Why would perfectly nice people climb into a rubbish bin to retrieve food and eat it?
I don't know if you know about freeganing but it is a thing- I'm not making it up. Some people know Freegans as Dumpster Divers. There are also Meegans- I had to look that one up. Anyhoo, it is folk that are diverting food from landfill back into the food chain.
There are oh so many reasons to get in a food dumpster and it has to start at the beginning which is a history lesson.
So agriculture and urbanism appeared approximately 10 thousand years ago roughly around the same time. This allowed cities like Rome which had about a million people to exist in the way that they did as a centralised entity with food being brought in via a chain of food production kept close to the city. Previous to this you had to live in the food belt. We were all Localvores back then my little hipsters, we had no other choice.
In fact cities were shaped by the influx of food, often literally walking into market. Just check out London's food markets like Smithfield with nearby Cow Cross Street and Turnmill St... until the advent of rail lead to the ability to slaughter your dinner anywhere and bring it from far afield.
Between then and now we have decreased the amount of farmers to the lowest amount in human history and now those people mostly spend their time in board meetings.
We have developed a relationship with food devoid of any love of food production. Mostly we make shitty food.
Now add to that 40 percent of all of the food we produce is wasted. Thats pretty fucked and somehow this bullshit leads to a billion obese people and a billion starving in our current world. Seriously.
So supermarkets throw out crap tonnes of food every day that is fit for human consumption- People like Jen and Grant of "Just Eat It" made a movie about climbing into dumpsters to retrieve that food and eat it which seems like the kind of thing you say you will do and in the cold light of day and sober sounds borderline crazy and dangerous- And that is all they ate for 6 months. This movie blew my mind.
Just Eat It: A Food Waste Story from Grant Baldwin on Vimeo.
I mentioned this to a person I was working with at a local organic shop- I say working, I was a volunteer because it was a community initiative about food security which has always interested me. I wanted to see how this stuff works up close from a logistics perspective. My workmate encouraged me to come along and go diving with her. Imagine my excitement at the invitation. I wanted to document it but turns out I couldn't bring my camera because of stuff that was happening in her life. Still I was curious so what the hell, jump on in.
We met at a train station because neither of us have cars and caught a tram together to a local Aldi.
Apparently the big supermarkets lock their bins to stop people going through them but Aldi dont.
Seems weird to me that supermarkets aren't donating their food to FareShare, Second Bite, the Asylum Seekers resource centre, any of the churches that feed people- geez really... we throw food away? Yeah we do.
We arrived at Aldi and she flipped back the lid of the dumpster, donned her gloves and began pulling out food and stuff. After the third or fourth time I time I asked "but why would they throw away that?" She said "I've been doing this for years- they throw away everything" She was pulling out child sized merino jumpers. The Asylum Seekers Resource Centre is 2 Km away. People have nothing.
There were brand new kids backpacks, fruit and veggies ensconced in more plastic wrap than I think is seemly, a packet of saffron, bike lights, cosmetics, and so much bread- there must have been 60 loaves in there. Couldn't they go to a church or a homeless shelter? I stopped waving things at her and saying it isn't even at it's best before date because it all became so meaningless. I could have cried.
I did it twice and it depressed me.
Our over production and over consumption of food, especially meat, has lead us to not value what we have.
"Meat production requires a much higher amount of water than vegetables. IME state that to produce 1kg of meat requires between 5,000 and 20,000 litres of water whereas to produce 1kg of wheat requires between 500 and 4,000 litres of water." Can I put this in perspective by telling you 10 hamburgers = 1 year of showers. So one dumpster worth of food could account for every shower you ever had in your life... then multiply every day, over thousands of shops a year.
Surely we could demand some stewardship of our food chain? Let's not fuck up everything along the way in the name of "Give me convenience or give me death."
Do we really think these unsustainable systems are going to keep serving us?
My hope is the farms of the future are high rise buildings that bring food production close to the people where they could see what they are going to eat growing in actual dirt, not limply lying in plastic trays.
I would like to see what agribusiness has stolen go back to wild places- between farms and cities there were always the bits that just belonged to the beasties... more of that.
Perhaps the gift of being able to stare at a pile of raw vegetables and know what to make of them will not being a dying art. It will be recognised as a necessary skill for living.
We could reconceptualize the way food shapes our lives, how it connects us with our environment, with the people we love and the people we don't know like oh, time immemorial.
I think I expect a lot from food. Maybe we all should.
No comments:
Post a Comment