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Journ 300/Spring 2013 recap




1) First day LEADS

• Follow the lead rules in the book – must be grammatical, no cliches, don’t start with a quote

• Makes an assertion. Is NOT a classic bad lead. Gets to the HEART of the event. (If you had ONE thing to say about the event, what would it be?)

2) Interview practices (blog posts on another student)

• Establish a relationship; don’t interrupt, be prepared with good questions; get the correct spelling of all names

• Ask open-ended details that allow your interviewee to tell you anecdotes; press for DETAILS

3) Speech paper on photo exhibit

• Lead needs to get to the heart of the event

• Research in advance and prepare good questions; interview a lot of people who attended for a more lively piece with greater perspective. Try to interview the artist. DESCRIBE.

4) Deadline writing assignments on Chinese dancers at DCs, seniors’ post-graduation plans, thoughts on “ZooMass”

• Reporting is KEY. If your reporting is good the writing will come easy. If you don’t do enough reporting, you can’t make it up by trying to write cleverly; that usually doesn’t work. It’s much better to interview people in person, to go to the event you are reporting on, etc.

• Don’t use Cliches, euphemisms, convoluted and ungrammatical sentences, “canned” language.

• Be observant, curious and original

5) Minor papers on PSA script focus group, PSA try-outs, Amherst Police Station visit, Sexual Assault conference

•Lead must make an assertion

6) Profile

• A good interview is key! Ask probing questions. Get concrete details and anecdotes. DESCRIBE

• Don’t make them HAGIOGRAPHIC.

• Ask other people about your subject so you have multiple perspectives for a fuller portrait

7) Feature

• Picking a good topic is KEY. Spotting a trend and writing a story that hasn’t been written before is impressive!

8) Issue

• Picking a good topic is KEY.

• Identify experts and contact them ASAP

• Interviewing sources in-person is much better than by phone or email (BEING THERE is key)

• Experts are the ones who offer opinions/analysis. Your sources talk about their personal experiences

9) Review

• Lead should make it clear if you recommend/don’t recommend the movie and why

• Write as you would speak! Your writing must FLOW, or the reader becomes confused and loses interest

10) Summaries

• Synthesize information. Doesn’t have to be in the same chronological order as what you are summarizing

11) Blogs

• Should be well organized and reader-friendly; AP style and grammar should be correct; photos add a lot! Be creative and original

Eating Trash Can Taste Good

Sofia Picatoste

Hampshire College

   Jump into the 2010 documentary called ‘Dive!’ with Jeremy Seifert, a local dumpster diver of Los Angeles who asks not only Trader Joe's but also our nation: Why are we throwing away all this food?

  A film that shows the food consumerism of America, Seifert reports facts on food waste and hunger, says what we can do to help, and speaks to the experts. With that, he realizes speaking to your local grocery store works much better than going to CEO headquarters.

  “In America, we throw away 96 billion pounds of food,” said Seifert in the beginning of the film,”263 million pounds a day, 11 million an hour, and 3 thousand pounds a second.” The start of the film takes off with Seifert and other divers at their favorite hotspot; the dumpsters behind their local Trader Joe's. Digging through bags on bags of food, this documentary does well in capturing the life of Seifert. It depicts his cycle of stealing the “almost expired” food, bringing it home to his wife and two sons Finn and Scout, and then eating the so-called trash.

  The film does an exceptional job on depicting how eating organic, local grown foods as well through quoting Seifert’s friends. “There’s a beauty in seeing garbage turn into a meal while indulging with friends. We cook gourmet food from stuff scrounged out of the garbage!” said another dumpster diver.

   For future dumpster divers, the film gets into detail on what to look for while dumpster diving. “Look, a crate of perfectly good eggs, and only one is cracked,” said another dumpster diver.

   While the film does very well in personalizing Seifert’s trash-eating life with his friends and family, it also dives much deeper than that. It takes us on the journey as Seifert goes to talk with stores face-to-face, and eventually confronting CEO headquarters on the issue of throwing out millions of pounds of food. Many of them refused.

 The document excels in depicting how we reveal ourselves as a society by throwing away the food and resources we consume from our planet Earth. Seifert spoke with Timothy Jones, one of the world's most knowledgeable activists on dumpster diving who has been a part of Eat Trash for 16 years. “If people send the food that is thrown away to the hungry, then hunger can soon end rapidly,” said Jones.

