Dumpster Diving: Movie Analysis

Jane Goodall, British Primologist and Anthropologist said, “We haven’t inherited this planet from our parents, we’ve borrowed it from our children.” (Marx, 2014, p. 216) In the movie Dive! Jeremy Seifert levies a heavy indictment on the inhabitants of the earth, especially those of us in the United States. Based upon our current behavior; we will leave a planet to our children that they may not be able to enjoy or sustain effectively. Seifert provides a riveting, sometimes overwhelming depiction of the current state of our society through the lens of dumpster diving. Dumpster diving is the process where Seifert and his friends retrieve food from dumpsters in back alleys and garbage receptacles of Los Angeles’ supermarkets. Their dumpster diving experiment highlights the massive amounts of food that are thrown away each day. The statistics he presented were unfathomable; we throw away 96 billion pounds of food every year, 3 thousand pounds a second. This food, which in most cases is still edible, gets thrown into the …show more content…
Seifert purported on any given day at Trader Joe’s, anything with a use by or best by date for the next day would probably end up in the dumpster that evening. He shared in just one week of diving nightly, he was able to secure a year’s worth of meat. When he endeavored to talk to the store’s representative to ask why they throw away so much food when the food could be given to those in need, he was rebuffed. After numerous tries at different stores and writing countless letters, he was no closer to an answer. I know there are hungry people in my context and to hear that there are at least 35.5 million people in America who don’t know where their next meal will come from was very heartbreaking. Even more distressing was the statistic that 11 million people in the USA are going hungry and won’t get to eat on any given day. All this is happening when so much food is being thrown