Just Eat It: A Food Waste Story

Filmmaking couple Rustemeyer and Baldwin previously entered into a competition with one another in : who can produce less trash? Carrying on the theme, the couple now turn their lenses on food waste. According to one of the experts in their film, a quarter of all our grocery shopping ends up in the garbage. In an attempt to rescue all that wasted food, the filmmakers try to live for six months from food that has been thrown away. Along the way, they naturally come face to face with many different aspects of this problem. Sometimes they find shockingly large quantities while dumpster diving – more than they could possibly eat. So they learn to cook using just the things that really need to be used up, and they give the rest to their friends. Both the found produce and the beautifully presented meals they prepare are photographed in detail, so that they can then make a graphical presentation of the scale of the problem. Waste during food production and in supermarkets is represented in a number of ways. For example, we see in a time-lapse sequence how a pepper plant grows from a seed, and then the pepper, having been processed in the factory and transported to a store, as it lies rotting in a refrigerator.