For the past few years, director Jeremy Seifert and his friends lived off scavenged trash from local grocery store dumpsters, and Seifert said he wants the rest of society to join them in this trend.
Carleton Cinema Politica dove into the alternative lifestyle with a screening of the documentary DIVE! The film – Living off America’s Waste Oct. 27 at Southam Hall.
Cinema Politica hosts biweekly film screenings which explore different subjects that resonate with the local and campus community, said organizer Rabita Sharfuddin.
“A few of us just thought it was a really neat documentary and felt that food waste isn’t really talked about,” said Sharfuddin, a third-year public affairs and policy management student. “Dumpster diving in particular remains a pretty unknown phenomenon.”
DIVE! documents Seifert and his dumpster diving crew as they try to publicize their own beliefs and indignations.
“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,” Seifert said in the film.
Seifert and his crew attempted to expose the absurdity of throwing out entire cartons of food for, say, a single bad egg in the bunch. And so, they took it for themselves, feeding their families week after week.
As far as the quality of the food goes, Seifert said he and his friends “eat much better from the dumpster than they ever have before [and] have clearly eaten like the upper class.”
Later in the film, Seifert decries food wastage given the food crisis as well as food markets. He said food markets do nothing to solve the problem, sometimes locking up their dumpsters to ensure “total waste.”
But there is a solution, and that solution is the public, according to DIVE!
A series of patriotic World War II stock footage fired off in a kaleidoscopic array. Over top the montage was a narration that insists that it’s the audience’s civic duty to stop the waste for the betterment of the country — waste that, if saved, could solve the hunger crisis in the United States three times over.
When the narrator asked who would step up to support the cause, a participant from the audience shouted out, “I will,” before quickly retracting his statement with, “Well, probably not.”
People have the power to bring change to their communities by finding an alternative, said producer Timothy Vatterott during a question and answer session with the audience following the screening.
“A shift is going to happen, and it’s going to happen because we’re going to demand it. Food isn’t just a commodity, it’s a right. It’s a human right,” he said.
The film was met with both praise and criticism. During the question and answer period, one student said the film seemed to blame food waste on a lack of respect, as opposed to the wrongful prioritization of profit.
Vatterott said the negative approach was necessary to critique a system that’s “broken.” The core of the film, he said, is looking at the importance of people being willing to do something about the problem.
Vatterott left the audience with one final piece of advice: “Eat trash.”
