Environment | Live. Learn. Love. Eat.

Since yesterday was such a cold and miserable day, we ended up watching a documentary that I have been wanting to see for a long time now called Dive. This is a documentary by Jeremy Seifert about how much food we waste and how unnecessary our wasting is. He feeds his family with the perfectly good food that he finds in dumpsters. America produces 96 billion pounds of food waste a year. 263,000,000 a day. 11, 000, 000 pounds per hour. 3000 pounds per second. And nearly a billion people are going hungry everyday.

This is something that I feel strongly about. It just does not seem fathomable that this can actually be going on every single day on the same planet. In the film it is mentioned that if more people were to care, that is the only way that we will ever see change. The problem is not that people do not know that they are being wasteful, rather it is that most people simply do not care.

In our home we do our best to never waste. If we have leftovers, we save them and eat them later. I also freeze a lot of food as well as share it. We use cloth diapers in place of disposable ones, take our own bags with us to the stores when we shop and we recycle everything that we can. Still, I am aware that I can do so much more. As I mentioned in my thinking post last weekend, I feel saddened by how much we as a nation consume and how much we waste. It seems that we are mostly living only to gratify our senses and desires, looking out only for ourselves without giving a thought to the results of our actions or concerning ourselves with the constant harm and pollution that we are causing to our planet – the planet that we are leaving to our children and our children’s children.

I love the heartlessness of this documentary and the way that Jeremy awakens us to just how unnecessary all of this waste is. He shares his personal journey and how he desires to make a difference in our world. He reminds us also that although we do not have much control over how much the larger grocery stores waste, we do have control over our personal waste. Even being aware of the statistics and how much waste actually goes into our food during production and transportation is sure to get you thinking about how you can waste less and in what ways you can change your diet to cause less waste. The food behind the food.

For an idea on the food behind the food check out the following links

“The kind of society that would waste this much food is one that doesn’t value the earth and the products it produces.”

What kind of society are we?

I have included the trailer for the documentary below and you can download the full documentary on the site Dive! as well as check out other ways you can help.