While editing the film, Seifert shows his interview with Jones while transitioning in-between clips of those dying from hunger on the streets in black-and-white film. The viewer is being informed while also feeling sympathetic and moved by the harsh realities shown in the film.

      “There are about 35 million people in the U.S. who don’t know where there next meal is coming from,” said one of the experts interviewed, “There are 11 million people in the U.S. are actually going hungry, and not eating today.” Seifert’s interviews feel raw by simply filming the experts as they state the facts.

    Along with that, the amount of data shown in the middle of the screen in plain, black text is staggering. The powerful statistics hit home for viewers. “Food takes up 20% of landfill waste, producing harmful methane gases,” was shown on screen.

      Not only does Seifert give us all the facts, data, underground knowledge on dumpster diving, he gets to the heart of viewers by quoting knowledgeable figures. The specific quotes tie into this issue of food waste and hunger. “Forfeit your senses of awe, and let your conceit diminish your ability to revere, and the universe becomes a market place for you,” by Abraham Joshua Heschel, a famous Rabbi and theologist.

Considering Dumpster Diving to be the Answer on Ending World Hunger

By Alyx Rivard

The documentary “Dive!” begins with a group of bearded, hippy-looking men diving through sets of dumpsters and sorting through piles of food waste they would later on consume. This activity was an odd one in itself, but as the film continued the real motive of the goal to end world hunger was revealed suddenly making dumpster diving not so weird after all.

            The 2010 documentary follows director Jeremy Seifert and his friends in Los Angeles as they dumpster dive through a variety of store’s trash and accumulate massive amounts of preserved, still edible food. Not only is the food brought back to their homes and eaten calling it “dumpster delight,” but it is also donated to shelters around the county and used to demonstrate the amount of wasted food in America.

            This isn’t a film about a bunch of eco-extremists sharing with audiences the great fun and enjoyment in diving through other’s trash and unwanted waste; it’s about much more than that. Instead, this is a documentary on the ongoing issue of world hunger and the need to solve this crisis. “The entire country of Haiti could be fed for five years with our food waste in America.” This film is a call to action and a message to all Americans that if we, collectively, care enough as a country, we can help feed not only hungry Americans but also starving people in other countries simply off our so called “trash.”

            “Why should all this food be thrown out instead of given to people who need it?” was an essential question Seifert posed to both citizens and large food corporations. One large generator of edible food waste Seifert targeted was Trader Joe’s who claims to give away left over food daily to food banks, however we were proven otherwise when Seifert dissected a local Joe’s dumpster after closing revealing an abundance of perfectly good food. Seifert depicts actions like these as a product of the laziness of society, saying it’s easier and more convenient to toss left over food in the trash rather than transporting it to local shelters or food banks.

“There’s a certain beauty of turning food from the dumpster into a full meal you can enjoy with your friends and family,” is a quote accurately representing the splendor that can be hidden among something as dirty as trash. The film showed Seifert and his family eating and enjoying healthy, balanced meals each day from food they had saved directly from the dumpsters. They were happy because it saved them money and kept their stomachs full. Seifert’s campaign believes that not all waste should be wasted, and what one may consider unusable, someone else could desperately need and benefit from.

            In the end Seifert leaves us with saying, “We are all responsible for finding a solution.” People need to care enough in order for positive change to develop and this documentary has the persuasiveness to do just that and generate the awareness necessary. The call for individuals to “Eat trash” seems alarming at first but “Dive!” gradually throughout the film makes this concept seem much more acceptable and appealing.

             

A Trashy Meal

Eleanor Harte

April 29, 2013

A Trashy Meal

If you went to a friend’s house for dinner, you wouldn’t expect to find out that the meal you’d just eaten came from a dumpster. For Jeremy Seifert’s friends, this is reality. Grocery shopping doesn’t seem to be enough of a challenge for Seifert; he prefers to feed his family with food obtained from scavenging through dumpsters.

The 2010 documentary film “DIVE! Living off America’s Waste,” directed by Seifert, explores America’s enormous – yet hidden – food waste problem. A thought-provoking piece that points out how precious our food really is, the film demonstrates the culture of laziness America has developed in regard to food. “Most of the time, wasting food is just easier,” says one man in the film.

