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Melah Travis
English 113-05
Professor Werner
29 March 2015
Annotated Bibliography
Dive! The Film-Living Off America's Waste. Director. Jeremy Seifert. 2010. DVD.
Dive! The Film-Living Off Americas Waste is a documentary about dumpster diving and
how it has become more of a popular scavenging for food, but it is more so about the hunger
crisis and wastefulness in our nation. This award-winning documentary focuses on the amount
of food wasted by American grocery stores that pile in landfills and dumpsters at an alarming
rate. The film dives deep into the realities of consumerism versus consumption and its impact.
The film uses dumpster diving to find evidence of Americas wastefulness as Seifert finds
himself pulling out huge amounts of food (unopened or still sealed) every night from a local
Trader Joes dumpster. The amount of food was grand enough to store in freezers for his family
to last the entire year, and he did. Therefore, the purpose of the documentary is not to encourage
dumpster diving but to address the bigger issue of food waste in the United States. This is done
with shocking statistics: one half of all food prepared in the US never gets eaten, and The
Department of Agriculture estimated in 1996 that recovering just 5 percent of the food that is
wasted could feed four million people a day; recovering 25 percent would feed 20 million
people. Today we recover less than 2.5 percent. Those statistics and many more helped prove
that one mans trash is another mans meal (242 words).
In the documentary, Seifert provides a good base for the subject of food waste. Each
statistic and example given was related back to dumpster diving. Seifert states, Every year in

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America we throw away 96 billion pounds of food (Dive). One thing that could have been done
differently to make this documentary more effective is to focus less on the dumpster diving and
more on how dumpster diving is an outcome of the vast amount food waste. On one hand, he
argues how great dumpster diving can be financially. On the other hand, he also says the amount
of wasted food is too immense. By focusing on the large amount of food found in his local
dumpsters and how his family is able to survive solely off the foraged foods, Seifert sometimes
overlooks the deeper problem of food waste in the United States. Companies throw away items
before the sell-by dates, when packages are opened, or if a can has been dented. Although the
focus of this enjoyable movie is on food waste, it would not be a good solo source for research
simply because it was so short and inconsistent. Overall, the film was great and provided a great
foundation for the topic of food waste in America (209 words).
Griffen, Mary, Jeffery Sobal, and Thomas Lyson. "An Analysis of a Community Food Waste
Stream." Journal of the Agriculture, Food, and Human Values Society. 26.1-2 (2009): 6781. Web. 29 Mar. 2015.
This scientific journal article describes the affects and concerns of food waste in America.
It also provides a research case study to support the research. The focus of the case study is on
methodology for conducting a community food waste analysis. The article explains that in
recent decades, food waste has become recognized as a significant social, nutritional, and
environmental problem because nearly all food is abundant and inexpensive. Food supplies are
available and waste, rather than reuse, is the norm. The perspectives of these studies vary and
include archaeological, environmental, and economic emphases. Since the nations food waste is
generated by the accumulation of thousands of local waste sources, the authors of this article
understands and quantifies the community food waste and how local efforts to decrease food

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waste are individualized to each communitys unique food system. The authors explain how this
method of reducing food waste may be more likely to succeed in reducing total waste than
nonspecific large-scale efforts (158 words).
This was one of the most successful and helpful articles found while looking for sources
for the research paper. For the subject of food waste in America, this journal is superior because
it is focused on one specific living community rather than the United States as a whole. The
article gives examples of how they calculated food waste throughout the area and states,
Managers from each of the nine major grocery stores in the county were interviewed
Interviews were conducted with county farmers to obtain information about food waste disposal
at the production stage The amount of food waste generated by the university and college was
obtained from the colleges composting programsetc.(Griffen, Sobal, & Lyson). The focus of
this article is great for a food waste, agricultural, and economy subjected research papers because
it enhances each of those topics while addressing them to fit the main idea, food waste, as a
whole. This article is effective in its way of evaluating evidence from its case study and also
presented evidence found. The article is peer reviewed, which makes it a better qualifying
source for any research in the environmental science, economic, or agricultural field. It is also
very detailed and descriptive which helps understand the main ideas. This article would be great
for grabbing statistics on food waste and the types of foods wasted at a smaller level (228words).
Nelson, Jennifer, and Katherine Zeratsky. "What You Can Do to Reduce Food Waste."Mayo
Clinic. Mayo Foundation for Medical Education and Research. (2012). Web. 26 Feb.
2015.
This website article was written by Mayo Clinic specialists to raise awareness of the
wastefulness in America. The blog offers a gathering of facts, statistics, and comparisons that

