One big lump

Garbage dump, my garbage dump,
That sums it up in one big lump.
– “Garbage Dump” by Charles Manson

On Saturday we abandoned our first movie of the year, a masterpiece called Dive! Living Off America’s Waste (I deleted a superfluous colon in the title). It had been awhile since the staff had to let a movie go, at least in part because we’ve been focused more on other media of late.

This particular film fell victim in part because it got that damn Manson song stuck in my head. They didn’t play it, of course. But they could have and likely would have if it had come from a less mass-murdering source. The theses of the picture and the song aligned seamlessly.

The idea these neo-hippies are trying to get across is that we throw away an obscene amount of food. That’s true, and perhaps if we’d given it more of a chance they might eventually have gotten around to some bigger picture solutions to the problem. Sadly, the lead-off was so off-putting that it discouraged us from pursuing it further.

The picture alternated between neo-hippies Dumpster diving, neo-hippies gobbling Dumpster-dived food, and stock footage of starving children in other parts of the world. And over everything lay a lattice of whiny preaching about how people in the United States systematically throw away perfectly good food.

This should probably go without saying, but I’ll say it anyway. Digging through the trash for food is not a solution to the food waste problem. If more than a handful of us were so bereft of gainful employment that we had the time and energy to feed ourselves in this manner, the Dumpsters would run dry in short order. Altering food disposal policies isn’t exactly a panacea, either. The production ignores a lot of legitimate concerns about food quality and safety.

Further, the Starving Biafran Babies aren’t a legitimate part of this equation. The argument assumes that pork chops that hit their sell-by date in Kansas City can somehow be magically transported directly to hungry families in distant lands (who will of course gobble them up because their cultures are the same as ours and they eat the same food we do). In reality the relationship between wasting less food here and serving more food there includes so many complex variables that the connection is tenuous at best.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m a big believer in the “person in the mirror” approach to social ills. And I would never begrudge someone a hearty meal of spoiled strawberries if such things were to her tastes. But when the practice takes the form of a sanctimonious documentary, what we end up with is a stupid, 21st century version of Catherine of Siena drinking pus from a sore. “Look at what we’re doing. This is all your fault. Don’t you feel bad?”

Not as bad as I would if I tried to eat that expired fish.