Seifert has spent many nights dumpster diving in Los Angeles, and feeds his wife and two children on food he finds in the trash. He describes himself as “living off the waste of the consumerism of America.” Certainly it’s an unconventional mfethod, but Seifert doesn’t do it because he can’t afford to grocery shop. It’s just that he hates seeing food go to waste. This often means he ends up with a surplus of food in his own home; he says he feels like he needs to save as much of it as he can. His toddler son Finn, who loves blueberries and strawberries, isn’t complaining when there’s a surplus of his favorite foods.

The film uses impressive visuals, such as drawings, statistics, and stop motion animations using food to make its point. One especially powerful use of food is when he lays out hundreds of loaves of bread on the ground to spell the word ‘logistics,’ as he explains that many people say the logistics of donating unwanted food are too much of a hassle to make it worth it. Through this example, Seifert emphasizes that we are all responsible for creating a solution to America’s food waste problem.

The film, though, doesn’t advocate for dumpster diving as that solution; in fact, Seifert’s wife is thankful for the free food but emphasizes that it’s a lot of work to wash, cut, and freeze large amounts of it. “It would be easier just to get what we need at the grocery store,” she says. Instead, the film advocates for a better awareness of food waste, which happens at all levels of production and consumption.

When Seifert plans to write a letter to the CEO of Trader Joe’s every day for a month asking to have a conversation about food waste, he receives a letter after two weeks asking him to stop contacting the company.

Why won’t grocery stores speak with Seifert? He’s not sure, but he finds that as he questions more stores, he finds more dumpsters locked behind gates. This raises another issue for Seifert and his band of dumpster divers: is it ethical to break in for food that’s going to be thrown into a landfill anyway? It’s illegal, but is it worth it? The film doesn’t have an answer.

It does raise some other questions – instead of collecting a year’s supply of meat in a fridge, why doesn’t Seifert take the surplus and give some to other people who need it too? He mentions at times that he has too much food, and this seems like a good solution: he can feed his family and help others, at no real cost to himself.

A redeeming moment for this question comes when he asks multiple grocery stores for surplus food on New Year’s Eve and donates it to a Salvation Army shelter. Sandra Martin, the lead cook at the shelter, is visibly thankful. She says the shelter always has trouble finding enough food. It’s nice to see Seifert giving food to others. He’s a likeable guy, and this anecdote is just one of a host in the film that make it easy to see his point of view. When he spots a huge bag of $15 chickens in a Trader Joe’s dumpster the next day, his sadness at not being able to give it to the shelter is evident.

The film does an excellent job at conveying the dual issues of enormous food waste and the hunger problem. It’s clear that they go hand in hand: fix one, and you can probably fix the other. Powerful interviews with people like Martin, food bank volunteers, and Seifert’s friends all convey the same message: there is enough food in America, but it’s not going to the right people.

So the next time you think about what’s for dinner, be grateful you aren’t one of the 11 million people in the United States who doesn’t know where their next meal is coming from. And if you decide to go dumpster diving for that meal, make sure to follow the golden rule: “Never take more than you need.”

Diving into the Dumpsters

Araz Havan

Video Review

Dive! into Awareness

There is a group of divers who aren’t interested in seeing underwater sea life as much as they are in salvaging food from dumpsters.

“Dive!” explores the idea that food is wasted so well in America, sent to the landfills without even a second thought from many humans. Jeremy Seifert and his group of friends in “Dive!” jump into dumpsters behind large-scale grocery stores to furnish their tables with food that would otherwise be thrown away.

Directed by Seifert, the documentary runs just short of an hour, but it continuously, if repetitively, brings up many questions surrounding the culture around food.

Seifert, speaking over videos of victory gardens from WWII, intones that Americans are living in a country that is fed by a “broken agribusiness that wastes one half of all the food it produces.” It sounds dire, and mixed with video clips of the friends picking massive bags of wasted produce out of their bags, it looks it.

The documentary is littered – no pun intended –with video of the huge amounts of food in dumpsters behind your everyday neighborhood grocery stores.

Dozens of different items are pulled out from the dumpsters. After the German cheese, expensive chicken and virtually intact eggs examined on film, the viewer is left to imagine what other items they pass by on the shelves that won’t be there the next day.

Approximately 96 billion pounds of food are thrown away each year in America. After some generalized math, Seifert says that that is around 3000 wasted pounds a second that makes its way to the landfills. The numbers are daunting. Twenty percent of the makeup of landfills is food, most of which could have been put to better use.

America, he said, is “feeding landfills as much as feeding our country.”

