Just Eat It: a Food Waste Story

A Food Waste Story, directed by a Canadian couple who sets out to determine how much of our food ends up wasted, and how our habits and ways determine what we buy, why we buy, and how long we keep it in our kitchen and fridges. The couple can only survive on food waste for six months, although they’re only allowed to eat what friends and family serve. Within the first minutes the film start to break down statistics of food waste. A new research shows that third of the world's food is not eaten and forty percent of the food we produce is being wasted. just Eat It begins with several excursions. One is when Baldwin's visit his brother to clear out his refrigerator. Baldwin was trying to see how ordinary people purchase too much food and keep too much on hand as a stay against the embarrassment of not having enough food in their refrigerator. Another is a talk with a young man who sells vegetables at a farmer's market and laments the large amount of vegetables and fruits not sold because of some flaws which make them unappealing to consumers obsessed with the aesthetic appeal of foodstuffs. People need to shift their attention to the problem and make small lifestyle changes in order to resolve that. Jen and Grant do a great job at bringing light to an issue that is constantly left in the dark.

The filmmakers appeal to pathos the most. They used many examples of pathos to draw people attention to the disgusting truth behind food waste in America. They spend weeks trash diving at grocery stores and whole food stores, asking for expired food, discarded or damaged product, they also used their family and friends to discarded food in order to survive the six months. . When I first started watching the film, I assumed that they would start looking in a random places trying to find food scraps to eat. I wasn’t prepared for the shock moment when the filmmakers would find a lot of good unopened food packages. The most alarming scene can be found on (54:00) when Grant comes across a pool sized dumpster full of unexpired hummus. Hummus is a popular food item and a good source of protein, where we can use it somewhere else instead of throwing it away. Seeing something like that wasted in such large quantities highlights the filmmakers concern with food waste and supports their argument. Jen and Grant did a good job addressing that people's view of food is mostly based on aesthetics. The discarded and unaccepted food by grocery stores are both edible and safe, the market just knows that they will not sell well. To make sure the need for change in food waste, the documentary roots a source of the problem on how we need to change our judgement of food from external to internal.

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