uncovering the hidden waste of western consumerism and the effects on the environment and my efforts to make use of as much wasted resources as possible
Sunday came around and my smoothies were lacking bananas. Beautiful sunny day, so I went for a spin and came back with 40 kg of fruit, veggies and bread.
mango and pears
loads of oranges, Again!
ready to leave
Grüneburger Bioladen, Frankfurt Nordend
Loads of green peppers, nothing wrong with them, tomatoes and cauliflower
The two faces of ALNATURA in Bockenheim
Alnatura Bockenheim had wheeled all their containers into a locked space, so no access, and thus lots of wasted food for sure! Well I had a good bike ride across the city on the quiet Sunday afternoon streets...
On the way home a routine checkup of ALNATURA No 1, Sachsenhausen
another Jackpot of Oranges and Mandarins and Bakery Products, sorted! Thanks!
ready to go, now fully loaded
Home again Weighing the food, sorting and cleaning
40 kg 40 kg 40 kg 40 kg 40 kg 40 kg 40 kg 40 kg
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The Smallprint
Thanks a lot to Nature, the Sun, the Growers, the Grocers, the slave laboring Africans in Spain, and other under-payed earthlings giving their lives for our wasteful habits, the truckers, the oil drillers, the Ships and steelworkers, computer manufacturers, the trees for oxygen and packaging materials, the animals and plants that gave up their wild lands for us to grow the wasted food on, the shop keepers and owners, thanks to all involved for this wealth to arrive here out of season, might aswell come from another planet, oh perhaps in the future, oh and not to forget the banksters who run the show behind the scenes with credits and loans to crazy business schemes, and the politicians/frontmen who pass the laws to subsidize Euro Agrobusinesses, so that in poor western africa the local farmers can't sell their own produce anymore, because they are five times more expensive than the European food dumped on them thanks to subsidies and so called free trade agreements, thanks WTO!
A shocking, sobering, really well put together and filmed austrian documentary, about how food production in Europe and the western world in general is threatening humanities sustained existence on the whole planet.film is a few years old but hotter than ever, as the spiral of madness is turning ever tighter and faster.....
Watch the full film with englishSubs below! or German Version (Austrian dialect in interviews) with German Subtitles for those troubled by the dialects
Topics include:
*Wasted food, (bread), Vienna wastes as much bread daily as Austria's second largest city, Graz, needs
*continual upsizing while reducing numbers of farms just to keep up
*food grown but used as biofuels,
*EU Fishing policies vs traditional more sustainable fishing, quality of the fish caught compared,examples given from France
*Tomatotrucking from Spain
*Rainforestdestruction and Social Injustice in Brazil for Genetically Modified Soybeans for Europe's Feedlots
*An Austrian Poultry Plant from the inside
*Rumanian Human and Animal run agriculture on teh chopping block of the EU, corrupt government and multinational corpoRATS
*Swiss Food and Agrobusiness importing 4/5 th of their grains even from india where 200.000.000 live with hunger
Industrialisation and agriculture "All the market’s interested in is the price. Taste is not really a consideration." Hannes Schulz, poultry breeder
*Subsidised injustice "If you go to the market in Senegal you can buy European produce for a third of the local prices. So the Senegalese peasant farmer no longer has any chance of earning a living." Jean Ziegler, UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food *Genetic engineering in agriculture "We fucked up the west some time ago, and now that we are coming to Romania, we will fuck up all the agriculture here . . ."
"We have to get used to the idea that there are no longer any GM-free foods." (Karl Otrok, Director of production, Pioneer Romania)
*Superfluity and starvation "Every five seconds a child under ten dies of starvation. A child that dies of starvation is in effect murdered." Jean Ziegler, UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food *The long road from the field to the table "These trucks are all full of soya. They pick up their loads in the north of Mato Grosso. From there the soya is transported 2,500 kilometres to port. And from there the soya is exported." Vincent José Puhl, , biologist (Brazil)
In the beginning there was a dumpster..... new finds at ALNATURA Super Natur Markt, Frankfurt Bornheim
good organic carrots make good organic carrot juice - Tasty!!!!!! and they make an excellent beginning for another great food-salvaging year
The wintery weather creates excellent conditions for thrown out food to last. Normally perishables are recommended to be kept between +4 and +8 deg C. Right now temperatures are hovering around freezing, apples and many other sweet fruits don't freeze until temperatures are well below freezing. Others like tropical bananas don't like frost! Except when severe frost freezes delicate lettuce and the-like quicker than a rescue mission can be arranged. Bread obviously does really well and when I find lots, I try to find empty freezer space and/or can give it away!