It is easy for Seifert to be outraged by these facts, though he keeps his cool throughout the documentary. However, he calls for the audience to express his indignation via facts, videos and interviews with outside sources about the wasted food.

He uses the different clips well, mixing in home videos with nature shots and separate documentary videos. Different friends and family members talk about their experiences with dumpster diving, speaking candidly about their opinions.

His son, Finn, was a surprise hit. When he was on-screen, his baby-talk was the comedic relief that the documentary didn’t need, but drew the viewer’s attention. One of the best moments during the documentary was when father and son were exchanging words across the table, Seifert expressing, for the first time his utter frustration with the value he gave food, while his son gave him the blunt advice that only children can say.

Obviously a low-budget film, the lack of funds didn’t detract from the message Seifert wanted to give. While he spoke about the homeless and the scarcity of food, he showed outside footage of rows of tents lining a sidewalk. As the camera panned from one tent to the next, the video transitioned to the produce section of a grocery store, where piles of fruits and vegetables replaced the parade of makeshift homes.

The score was simple; a collection of uncomplicated and unobtrusive music was sprinkled throughout to accent the different emotions that the viewer was supposed to be feeling. For a documentary that focuses on self-reflection and aims to be thought-provoking, it was a good choice to play wordless guitar music.

The documentary ends with the words “Eat Trash” emblazoned on the screen. Seifert isn’t forcing the audience to dig through the trash. He isn’t making anyone do anything other than increase their awareness.

“We’re all responsible for creating a solution,” he said, and in watching Dive! you walk away realizing  that you are.

Seifert successfully dives into issues of food waste in 2011 documentary.

By Peter Cappiello

Charming, fun and nostalgic at times with grainy nature panoramas to segue between scenes, Jeremy Seifert suits up in a speedo with blue goggles and jumps headfirst into a dumpster in his 2011 film, “Dive! Living off America’s Waste.”

Using a combination of humor, wit, expert testimony and key facts Seifert, along with his mustachioed mates, take a more serious turn to recover food from dumpsters in Los Angeles, which is then used to feed Seifert and his family.

With food making up 20 percent of landfill waste, equaling 2.8 billion pounds of wasted food in L.A. county alone, Seifert nobly aims to live off the “waste of the consumerism of America.”

“This garbage was feeding my family and friends,” Seifert said. “And doing it in style.”

Alternating between first and third person points of view, Seifert makes the audience an accomplice when he talks to the camera about his mission, occasionally having to trespass behind locked gates to reach dumpsters stocked with edible and healthy food.

Be it Trader Joe’s, Ralph’s, Vons, Safeway, Whole Foods, Costco or Sam’s Club, he aims to seek out the people who cause food waste and hold them responsible in addition to shining a critical light on the issue of waste in the U.S.

Seifert’s efforts hit home when his young son, Finn, said to his father,  “you can’t waste,” through his still developing English. The toddler was shown loading loaves of bread into his red and yellow toy car while his father talked about donating “dumpster food” to the Salvation Army.

Sandra Martin, lead cook for the Salvation Army Bell, Calif., shelter’s kitchen said is it increasingly difficult to feed the shelter’s average of 450 people per day with a declining economy.

Timothy Jones, former head of garbage production at the University of Arizona, said that what Americans throw out reveals a lot about them as society.

“The kind of society that would waste this much food is one that doesn't value the earth or the products it produces,” Jones said. “It's in our own personal detriment to continue the process.”

With workers at the Salvation Army empathetically saying “god bless you,” to Seifert after he delivered food from a Trader Joe’s dumpster, it becomes clear that there is a disparity between public opinion on food waste and its reality.

Although the United States has the greatest food surplus of any nation, 35.5 million people are “food insecure,” meaning they don’t know where their next meal is coming from, while 11 million are going hungry.

Invoking human imagery of starving and malnourished children in Haiti, juxtaposed with film of World War II era America, Seifert said that food wasn’t always a commodity.

With older generations living on the mantra of “waste not, want not,” he said that Americans don’t have to waste food and that it is a simple thing to change.

“Clearing our plates is a good place to start,” Seifert said. “But it’s not going to put food in hungry mouths.”

Leaving viewers with the words, “eat trash,” written in bold white letters on a lonely black still frame, Seifert neatly wraps up the controlled pace of the film with an invitation for action and responsibility so that hunger can be curbed.

It is a well presented and much needed challenge to the audience to examine their habits and act in a smarter and less wasteful manner.