Jeremy Seifert stumbles upon quite the find in his search for food in the dumpsters of Los Angeles, that the American food industry wastes an unfathomable amount of perfectly good food. For years Seifert has been feeding his family from the food he finds in supermarket dumpsters, and it’s not leftover scraps but rather troves of high quality produce that are tossed directly from the shelves.
Seifert’s film, “Dive! Living off America’s Waste,” presents the unsettling truth of food waste in the United States. Seifert uses his personal story, shown through amateuresque yet convincing filmwork, and little known facts to reveal this problem that has been swept out of view to the trash heaps of America. The film is a powerful statement calling for an end to the gross waste of the current practices in the food industry.
Seifert and his friends frequent the dumpsters behind supermarkets such as Trader Joe’s, Costco, Safeway, Whole Foods, and many others. If all of America’s wasted food was put on a train it would stretch coast to coast and back. As of right now, that train is headed straight to the dump and Seifert makes it know that “food makes up about 20% of landfill waste.”
Seifert uses the food he finds to feed his wife and two children but finds more than he knows what to do with in his search through dumpsters. He got a freezer just to store excess food and began donating food to homeless shelters. He also makes repeated attempts to contact the stores who throw out the food and urge them to change their policy, but none will talk to him. “96 billion pounds of food is thrown away in America every year...3,000 pounds a second.”
All of this food goes to waste, and yet “11 million people in the United States are going hungry.” Through statistical assessment, Seifert makes it blatantly apparent that this wasted food would go very far in eliminating world hunger. While Seifert was pushing these companies to give food to people who need it rather than throw it away, the world’s food crisis worsened. “A billion people in the world are starving every day.”
Although a lot of attention is placed upon the stores who throw away the food, the problem extends to farms, distributors, and households. Food is wasted everywhere along the line, and a lot of it is simply because of a lack of knowledge about whether food is edible or not. People are reluctant to eat food and stores are unwilling to donate it, because they are worried it might not be safe to consume despite it being before the already conservative expiration date.
Seifert’s film offers a refreshing take on the documentary genre. He makes no attempt to hide the fact that this is essentially a home-movie made from a handheld camera with friends and family. The lack of professional cinematography actually comes across as a strength, making Seifert’s claims more believable and grounding the viewer in reality.
The occasional camera wobble and cheap tricks such as filming from inside a shopping cart, add character to the film and make it feel more human in its deliverance. The viewer is not watching a streamline production of a multi-million dollar studio, but rather a personal enterprise made to voice the concerns of an individual who has first-hand experience with the issue.
Images of dumpsters filled to the brim with packaged food held next to images of people starving without anything to eat sends a powerful message. It urges a change in the current system and presents an irrefutable argument that this food should not go to waste. However, Seifert makes it clear that this change will not happen on it’s own, “We’re all responsible for creating a solution.”
Wednesday, May 1, 2013
"Dive!" Starts Off Strong but Splashes by the End
By Zac May
"Dive!: Living Off America's Waste" tries to present a unique insight into the culture of dumpster diving, sadly many of the non-cited facts it throws at viewers belong in the same dumpsters that the documentary was finding food in.
As Jeremy Seifert's first documentary, he directs, narrates, and produces "Dive!" but I found that he did not show much care for video or sound quality along with going along for a little bit longer than it should have.
The documentary looks to have been shot on a camera from the 90's, which surprised me when I found out that the whole thing was actually shot in 2010. A lot of the images have a bad film grain quality too them, which only worsens when you increase the video size to fit a regular television set. However, this does not matter much because many of the shots appear to be pointless. At one point in the documentary, the frame sat looking at crows sitting on a lamp post for 30 seconds while the narration talked about something completely unrelated. Other pointless shots such as random close ups of objects pervaded much of the runtime.
That is not to say that the entire documentary is unpleasing to the eye. I found some of the stop motion shots to be incredibly elaborate and a fun way to present facts, and the clips from old educational videos from the 1950's were neat to see. But when looking at "Dive" as a whole, I found that Seifert had no discernible style and that many of the shots were boring.
