NEWSGROCERS

This is a guest post written by Jeremy Seifert, the director of DIVE!, an award-winning documentary about food waste in America. He is currently working on another film project about genetically modified foods.

I recently started a national petition on Change.org asking Trader Joe’s to eliminate its food waste, and more than 78,000 people have joined the campaign so far.

Ever since, I’ve received many encouraging notes from people around the country about all of the good things the grocer is already doing.

“I personally helped a drug and alcohol rehabilitation facility pick up hundreds of pounds of food every week from Trader Joe’s on National here in Los Angeles,” wrote one person. “Here in Dayton, Ohio, we have a Trader Joe’s and they do bring all their food, every day, seven days a week to the House of Bread, a soup kitchen I volunteer at,” said another. “I work for the food bank in Bellingham, Washington. Trader Joe’s contributes to the food bank more than any other single grocery store in Bellingham,” wrote yet another concerned citizen.

Understandably, a petition asking the grocery chain to “stop wasting food” strikes these people as unnecessary at best and recklessly mean at worst, like scolding a child for getting an “A” on a paper when everyone knows an “A+” is better.

But this campaign isn’t attacking local TJ’s that do amazing things to eliminate food waste. In fact, we want to praise them for their work and say THANK YOU!

Jeremy Seifert is a documentary filmmaker and activist. His film about dumpster diving and food waste in America, "Dive!" will be released on July 19th. To join Seifert's campaign asking Trader Joe's to stop wasting food, sign his petition here.

For many years now, I have fed my family food from the dumpster. It’s not because I can’t afford to shop at grocery stores like other, normal folks. It’s because supermarkets across the nation toss perfectly good meats, cheeses, eggs, and produce into the trash every, single day.

So I dumpster dive, which is exactly as the name sounds: I jump into dumpsters, pull out not-yet-expired food, and bring it home to my family. Yes, you could say we eat trash—but it’s delicious! It used to be that nearly every meal we ate contained some “trash” in it, like a head of broccoli, fresh Ahi tuna, or strawberries. With three kids and a busy life, it’s been harder to keep up the practice, but the food is there, waiting to be salvaged before being carted off to the landfill. My dumpster diving is the subject of a new documentary I made, called Dive!, which will be released on July 19th.

Grocery stores dumping their goods provide me with a free lunch, and the film was certainly a fun project. But the documentary showcases a huge problem—food waste. Every year in the United States, we throw away 96 billion pounds of food. That's 263 million pounds a day, 11 million pounds an hour, 3,000 pounds per second! This mind-boggling amount of trash is what prompted me to start a campaign on Change.org asking one particular supermarket chain to combat food waste.

It seems like bisphenol-A (BPA) is found in virtually everything these days. Canned foods and beverages, plastic bottles, credit card receipts, even dental sealants contain the hormone-disrupting chemical. But there's one place where BPA won't lurk for much longer — Kroger grocery store-brand products.

Kroger, a national supermarket chain, recently committed to phase BPA out of its store-brand foods and beverages as well as its cash register receipts. By the end of 2011, all Kroger stores will have switched to BPA-free receipt paper. Eventually the store plans to eliminate BPA from the can linings of its Kroger, Value Brand, Private Selection, Comforts, Mirra, Active Lifestyle, and Fresh Selections products.

"While there is no conclusive scientific evidence that this minimal exposure to BPA in can linings poses any risks to consumers, Kroger has begun a process that we believe will result in the removal of BPA in the linings of canned goods in all of our corporate brand items," Keith Dailey, a Kroger spokesman, recently said.

This blog previously referred to the supermarket chain Supervalu as a "villain of the high seas." According to a new Greenpeace report, the store's reputation isn't getting any better.

Today, Greenpeace released the fifth edition of its "Carting Away the Oceans" (CATO) report (pdf). The annual report analyzes the progress — or lack thereof — that major retailers have made when it comes to implementing sustainable seafood programs. The survey studies 20 national chain supermarkets and ranks them on their environmental stewardship. For the fifth time in a row, Supervalu — which owns about 2,500 grocery stores nationwide like Acme, Albertson's, Save-a-Lot, and Shaw's — got failing marks.

Supervalu ranked at lowly number 18 on Greenpeace's list of 20 supermarkets, earning a failing score along with Giant Eagle, Publix, Winn-Dixie, and Meijer. Take a look at Supervalu's seafood offerings and it's easy to understand why the store scored so poorly.

Big Box stores like Walmart are one of many Goliaths in our industrialized food system. Luckily, a critical mass of Davids (and Johns and Katies and countless other consumers) can push those stores into greener initiatives.

As Change.org recently reported, Walmart seemed to have stalled on its sustainable seafood commitments. The Big Box store said in 2006 that by the end of 2011, it would only sell fish certified as sustainable by the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC). But as Greenpeace reported in its most recent "Carting Away the Oceans" report, which ranks stores on their seafood sustainability programs, Walmart hadn't moved forward with this goal at all since 2009. Even according to Walmart's own 2010 Global Sustainability Report, only 55 percent of the store's seafood offerings were MSC-certified. Could it be that Walmart made empty promises to its droves of consumers?

That's what it seemed like — until Greenpeace and Change.org stepped in, that is. Greenpeace recently launched a petition targeting Walmart and Supervalu, one of the worst supermarket chains when it comes to selling unsustainable seafood. The petition asked the stores to green up their acts and immediately implement clear sustainable seafood policies. More than 58,000 Change.org members signed the petition so far, and it's starting to make big waves.

