Dive! Trailer from Compeller on Vimeo.
H/T for the video: The Aesthetic Elevator
The simple answer, which I'm sure the documentary gets to, is that grocery stores throw the food away instead of giving it away because otherwise people would be asking for the throwaway stuff before buying it. There's also the liability factor.
Of course it's wrong. The wrongness of it runs deep into the underpinnings of our society and culture, and does not just exist as a matter with the grocery stores themselves - something which I'm sure the documentary gets into as well.
A close friend of our family who we called uncle (and his wife, aunt) immigrated here in his youth from Denmark with his wife, and they homesteaded up northeast. They were in a sense pioneers. When they had retired, the time at which we knew them, a good few decades before they both died, they were pretty well off. But he, our uncle, dumpster-dived to the end of his days - and more so after his wife died. I went with him on a couple of occasions to help.
Knowing scarcity of food, or the acquaintance with labouring to make and get food and to preserve it - its existence in your life being entirely dependent on your time and effort - I guess that's something which does not really leave you, even when you have the money later on. At least that's what I understood, observing my uncle.
The grocery store at which he dumpster-dived later reconfigured their bin system, so that it was basically connected to the building and could not be accessed by anyone other than employees.
The waste of food is intimately connected with the production of food as a commodity. Many will say, but food is a commodity. In fact, you might say that, in the end of things, food is the only real commodity. Yes, in many ways it is. But the "commodity" we're talking about right now is something vastly removed from Harry walking to Tom's farm and saying he'll exchange some cedar shakes for a sack of potatoes. The very principle on which today's industrial farming is based is a monster. Hundreds upon hundreds upon thousands upon thousands of acres of land get literally raped - milked solely for profit. That's the short of it of course, but it's true.
And when corporations like Monsanto come along and try to tell us that they are feeding the world and keeping us all from starving, just remember certain things: how much goes to waste in such a system, not only after the grocery stores but before them, through transportation and packaging. Remember the multitude of things that go wrong when we are so disconnected from the production of what we eat. We become slaves. That's the main thing: we become servile. And people still starve. In fact, I think that after the right to life, the deep-seated issue of abortion, the issue of food and its control (and all the related issues of stewardship and creation) is the next big one, which for all the talk concerning it, to me is the baby elephant in the room that we are going to find, perhaps shortly, has suddenly grown to full size.
