Travis 1

Melah Travis
English 113-05
Professor Werner
24 February 2015
Annotated Bibliography Draft 1
1. Dive!
Dive! The Film-Living Off Americas Waste is a documentary about dumpster diving and
how it has become more of a popular scavenger 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 uses dumpster diving to find evidence of Americas wastefulness as Seifert finds himself
pulling out huge amounts of food from a local Trader Joes dumpster. 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 with shocking statistics and proves that ones mans trash is another
mans meal.

The USDA estimated in 1996 that recovering just 5 percent of the food being thrown
away at home could feed four million people a day; recovering 25 percent would feed 20
million people. Sadly, today America recovers less than 2.5 percent

2. An Analysis of a Community Food Waste Stream

This scientific journal article describes the affects and concerns of food waste in America
and provides a research case study to support the research. The article explains that in recent
decades, food waste has become recognized as a significant social, nutritional, and

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environmental problem because nearly all food is abundant and inexpensive, as 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, this article understands and
quantifies the community food waste and how local efforts to decrease food waste are
individualized to each communitys unique food system.

Overall, 27,240 tons of solid waste and an estimated 8.8 billion kilocalories are lost
annually in America due to food waste

3. What You Can Do to Reduce Food Waste

This website article was written by Mayo Clinic specialists to raise awareness of the
wastefulness in America. 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 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.

Americans could fill the Rose Bowl with a days worth of food waste

4. The Omnivore's Dilemma

The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals states that omnivores are
faced with too wide of a variety of food choices. Pollan divided the book into three sections:
Industrial Corn, Pastoral Grass, and The Forest. 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

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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.

The food industry burns nearly a fifth of all the petroleum consumed in the United

Statesit takes more than one calorie of fossil-fuel energy to yield one calorie of food
A single strawberry has about four calories. On average, the distance that the strawberry
would travel is about 3,581 miles before finding its way onto a consumers plate

5. Wasted: How America Is Losing Up to 40 Percent of Its Food from Farm to Fork to Landfill.
(Summary)

On average, consumers throw away about 40 percent of the food produced in the country
Restaurants and stores are estimated to throw away more than 6000 tons of food each

year
sell by and use by dates are not federally regulated and do no indicate safety;
therefore, there should be no excuse as to why supermarkets are over $15 billion in debt
annually just from fruit and vegetable food waste alone