from ALNATURA, Königststein im Taunus, Jan.10,2010
***************************************************** ALNATURA Super Natur Markt, FrankfurtSachsenhausen Jan 11, 2010 nice shit! The people who work there, ordered as part of their job description to throw out this food, they may not take home themselves and which they have a hard time affording themselves must surely go crazy with post traumatic waste syndrome!
***************************************************** We went to Mespelbrunn-Heimbuchenthal near Aschaffenburg in the Spessart Forest Park, to celebrate my mom's 70th birthday. Jan 12, 2019 Many family and friends came and we all ate and stayed over at the hotel "Lamm" where i was watching closely what food might get thrown out from our dinner and afternoon coffee and cake session...... .......but more importantly, on our way there I had noticed from the car, that 1.5 km from our hotel in nearby Mespelbrunn, there was a fairly new REWE Supermarket.
So I used the break between Coffee and Champagne, Cake and Dinner, to go for a walk through the snow and forest up the valley, of course I brought a little stuff-sack, for the event that I would hit gold.
Well there was lots and lots of food, and I took what i could fit into my bag, though not organic, I figured I could always give away what I won't eat to some friends of my parents, who were familiar with my tasty hobby!
While most people hunt for their food in huge trap cages on dinky wheels, the freebies are out there lone and dark, freezing, which should only prolong their off-shelf life!
Among the finds were sliced cheese packages, yellow sausage, a kind of specialty cheese made from moldy milk (Handkäse) actually a favorite of mine, surprising: The expiry date, Jan14, 2010, had not even been reached on none of the things I picked, if you zoom in you can see it in the bins on the packages squeaky-clean-corporate-contrasts
The famous villains and robbers from the Spessart hills, no longer waiting in ambush alongside muddy forest tracks, they now hide their evil faces behind squeaky-clean corpoRATe logos, surrounded with "black-crack-oil-and-tar" covered parking lots for the "black-crack-oil"dependent "power-wheel-chairs" of our age (the most luxurious kinds of wheelchairs around, enabling the mentally handicapped/challenged-to-walk-more-than-100m citizens to reach their feedlots) My feedlot too! Thanks!
***************************************************** ALNATURA Super Natur Markt, Frankfurt Sachsenhausen Jan 15, 2010
***************************************************** ALNATURA Super Natur Markt, Frankfurt Sachsenhausen Jan 16, 2010
"Ohne Worte - Without Words"
A lot of todays food I took to Aschaffenburg and the Odenwald while visiting friends over the weekend, way to much good stuff to leave behind or to eat oneself in many weeks
An Exploration of TEGUT Supermarkets between Frankfurt and Aschaffenburg Jan 19, 2010
a supermarket chain founded on Steiner- or Anthroposophic principles, 20% of sales are organic, they aswell as Alnatura give much of "unsaleable" food to organisations such as: "Die Tafeln" but as always they have no need for it all!
"Fairytale-like Moments"
Certainly a rich dumpster on certain days, though locked and only occasionally accessible, one can expect a good amount of organic food there since nearly 20% of their sales are organic. I only saw some frozen meat and left it at that!
"Artwork from Nature" ....................and .............................."setting Standards"
Industriestraße 24 63811 Stockstadt
Then I went to Pflaumheim 10 km from there for the next one! Good one! Unlocked dumpsters! Rudelzauer Straße 63762 Großostheim-Pflaumheim Pflaumheim is a rural town with some old charming buildings and churches
found a few organic bananas which i took and some crappy junk cakes which i left, and some poison mouse-bait in the regular trash. Apparently expired!
