Tag: jeremy

A Filmmaker’s Food Waste Story

  • Jeremy Seifert produced the Dive!, a film about food waste and how much of it is actually useful. (Photo courtesy of Dive! The Film)

A film about food waste is catching attention and awards at independent film festivals across the country.

The film’s called “Dive!,” and reviewers are shocked by the film’s statistics about how much edible food that grocery stores toss into dumpsters.
Shawn Allee reports the reviewers are also enthralled by the filmmaker’s personal story about diving after that food.

Transcript

A film about food waste is catching attention and awards at independent film festivals across the country.

The film’s called “Dive!,” and reviewers are shocked by the film’s statistics about how much edible food that grocery stores toss into dumpsters.

Shawn Allee reports the reviewers are also enthralled by the filmmaker’s personal story about diving after that food.

Jeremy Seifert didn’t start dumpster diving to make a film.

A few years ago, friends turned him onto it.
One morning, they surprised him with bags of food pulled from a dumpster.

“And so my entire kitchen floor was covered with meat and salads and I was filled with delight and wonder and I just said, “where do we begin?”

Seifert says he dumpster dived for kicks, but that changed.
Seifert is a filmmaker by trade, and he got a filming assignment at a refugee camp in Uganda.
The kids in the camp had hardly any food.

“They were truly hungry and suffering from hunger. And I came back home and two nights later, I was on my way to a dumpster pulling out a carload of food that had been thrown away. That experience filled me with such outrage, that I felt I needed to do something and my expression was to make a film.”

Seifert’s film picks up after his dumpster diving takes this kind of political turn.
It’s not for kicks anymore; he wants to show our food waste problem is so bad, that his family could practically live off food from grocery stores dumpsters.
He gets advice from experienced divers.

“Rule number one. Never take more than you need unless you find it a good home.”

But, Seifert runs into trouble with this rule.
He can’t let food go …

“I’m tired of it, there’s too much. I only took this much because there’s so much going to waste. It’s almost two in the morning, and I don’t have anywhere to put it, really.
I had to save as much of it as I could. In just a week of nightly diving, we had a year’s supply of meat.”

Guilt wasn’t his only problem.
His wife, Jen, explains a practical one.

“The dumpster stuff is really great. but because there’s such a large quantity of it, it can turn to a lot of work. So there’s like 12 packages of strawberries that I need to wash and freeze and cut. It’s not that big of a deal, but it’s just a lot more work than going to the grocery store and picking up just what you need.”

Seifert says the biggest problem with dumpster diving, was that it changed how he felt about food. One morning, he talked to his young son about it and kept the camera rolling …

“I don’t know if dumpster diving and eating food from the dumpster has made me value food more or value food less because it’s easier now to throw food away because we have so much of it. Part of me, I think I’m valuing food even less.”

“You can’t waste food, Dad.”

“I know, I don’t want to waste food. Do you want to waste food?”

“No.”

“I don’t want to waste food, either.”

Seifert tells me that this scene at the breakfast table haunted him, because maybe he was setting a bad example for his son.

“So it was a crisis moment in my food waste dumpster diving adventures. And so by the time the film was over, I was so tired of food and thinking about food.”

Well, Seifert’s had to keep thinking about food.

His film’s at festivals, and he helps activists get grocery stores to donate to food banks.
But things have changed at Seifert’s house.

He doesn’t dumpster dive so much – instead, he’s started a garden.
That way, his boy can really value what makes it to the dinner table.

For The Environment Report, I’m Shawn Allee.

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Nanotech Nervousness

  • Researchers are studying whether nano-sized material could purge bacteria from the digestive tracts of poultry. The bacteria doesn't harm chickens and turkeys, but it can make people sick. The hope is that using nanoparticles could reduce the use of antibiotics in poultry. (Photo courtesy of USDA)

Nanotechnology is the science of the very, very small. Scientists are
finding ways to shrink materials down to the scale of atoms. These
tiny particles show a lot of promise for better medicines, faster
computers and safer food. But Rebecca Williams reports some people are
worried about harmful effects nano-size particles might have on
people’s health and the environment:

Transcript

Nanotechnology is the science of the very, very small. Scientists are
finding ways to shrink materials down to the scale of atoms. These
tiny particles show a lot of promise for better medicines, faster
computers and safer food. But Rebecca Williams reports some people are
worried about harmful effects nano-size particles might have on
people’s health and the environment:


Life on the nano scale is so tiny it’s hard to imagine. It’s as small
as 1/100,000 of a human hair. It’s as tiny as the width of a strand of
DNA. A nanoparticle can be so small it can actually enter cells.


Nanoparticles are loved by scientists and entrepreneurs for the novel
things they can do at those tiny sizes. They act differently. They
can go where larger particles can’t.


Many companies already sell new products with nano properties. The
Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies says there are almost 500 products
on the market that use nanotechnology.


Some of those products are starting to show up in the grocery store.


Jennifer Kuzma is with the Center for Science, Technology and Public
Policy at the University of Minnesota. She tracks nanotech
developments in food and agriculture. She says there are some edible
nano products on store shelves right now:


“One is a chocolate shake that is a nano emulsion of cocoa molecules so
you can deliver more flavor for less of the cocoa product.”


Kuzma says that’s just the beginning. She says hundreds more nano
products, including a lot of food products, are on their way to market.
In many cases, scientists are looking for solutions to food safety
problems.


