Just Eat It: A Food Waste Story
Directed by Grant Baldwin
A few weeks into their experiment for Just Eat It: A Food Waste Story, producer Jenny Rustemeyer, in a moment of frustration, tearfully asks the camera (held by her husband director Grant Baldwin) how long they have to live this way, and what's the point.
The experiment: Eat only discarded food for six months. This means food that's technically expired (and often not) and tossed into dumpsters by retailers and manufacturers.
The point: Illustrate how much food is wasted in our society.
By the end of the documentary, Rustemeyer and Baldwin have executed both experiment and point with deftness.
In Just Eat It – which took the top spot in the #mustseeBC campaign and will screen at the BC Spotlight gala on Oct. 4 – the couple's dumpster diving exploits are intercut with telling interviews with experts who share some of our culture's deepest and darkest secrets about how much food we 're wasting and the destruction such waste is waging on the environment.
It's hard not to be disgusted and changed watching Baldwin jump into a dumpster filled to capacity with perfectly good, unopened packages of chocolate, hummus, eggs, and yogurt, thrown away because of misguided notions about aesthetics and consumer priorities.
Baldwin and Rustemeyer show the waste, and then the experts serve up the facts. It’s a portion-controlled storytelling technique that makes a weighty impact.