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provide very detailed images of volumes of waste and amounts of waste. The page is broken
down into three parts: Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle, the typical slogan for being environmentally
conscious. With each section, there are descriptions and examples on how to manipulate these
tasks. The reduce section gives examples on how to reduce the amount of food purchased, such
as shorter grocery lists, being practical with time and money, etc. In the reuse section, the
specialists list a few ways to reuse food items or store unfinished. Lastly, the recycle section
tells the reader new ways of recycling unwanted food. The examples range from the simple
compost and donation to using scraps like vegetables and meat scraps for homemade stocks and
citrus fruit rinds to add zest or flavor to foods (159 words).
Although this article was short, I enjoyed and agreed with the images and examples that
were given to support their claim that waste in America has gotten out of hand. The opening
paragraph was my favorite as it contains a rather surprising fact that states, Need a visual?
Americans could fill the Rose Bowl with a day's worth of food waste (Nelson & Zeratsky).
Along with the introduction, the article is full of these kinds of visuals that helped understand
exactly how much waste Americans are wasting each year. Nelson and Zeratskys theory of
composting or creating shorter grocery lists is extremely useful because it sheds light on the
difficult problem of food waste in America and its economical impact. I agree that there are
more effective ways of tossing out unwanted food, a point that needs emphasizing since so many
people still believe in the phrase reduce, reuse, recycle. If Nelson and Zeratsky are right that
Americans could fill the Rose Bowl stadium with a days worth of food waste as I think they are,
then it is vital to reassess the popular assumption that throwing away food and making it vanish
is not the proper method of getting rid of unwanted or spoiled food. This article was very
effective and I would recommend it to students thinking about researching food waste in

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America (225 words).
Pollan, Michael. The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals. New York:
Penguin Group, 2006. Print.
The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals is a nonfiction book that
opens with a straightforward question of what should we have for dinner. The book states that
omnivores are faced with too wide of a variety of food choices. Therefore, this book is an eyeopening exploration of the dimensions of eating in America and contains vital revelations about
the food we eat and how it comes on to our plates. Pollan divided the book into three sections:
Industrial Corn, Pastoral Grass, and The Forest. Perhaps the central idea is the importance of
'corn' in much of what we eat and how it plays a disproportionately large and unhealthy role in
Americas diet. Pollan gives a detailed tour of how our food is made relating to why present
American diets are disastrous in health-terms. He concludes each section by sitting down to a
meal and traces back everything consumed, revealing components ingested and explaining how
these foods affect our environment and biology. Through this process, Pollan integrates
somewhat repulsive facts critique the American way of eating. By tracing each of these meals
from its beginnings to his table, Pollan brings up several main themes. Each of the themes
overall conclude that many of the nutritional and health problems facing America today can be
traced back to the farms that grow the food (224 words).
I didn't expect to learn much from Michael Pollan's book since the style of writing
was pretty difficult and intricate; however, I did learn a great deal. While reading this book I
learned a lot of interesting information on the inside of the food business. Pollan writes, ...it
takes more than one calorie of fossil-fuel energy to yield one calorie of food (332). Pollan is
surely right about the amount of energy and labor that goes into producing food each day. The

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book provided a lot of cool, and sometimes unpleasant, facts such as the one above that I never
would have took time to care about. Americans could benefit from reading this book because it
can change the way we go about obtaining our food. It is understood that people may not pay
attention to their food waste, particularly at home, because it goes straight into the garbage can or
the disposal. Being aware of wastefulness is also a responsibility to the owners and corporations
of restaurants and stores throughout the country as the continuously discard food items. What I
took away from this book was how thoughtless the majority of Americans have become about
what we feed ourselves. More than anything else, Pollan's book is a request to stop and think for
a moment about our whole process of eating (222 words).
"Wasted: How America Is Losing Up to 40 Percent of Its Food from Farm to Fork to
Landfill." NRDC. Natural Resources Defense Council. (2012).Web. 2 Mar. 2015.
This article from the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) examines the
inefficiencies in the United States food system and offers recommendations and examples of
early on solutions. The report suggests the following actions: the United States government
should conduct a comprehensive and full study of food losses in our food system and establish
national goals for reducing this number, state and local governments should set targets and apply
food waste prevention campaigns, businesses should understand the extent and opportunity of
their own waste streams and adopt quality management practices, and Americans can reduce
their waste by learning when food goes bad, buying imperfect produce, and storing and cooking
food with an intention to reducing waste. In addition, this article highlighted how much, and in
what ways, food is wasted at each step of the food supply chain. The article is quite lengthy, as
the majority of it is graphs and statistics that provided visual evidence to prove the amount of
food being wasted at the community level (167 words).

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This article is going to be very helpful throughout the research process. The authors state
that on average, consumers throw away about 40 percent of the food produced in the country,
whereas restaurants and stores are estimated to throw away more than 6000 tons of food each
year. That breaks down to about 20 pounds of food each month (Wasted). This rather upsetting
statistic is due to multiple things, but especially that the increase in population raises the demand
for food. Yet there are some Americans that are too full, buy more food than need, or do not
have enough time to finish their food. Nevertheless, the waste issue is not solely based on the
consumers; restaurants and grocery stores play a huge role in contributing to the countrys waste.
Each of these factors is a result in the countrys current state of waste. This quote made the
article more credible for me because it is a shocking statistic that would help support my
argument. This source made me reconsider the waste within my family and shook me with its
quantitative evidence. Because of all of the previous statements listed, this article would be
perfect for my research essay. This article was very effective because of its certainty, credibility,
and thought (211 words).