Wasted! The Story of Food Waste premiered Thursday, October 5 at the Alamo Drafthouse Cinema in Brooklyn. Wasted! will be in theaters, on demand, and available for purchase on Amazon and iTunes on October 13.
A remarkably poignant film presented by the directors of Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown and Mind of a Chef, Wasted! balances the harsh reality of the food industry with the personalities of global “chef-heroes” Anthony Bourdain, Mario Batali, Danny Bowien, Massimo Bottura, and Dan Barber.
The premiere boasted specialty “recycled” dishes by Mario Batali and Anthony Bourdain.
“We’re just asking the average American to do what every Italian grandmother has been doing for years,” Bourdain told us, mentioning planning, organizing, and creating shopping lists as easy ways for the average family to get rid of waste.
Batali calls the wasting of food “sinful, criminal, and financially foolish.”
Chef Danny Bowien is particularly passionate about the stigmas surrounding “used” food, which he shared a bit about on the red carpet before the show.
“There’s basically a law that you can’t donate food if it’s been cooked in a restaurant, even if we haven’t touched it, because of the liability,” Bowien said. “The film outlines that that has never happened, that no one has ever gotten sick. There’s all these stigmas that have to be broken down. This shows us behind the curtains. It’s stupid. It’s very, very restrictive. I want [that law] to change.”
“Americans like “pretty” food,” he says in the film, relating a story of his father trying cow tongue and his disgust once he found out what it was.
We asked executive director Anna Chai to speak about global warming – few people know how much food waste affects it, she said: “In America, 40% of the food we don’t eat gets wasted. Of that, 90% ends up in landfills. Food doesn’t decompose properly in a landfill and releases methane, which is 23 times more lethal than carbon dioxide. The methane that goes into the atmosphere has a huge effect on climate change, and I feel like people don’t know that.”
Chai went on to mention the logistics of food growing that ends up wasted: the land farmed, the water used, the gas emitted from the vehicles that transport the food.
“We don’t need to produce more,” Chef Bottura says in the film. “We need to act different.” The 1.3 billion tons of food that are wasted yearly, the documentary states, could solve world hunger entirely.
The film uses illustrated graphics, interviews with the chefs, footage of a lower-income family in the kitchen, and beautifully landscaped long shots of farmland across America.
The documentary is a true call to action to every American. As the pressing problem of climate change becomes stronger each day, Bourdain and the directors provide the average person with incredibly easy and poignant ways to fix it.
“You get to eat three times a day,” Chai said, “which means you have three chances to do something about it.”
Bourdain puts it even more simply than that: “Use everything. Waste nothing.”
