0:00  
I think the best dumpster dive day was when I got like five cases of spaghetti sauce ingredients and just like rocked out at home. I probably made spaghetti sauce till like three in the morning. It was like what was their frickin problem?

0:22  
Hello, my name is Julianna Perkins and you're listening to Dumpster Divers Anonymous. Today, we'll hear from a regular diver, a documentary filmmaker who lived off rescued food for six months, and a former grocery store employee. We'll also take you out in the field to find out what I found last week, get ready to dive in.

0:45  
I'm Tracy TF. And this is this is my store an area's natural health apothecary. I'm a certified natural health practitioner and an activist. I don't know how it started, I think I always thought it was a terrible idea to waste anything. I just have this lifelong ethic of not wanting to waste food. What do people do when they had a harvest all at once? How did they manage to keep food throughout the year? But I've never been satisfied by something packaged in the grocery store, I'm more curious than that. I guess I don't want to out my dumpster because it's such a good dumpster. But this store throws things out a few days ahead of the expiry day. And the foods are completely sealed in their original packaging. Their best before dates have often not expired at all and they'll be throwing cases of mango out, cases and cases and cases of bananas. Most of the food at this boutique place that I dumpster dive at is certified organic. I find out pretty soon whether people are against it or disgusted by it and it becomes a little hard to get along with people to feel like food snobs to me. I mean, there's no difference if five minutes ago it was on the shelf for 4.29 and now it's in a box in a dumpster, and it's free.

2:06  
My name is Jenny Rustemeyer, and I'm the producer and subject of the film, Just Eat It: A Food Waste Story. The film came about because we had originally done a film about waste and recycling. And it was a similar kind of genre where we did an experiment. Then we just wanted to research a little bit more and once we heard those statistics, like 30% of food gets wasted, it just seems so big that you almost want to see it for yourself. So the rule is pretty simple, we just had to eat exclusively rescued food for originally it was one month, but then Grant continued to six. So we did six months exclusively rescued food. We assigned a dollar value to the amount of food that we brought into our house, and it was about $20,000 over six months. So that's obviously way more food than we would normally buy. And that was partly due to the fact that we found a lot of really expensive items. So my feeling when I'm purchasing a dumpster is complete embarrassment. There's a real stigma around food waster and I can't get over it. But when you look in and you see the amount of food that's there, like it's exciting. So it's like this mix of excitement, and then extreme despair. Sometimes we felt pressured, like we wanted to save it all. Because you know, if you don't take it, then like it's gone. Nobody else is gonna save it you're the last stop. And then we kind of had to get over it because it's just there's too much food out there, like you can't possibly save it all.

3:32  
I feel guilty all the time because I'm a mother. But when it comes to food, I feel righteous getting it out of the dumpster. When I met Karma Food Co Op where I actually buy my food, I often buy the sad produce, that's one third off, because I explicitly feel sorry for food that doesn't get eaten. Like I just think it just took so much energy to make that broccoli, you know, it's a little yellow on the ends, like someone needs to eat it. So like even if I would like rather get the completely fresh one, I will out of guilt get the sad vegetables.

4:10  
My name is Joe Scrozzo I work for the OTI department in FCAD. So when I was a student at Ryerson, I worked at a grocery store for about a year and a half. It was a big chain in Vaughan. I worked in the produce department and from what I remember my specific role was all the fresh produce. I helped prepare it and we put it out on display and all that sort of thing. There were quite a few incidences where it was, for lack of a better word employee laziness that was creating waste. And then there was some sort of policies that would create waste. Fresh fruit platters, for example, those would be created daily. So they want to limit how much they would make so that at the end of the day, there's not a lot of waste, but inevitably there'd be several platters that don't get sold. What would happen is, this is kind of backwards thinking the management would think if they allowed employees to eat it, or if they allowed it to be donated, that someone would over make things and waste company money. So instead of, you know, finding a happy medium, they just said anything extra that's created, even if it's edible has to go into the garbage. I would say within a day, there was probably a few dozen big blue bins full like quite a bit.

5:28  
The number of times that we found things that were thrown out for reasons that most people on the street would be like, that is dumb. Like there was an error in the print on the package and there's nothing wrong with the food inside. Like, it just seems so incredibly wasteful. Like a lot of times people think, oh, you're eating stuff that's like way past the date and it's like, almost going moldy and that was truly not the case. An egregious waste that you don't see and most people would think it was unacceptable. I found out about this guaranteed sale idea, so it happens a lot in things like dairy. The producer gives it to the grocery store and it's a guaranteed sale, so if the grocery store doesn't sell it, they just give it back and it costs them nothing. And so there's no incentive for them to like mark it down, make sure it gets sold. All they do is give it back to the wholesaler they get a full refund and the wholesaler is stuck with this product, but they don't have to throw out.

6:22  
You know, as the environmental tragedies unfold, now, I think it becomes even more criminal for us to be making poor people in another country work their butts off to grow food that they don't get to eat. And all the perfect stuff is shipped here unripe and sprayed with whatever and coming across borders and then once it arrives here, we managed to throw a third of it out anyway. So I feel very bad for avocados and mangoes and bananas and the people who slogged away growing them.

7:00  
Welcome to part two. Now that I'm an expert on dumpster diving, I decided it was only right to try it out myself. I enlisted the help of my friend Charlie.

7:10  
Hi there.

7:10  
And we hit two grocery stores and the dumpster behind Charlie's own apartment building. Stay tuned because this doesn't end how you think it might.

7:21  
All right, we are out near Ossington station looking into dumpsters behind a Drug Mart in the area. We found a single loose cantaloupe in the dumpster, but otherwise not too much. Our biggest concern right now is even if we do find things some of which might not be safe to eat. For example, there's currently a recall on lettuce for contamination purposes. So we're expecting that we might find some but it is not safe for us to take with us.

7:47  
Actually, the cantaloupe is not the only thing we found we just kind of went around the corner and we have located a massive bag of Christmas ornaments, it appears. We are not gonna be grabbing it. Alright, so we've just pulled up behind a grocery store in Korea Town. And we were kind of expecting this place might have a lot of waste just based on what they sell and kind of where they're located and I don't think we were wrong. We have been pleasantly surprised, however.

8:23  
So we have just encountered a truck from the group called Second Harvest Food Rescue that seems to have just finished clearing out whatever food was not sold by this grocery store.

8:34  
I don't know if what they're taking is going to their own society or to a food bank, but I'm happy that we don't have to take it and that it will actually be used. 

8:49  
By the end of this expedition, we were getting curious, what would we find in the dumpsters behind our own buildings? The result, it turns out, was a bit more depressing than we had expected. Charlie's landlord had recently died. She had a unit in his building. The dumpster area was filled with her furniture and other items. There was an inhaler, a framed photo of her, a cut up St Michael's Hospital admission card. Needless to say, this wasn't how we expected the evening to end.

9:22  
I'd be lying if I said it wasn't jarring. I mean, you know it kind of took us by surprise already seeing like the memorial stuff in the in the hall and all that. Now we are seeing what amounts to everything she's owned, just thrown in the trash.

9:38  
Thanks for listening to Dumpster Divers Anonymous. We hope you enjoyed the episode and it just goes to show that you never really know what you might find. Dive on.