Do you think we’re overweight? We’re not. We’re wasting away. Well, we are overweight, but that’s a discussion for some other day.
Look in your refrigerator. How much stuff do you stuff in it that goes bad? How much stuff in it do you throw out because it’s past the “expiration” date (which, did you know, no way indicates the food is bad)? How much food in your home do you throw out because leftovers don’t appeal to you? How much of what you stuffed in your shopping cart doesn’t hold your interest or rate your effort once you get it home?
Look at your plate -- at home or eating out. How much food gets thrown out because portion sizes are too big? Look at your supermarket shelves. How much food do they throw out because it doesn’t look as good to you as the food sitting next to it? “Sell by” and “use by” and such labels in no way indicate the food is bad. When people don’t buy such seemingly expired food, it gets tossed.
We are wasting away. It is estimated that, in the USA, we waste about 40% of our food. Forty percent! Look at our abundant lives. We have so much that we waste unfazed.
See the film “Just Eat It.” Two people decide to live for six months almost entirely on discarded food, perfectly good food that gets thrown out.
Along the way, “Just Eat It” reveals the tonnage that never makes it out of the farm fields, the tonnage of food that gets rejected – for cosmetic reasons – from assembly lines. “Just Eat It” reveals the massive deadweight hauled to landfills. As well, “Just Eat It” communicates efforts, organizations, and businesses transforming waste to good use.
While keeping this straightforward documentary personable in style, “Just Eat It” reports the bigger waste: how much precious energy and water and other resources are misappropriated into producing too much. Managing not to get too heavy about it all, “Just Eat It” relates perhaps the biggest squandering: how much virtue is wasted in the misallocation of our abundance.