For example, bacteria in the intestines of chickens and turkeys can
make people sick when poultry is undercooked. Right now farmers treat
their birds with antibiotics. But as bacteria are becoming resistant
to antibiotics, scientists are looking for other methods to fight the
bacteria.


Jeremy Tzeng is a research scientist at Clemson University. He’s part
of a team developing what he calls intelligent chicken feed.
Basically, chickens would be fed a nanomaterial that attaches to
molecules on the surface of the harmful bacteria. Then the bacteria
could be purged from the chicken along with fecal matter:


“If we use this physical purging, physical removal, we are not using
antibiotics so the chance of the microorganism becoming resistant to it
is really small.”


Tzeng says his research is still in its early stages. He says there
are a lot of safety tests he needs to run. They need to find out if
the nanomaterial is safe for chickens, and people who eat the chickens.
And they need to find out what happens if the nanomaterial is released
into wastewater.


“As a scientist I love to see my technology being used broadly and very
quickly being adopted. But I’m also concerned we must be cautious. I
don’t want to create a miracle drug and then later it becomes a problem
for the long term.”


There are big, open questions about just how safe nanoparticles are.


Researcher Jennifer Kuzma says there have been only a handful of known
toxicology studies done so far. She says nanoparticles might be more
reactive in the human body than larger particles:


“There’s several groups looking at the ability of nanoparticles to
damage, let’s say your lung tissue. Some of the manufactured or manmade nanoparticles are thought to have greater abilities to get into the
lungs, penetrate deeper and perhaps damage the cells in the lungs, in
the lung tissue.”


In some cases, it’s hard for the government to get information about new
nano products. Kuzma says companies tend to keep their own safety data
under lock and key:


“Some companies might send you the safety studies if you ask for them. Others may not
because they of course have interests in patenting the technology and
confidential business information.”


So the government doesn’t always know all that much about what’s
heading to market. Agencies are trying to figure out how – and even
whether – to regulate products of nanotechnology. Right now, there are
no special labeling requirements for nano products.


In the meantime, nanotechnology is turning into big business. Several
analysts predict that just three years from now, the nanotech food
market will be a 20 billion dollar industry.


For the Environment Report, I’m Rebecca Williams.

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Horses Bring Logging Back to the Future

  • A horse logger directing his team through a forest. (Photo courtesy of Troy Firth.)

Some forest owners are going back to past practices to do less damage to their land. Commercial horse logging is finding a viable niche in woodlands around the country. Ann Murray has this story:

Transcript

Some forest owners are going back to past practices to do less damage to their land. Commercial horse logging is finding a viable niche in woodlands around the country. Ann Murray has this story:


In a hardwood forest, Troy Firth points out trees he’s marked for cutting.


“We put a blue slash on the trees that are designated as log trees.”


Firth is a sawmill owner in Northwestern Pennsylvania. He’s an advocate of sustainable forestry and says it takes excellent silviculture and mechanics to harvest timber.


“Silviculture has been defined as the art and science of growing trees. Mechanics is the way the logs are moved out of the woods once they’re cut.”


Firth believes the best way to get logs out of the woods is with horses. He contracts about a dozen men who use workhorses to haul or “skid” logs to road sites. One of his long time horse loggers is Ray Blystone, a brawny guy with a long ponytail. Today, Blystone and his team of Belgian horses are working with Jeremy Estock, an experienced chainsaw operator.


“I just need to bring the horses to come around and get ’em hooked up and out onto the skid road.”


The chainsaw is really, really loud, but Blystone’s well-trained horses calmly munch on leaves. The massive caramel colored animals are harnessed to a small open-ended cart called a log arch. Once Estock has cut down a tree and sawed it into useable lengths, Blystone hammers spikes into one of the logs. Then he attaches the timber to his cart with chains.


“It’s basically just to get the front end of the log off the ground. It makes it so much easier for the horses.”


Blystone stands in the cart. He looks a lot like a Roman gladiator. He gently urges the horses back to shorten the chain and then signals them to get going.


“Git up Billy, Kate.”


The surprisingly agile Belgians step around chopped wood and low bushes. The horse-drawn cart and log make a trail through the woods that’s barely six feet wide. There aren’t any visible ruts.


Troy Firth, who’s on site, says that’s one reason he prefers horses over heavy mechanized skidders. He motions toward another skid road in the forest just a few feet away.

“We have a skid road that was used by a rubber tired log skidder on a previous logging job and the tracks are still here from 30 years ago.”

“So damage could last for 30 years? That’s how much they’re compacting the soil?”


“It will last longer than that.”


Firth says when mechanized skidders compact the soil, it can make it harder for tree roots to grow, and these big machines can do a lot of damage to nearby trees that aren’t cut. But, that kind of power also means that motorized equipment can haul timber much faster than horses and with less cutting.


“Simply because you have so much power, you can bring a whole tree out at once. It’s the mechanics of getting through the woods.”


Getting trees out of the woods faster can mean a cost savings of nearly 25% over horse driven skidders. But Ray Blystone says he has more work than he can handle. He’s found that more and more landowners recognize the long-term low-impact benefits of horse logging. And besides all that, he really likes his job.


“It means a lot to me. I enjoy being around horses, and it’s important to me that I do something for a living that’s environmentally friendly.”


Although no one seems to have an accurate count, there are hundreds of commercial horse loggers in the United States. Most work in the northeast and the Pacific Northwest. They’re part of a small but growing movement going back to logging’s roots.


For The Environment Report, this is Ann Murray.

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