Sometimes when Jen Rustemeyer and Grant Baldwin drive by a dumpster—especially one where they used to get really good stuff—they still get the urge to stop and take a look.
Sometimes they actually stop. As Baldwin told Jasperites Dec. 15, “How can you not? What if there’s something good?”
Baldwin and Rustemeyer were in the Jasper Activity Centre Monday night to answer questions about their recent film, Just Eat It, which follows the couple as they challenged themselves to eat nothing but discarded food for six months.
The film follows their struggles and triumphs, as the couple dumpster dives for food, but also explores our culture of excess and food waste.
Early into the film, the couple points out that households throw away anywhere from 15 to 25 per cent of all their groceries.
Food Scientist Dana Gunders said in the documentary, that’s like walking out of a grocery store with four bags, dropping one and not bothering to pick it up.
As Baldwin and Rustemeyer got deeper into their project, the amount of discarded food they found around their city was staggering. The film is full of shots of dumpsters loaded with perfectly good food, still in the package, with weeks or months until it expires.
A large part of the problem, they explain, is that we live in a society of excess, where people can get the exact food they want, whenever they want. This means we won’t usually eat something that’s close to its expire date, or a little bit deformed.
Grocery stores respond to this attitude, and often throw away literal tons of perfectly edible product to meet consumer demand for fresh, perfect food.
Baldwin said the biggest realization for the couple was how much responsibility individuals have for normalizing waste.
He said when they started, he and Rustemeyer had expected to point the finger at industry as the main source of food waste. But after all of their research, they realized that households were responsible for a huge portion of the food that is thrown in the trash.
“That’s incredibly sad, but also incredibly empowering because that’s something we deal with three times a day; breakfast, lunch and dinner, you can make a decision to finish your plate,” he said.
Rustemeyer pointed out that to reduce food waste, as a society we have to get used to a little less excess. If grocery stores are going to waste less food, they need to stock a little less, this means shelves could be nearly empty at the end of the day.
As the couple pointed out in the film, people tend to think that if there’s only one or two of a product left on the shelf, something must be wrong with it.
Baldwin said that putting pressure on manufacturers and retail outlets can have a positive effect, but individual decisions at the household level can still enact major change.
“There’s so much we can still do. People come up to me all the time and say, ‘I waste nothing,’ and I’m like ‘you’re lying, because I made this movie and I’m still wasting food.’”
Baldwin and Rustemeyer’s film screening was presented by the Municipality of Jasper, Parks Canada, West Yellowhead Recycles and Talisman Energy.
Trevor Nichols
[email protected]
