in the dumpster." "Most families, we give them so much food by cases of produce, that we tell them that," ""We hope we give you so much food, you have to go" ""next to your neighbor that you don't talk to and give them some food."" "God Provides opened me up... to the good some grocery stores are doing." "Four Trader Joe's stores contribute every day, as well as many Albertsons, which I learned is a leader in food waste reduction with its nationwide Fresh Rescue program, a simple program that could easily be imitated by all grocery companies." "We also experienced firsthand how hard the work is." "Without volunteers, none of this food would be rescued and redistributed to people who really can't live without it." "We have to help each other." "That's what we're here for:" "to help everybody." "And if everybody kind of took that attitude, you know, I think we'd be much better." "Sometimes I wish we could take back all of this waste, that trash cans and dumpsters and landfills would give up their food to those who really need it, that we could erase all the damage of our bad habits." "But I know that's impossible." "We can't go backwards." "The problem won't conveniently solve itself either." "We have to move forward creatively, start living differently so that everyone has a chance to live fully." "It's about more than not wasting food;" "it's about making sure everyone has enough to eat." "Clearing our plates is a good place to start, but it's not going to put food in hungry mouths or stop massive waste in grocery stores or throughout the food industry." "Noam Ohomsky said, "Ohanges in progress" ""very rarely are gifts from above." ""They come out of struggles from below." "The answer to what's next depends on people like you."" "It's a messed-up world, but it's the only one we've got, and we have to wake up and start carving out" "Maybe we can begin to help create a world for our children and their children and their children, a world where all of creation and all of life is sacred and beautiful and valued for what it is." "All I'm gonna say, Jeremy, is, ever since you started this documentary, the dumpster diving has been terrible." "Thanks, bro." "# Feel the sun pouring down" "# Oh, my love" "# Feel the sun" "# Pouring down" "# Blood and fire" "# Feel the sun" "# Pouring down" "# Oh, my love" "# Come on" "# Come by my side" "# Come on"