Genetically engineered (GE) foods have been cropping up like, well, crops. In addition to genetically modified (GM) soy, corn, cotton, and and canola, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) recently deregulated Monsanto's GE alfalfa and sugar beets. Transgenic salmon and pigs also loom on the horizon, and who knows what kind of weird science will try to invade our dinner tables after that?

So now that the USDA has blatantly disregarded the health of the environment, the organic industry, and consumers by deregulating GE crops like alfalfa, what do we do now? That's where the Institute for Responsible Technology comes in.

The non-profit recently launched its "Alfalfa Plan B" campaign. Because the USDA has already given Monsanto's GE alfalfa the green light, the Institute for Responsible Technology reasons that the best option we have now is to target major players in the food industry. Through a petition on Change.org and its own site, the non-profit is telling dozens of corporations like Sara Lee, Walmart, ConAgra, Kroger, and Kellogg's that if they want to keep us as consumers, they must publicly reject GE alfalfa and keep the Frankencrop out of their supply chains.

Score one for the oceans. Princes Tuna, a leading brand of canned tuna sold in the U.K., recently agreed to implement a seafood sustainability program and support the establishment of protected marine reserves in the Pacific Ocean. It's a huge move for the tinned tuna purveyor — according to Greenpeace, Princes currently relies on "ocean annihilation devices" to catch most of its fish.

Those "ocean annihilation devices" are also known as fish aggregation devices, or FADs (pdf). FADs are structures that attract fish under or around them, increasing the load that fishermen haul in. While FADs effectively capture more tuna, they also attract all kinds of other marine species, such as vulnerable animals like juvenile skipjack tuna, rays, sea turtles, and sharks. The fishing industry's use of FADs is helping to push already-struggling species to the brink of extinction, with Princes Tuna leading the charge.

Princes Tuna may currently rely heavily on FADs, but that's about to change: The company says it will phase out its use of FADs by 2014. Instead, Princes will use only pole-and-line or purse seine fishing, two methods that are considered to be less environmentally degrading than FADs. The company also announced that it would support the Pacific Common marine reserves, a proposal to establish a network of protected ocean areas in the Western and Central Pacific Oceans. About half of the world's tuna comes from this region, so these waters are in desperate need of conservation.

Despite what the old adage claims, there really aren't plenty of fish in the sea. In fact, 75 percent of the world's fisheries have been pushed beyond the point of sustainability, while some populations of swimmers like bluefin tuna and shark have declined by as much as 80 and 90 percent in recent years.

If you want to know who's perpetuating this massive fish fry, look no further than your local supermarket — especially if that grocery store is a Walmart, Acme, Albertsons, Cub, Farm Fresh, Hornbacher's, Lucky, Jewel-Osco, Save-A-Lot, Shaw's/Star Market, Shop N' Save, or Shoppers.

Walmart and SUPERVALU (which owns Acme, Albertsons, Cub, Farm Fresh, Hornbacher's, Lucky, Jewel-Osco, Save-A-Lot, Shaw's/Star Market, Shop N' Save, and Shoppers stores) rank as some of the worst offenders when it comes to supermarkets that sell unsustainable species of fish. Walmart ranked ninth out of 20 grocery stores on Greenpeace's Supermarket Scorecard, while SUPERVALU came in at an abysmal number 15. Not only do these stores fail to provide sound, conservation-minded sustainable seafood programs, they regularly sell fish included on the International Union for the Conservation of Nature's (IUCN) Red List of Threatened Species. These types of fish have some of the lowest population numbers — selling and eating them not only pushes these species to the brink of extinction, it threatens to disrupt entire marine ecosystems.

Changing the industrialized food system oftentimes starts in grocery store aisles. No situation makes this fact more evident than Costco's agreement to stop selling threatened species of fish and implement a seafood sustainability program.

Today, Greenpeace announced that Costco, North America's largest wholesale club operator, agreed to the terms of the non-profit's "Oh-No-Costco" campaign. The campaign demanded that Costco immediately stop selling species of fish listed on the International Union for Conservation of Nature's (IUCN) Red List of Threatened Species and institute a publicly available seafood sustainability program that lessens the store's environmental impact. Eight months after the campaign launched, Costco has agreed to most of Greenpeace's conditions, marking a huge step forward in ocean conservation.

"It was a long and arduous process," said Casson Trenor, Greenpeace's seafood campaigner. "I'm really happy with where we've gotten to, and I think it says a lot about our methods and how effective we can be."

On January 29, 2011, we ran a post entitled "Battle of the Plastic Bag Bans Rages on in California Towns." In this post, the writer stated that the Save the Plastic Bag Coalition was funded by the American Chemistry Council (ACC). We have since learned, from the Save the Plastic Bag Coalition, that they accept no funding from the ACC, nor are they affiliated with the ACC in any way.

This post also suggested that the Save the Plastic Bag Coalition lobbied against the statewide plastic bag ban bill, A.B. 1998. According to Save the Plastic Bag Coalition's legal counsel, Stephen Joseph, the organization was not involved in these lobbying efforts. Also, despite what our post might have implied, Mr. Joseph states that Save the Plastic Bag Coalition does support fees on paper bags when plastic bag bans do occur.

We regret the above mentioned errors and have included a correction update in the original post.

Photo credit: How can I recycle this via Flickr