Just Eat It - A Food Waste Story
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Nearly half of the food produced in America is thrown out. Even worse is that 10% of the population do not meet their daily nutritional requirements. Can one live on food rejected by a system based on wastage? Just this is what Jen Rustemeyer and Grant Baldwin set out to prove with a 6-month experiment in which they gained several pounds and saved about US$ 20,000 by collecting products near or after sell-by date, damaged or mislabeled products.
Our previous film, The Clean Bib Project had focused on zero-waste, so we were interested in what people were throwing away. We had no idea that edible food could end up in the trash can with such ease. We tried to entertain the public by informing them, our idea being that this might induce real change. We want people to leave the cinema enriched educationally but also amused. I personally draw a lot of inspiration from action movies (3D photography, special effects, speeded-up footage and so on), so we attempted to translate that type of figurative language into a documentary, a genre traditionally viewed as being arid. Spectators, from adults to six-year-old kids, were thrilled by the result.
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About the Movie Just Eat It - A Food Waste Story
Jen and Grant, cineastes and food lovers, take on the question of food waste, from agricultural production though retail sales to their own fridge. When they realize how many billions of dollars’ worth of good food is thrown away every year in North America, they pledge to stop shopping for food and to survive only on food that has been discarded. Images of wasted food are, at once, shocking and oddly engrossing. The couple’s enterprise leads them not only to salvage food but also to embark on an investigation whose outcomes are bewildering. Through interviews with TED lecturer Tristram Stewart, food waste expert Dana Gunders and acclaimed author Jonathan Bloom, Just Eat It puts our obsession with sell-by dates and aesthetically perfect food products, revealing how apparently insignificant behavior can generate devastating consequences the world over.
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Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the Creative Europe Media Program. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.