Argumentative Essay On Dive By Jeremy Seifert

I believe if you were to ask any common citizen, no matter how large or small their city may be, they would say that homelessness and food waste are both huge problems in this country. Two men have done their research and have had their own first-hand experiences with these issues. One from being homeless himself, and the other through searching dumpsters to provide for his wife and young son.
Jeremy Seifert’s documentary, Dive!, goes behind the scenes to show that there are billions of pounds of food waste a year in our country when 1 billion people a day are starving worldwide. Seifert originally began his dumpster diving to show that his family of three could not only salvage good food to eat from the trash, but they would also save more

Seifert travels around to different grocery chains and retailers in his area of the state of California and films his experiences. For example, Seifert and his team would find bags of fruit in dumpsters that would only have one or two spoiled pieces, but was still discarded. That’s two apples out of a bag of twelve being discarded, while wasting ten other apples that are still edible. Because stores are so carefree about what they throw away, it makes you wonder if production is causing an overload in food. Do they have the mentality that it will never run out? Seifert reaches out to chains such as Trader Joes Grocery to ask and they refused to answer these questions. However, they had locked dumpsters to prevent anyone from taking what they consider to be trash. Lots of foods and meats that Seifert and his team find are indeed salvageable. Seifert’s teammate explains, “if one egg is broken, take it out and save the rest.” This is the attitude that most dumpster divers have. There are so many people in need and if the food is not “good enough” to stock on a shelf, why couldn’t the food be donated to shelters or food banks if it were truly uncontaminated? The documentary film stresses this idea and just how much waste retail chains have at the end of every day and just how little they are willing to donate to the local homeless shelters and food banks. Seifert even

The second stage happens only with experience and involves learning the concept of only taking what you need. Seifert also mentions this concept of rationing and avoiding greediness in his film. Where Seifert took only food, Eighner states in the beginning of his article that all of his clothes, except jeans, came from the dumpster as well as “boom boxes, candles, bedding, toilet paper, medicine, books, a typewriter, money, etc” all from the dumpsters. According to Eighner, most divers realize that they can’t hold on to everything and begin to only take what they have a need for or could use. Those that break what he calls the “pack rat habit” begin to restrain themselves from over scavenging and only get what they have an immediate use