Not only did I find the shots lacking, but I thought most of the audio work was terrible. Anytime they did a phone interview, I struggled to hear what the person on the other line was saying, and some of these phone interviews were the crux to the points they were making. Not being able to hear them meant that those points became flimsy.
Many of the regular interviews also had poor audio quality. Sometimes it was hard to hear what someone was saying and other times the sound came off as very tinny sounding as if they recorded inside a can of Campbell's soup.
Even if I ignored the bad camera work and audio, I found that most of the content was just too boring for me. The same point through the documentary was just being hammered over and over again. Within fifteen minutes I got that Seifert felt that food was being wasted, but then I had to sit through 40 more minutes of him repeating this same fact.
Other times the people being shown came off as boring and seemingly just there to complain. At one point Seifert's wife complains that she is overwhelmed with how much food they have and this sparked by interest, but sadly they do not go into Seifert's problem with collecting too much food much further.
I also found many of the facts presented either not citing anything at all, or citing a news story instead of the proper source of the facts. One fact in particular cited Reuters which itself was citing the USDA, so I wondered why they wouldn't just cite the USDA in the first place.
With all these problems with content, I have to say that the first fifteen minutes that focused just on who was dumpster diving and how was the most interesting part of the film. I really enjoyed finding out about the weird rules this unique Los Angeles subculture has and how the operate. However, this could not save the entire documentary and by the end I found it overwhelmingly boring and tried out.
If would give Seifert's efforts a two out of five for a rating. "Dive!" starts off strong, but then rambles on for way too long with too problems with the look and audio of the whole thing.
"Dive!: Living Off America's Waste" tries to present a unique insight into the culture of dumpster diving, sadly many of the non-cited facts it throws at viewers belong in the same dumpsters that the documentary was finding food in.
As Jeremy Seifert's first documentary, he directs, narrates, and produces "Dive!" but I found that he did not show much care for video or sound quality along with going along for a little bit longer than it should have.
The documentary looks to have been shot on a camera from the 90's, which surprised me when I found out that the whole thing was actually shot in 2010. A lot of the images have a bad film grain quality too them, which only worsens when you increase the video size to fit a regular television set. However, this does not matter much because many of the shots appear to be pointless. At one point in the documentary, the frame sat looking at crows sitting on a lamp post for 30 seconds while the narration talked about something completely unrelated. Other pointless shots such as random close ups of objects pervaded much of the runtime.
That is not to say that the entire documentary is unpleasing to the eye. I found some of the stop motion shots to be incredibly elaborate and a fun way to present facts, and the clips from old educational videos from the 1950's were neat to see. But when looking at "Dive" as a whole, I found that Seifert had no discernible style and that many of the shots were boring.
Not only did I find the shots lacking, but I thought most of the audio work was terrible. Anytime they did a phone interview, I struggled to hear what the person on the other line was saying, and some of these phone interviews were the crux to the points they were making. Not being able to hear them meant that those points became flimsy.
Many of the regular interviews also had poor audio quality. Sometimes it was hard to hear what someone was saying and other times the sound came off as very tinny sounding as if they recorded inside a can of Campbell's soup.
Even if I ignored the bad camera work and audio, I found that most of the content was just too boring for me. The same point through the documentary was just being hammered over and over again. Within fifteen minutes I got that Seifert felt that food was being wasted, but then I had to sit through 40 more minutes of him repeating this same fact.
Other times the people being shown came off as boring and seemingly just there to complain. At one point Seifert's wife complains that she is overwhelmed with how much food they have and this sparked by interest, but sadly they do not go into Seifert's problem with collecting too much food much further.
I also found many of the facts presented either not citing anything at all, or citing a news story instead of the proper source of the facts. One fact in particular cited Reuters which itself was citing the USDA, so I wondered why they wouldn't just cite the USDA in the first place.
With all these problems with content, I have to say that the first fifteen minutes that focused just on who was dumpster diving and how was the most interesting part of the film. I really enjoyed finding out about the weird rules this unique Los Angeles subculture has and how the operate. However, this could not save the entire documentary and by the end I found it overwhelmingly boring and tried out.
If would give Seifert's efforts a two out of five for a rating. "Dive!" starts off strong, but then rambles on for way too long with too problems with the look and audio of the whole thing.
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