Next thing I know, two female employees came out and tried to chase me out of there. I refuse to return the food, which I rescued from destruction, back into the bin! When the vocal one of the two threatens to call the police, I ask her if she also wants me to make a fuss over the illegally dumped mouse-poison in the regular garbage (right picture above). Immediately there is a change in tone, and a defensiveness appearing: "Ooooh, that wasn't me, i didn't work there this morning!!! Let me have a look...."
All of a sudden she's more friendly and I am able to explain that I am documenting the wastefulness of our society! She actually says that she will look into this mouse poison thing, but strangely enough for the time being leaves the boxes in there! Well who knows what happened, I hope she came to her senses and did something about it!
Slogan of nearby regional water-treatment plant: "Water is Life"
Industrialized nations spend billions each year to clean water for drinking from a variety of sources that are under continuous threat from industrial, modern agricultural and household as well as traffic related pollutants. A cost which is paid by all living things with their long term sometimes even short term health. As well as future generations, that will have to pay dearly for the often still unrecognized/invisible long term cumulative effects of our mistreatment of our home planet! Poisons that end up in the dumpsters and percolate into groundwater, fertilizers that end up in our drinking water directly. Pesticides in peoples conventionally grown foods
At the next and last TEGUT shop, no photograph, i forgot my duty, I was able to find some nice organic peppers, cherry tomatoes and a good load of mushrooms in pretty good shape, Unlocked dumpster, so that's good for those who might want to rescue some good food in: tegut... nah & gut Hasselstraße 26 63762 Großostheim-Ringheim
Heading home!
Jan 20, 2010 Mom cleaning nice mushrooms from TEGUT for lunch
My parents as children were both forced to flee from their homes at the end of World War II, although they have worked up material wealth all around themselves, they have still retained a common sense regarding food, the looks and smells of it, so that the mere fact that it came from a dumpster is not the most important thing to observe. They had to eat out of dumpsters and survived with their families, although the stuff they ate was never such nice stuff as i bring home. First they were in shock and disbelief, still shaking their heads when i come with the next load! "Unbelievable!" What does it look like, what does it smell like, does it taste bad? The expiry date means nothing more than a recommended date by which to use things. From Experience we know for dairy, often weeks or months later it's still good.
***************************************************** ALNATURA Super Natur Markt, Frankfurt Sachsenhausen
ALNATURA Super Natur Markt, Frankfurt Bockenheim, Jan 26, 2010
a totally insane amount of oranges and mandarins in nets, TOMATOS ASIDE standard procedure, rip open the nets quickly and take out the bad ones 10-25% only, leaves me quickly with 10-15 kg of great organic fruit to take home and juice
my cruiser getting loaded down with the goods
later at home, YUM!
Orange Juice, Orange Juice, gotta have my orange juice, reminds me of the famous late physicist and Nobel Prize winner Dr Richard Feynman, who could occasionally be heard singing and drumming bongos using a modulated way of singing english so it would become almost intelligible, singing this orange juice thing such that it sounded like a very tribal and foreign chant, that was later used by the Ondar Project mixed in with Tuvan Throatsinging, well here comes Richard Feynman on YouTube drumming up for Orange Juice!!! My kind of Man!
ALNATURA Super Natur Markt, Frankfurt Bornheim, Jan 28, 2010
with friends A. & J.
Nice glow, nice marketing, feel good strategy using colors according to Anthropological teachings, Rudolf Steiner, would have been happy but not about the colorful waste that is produced on a daily basis
first, a quick scan of what is available, without digging deeper into hidden treasures This could be rich!!!!
Then we hit a jackpot of dairy and meats
screening and packing, we left a lot behind.....thinking hard who to give stuff to
Afterwards a little peek at ALNATURA in Frankfurt Sachsenhausen ON MY WAY HOME, oooooooooopppssss!!!!
...that's where i hit a jackpot of oranges and mandarins, generally these red nets with usually one or two squished or moldy ones that I just sort out...
and here back home, taking stock of the afternoons findsin detail ....Mango, 4 boxes of cherry tomatoes, grapes, sausages for the neighbors and parents' freezer(i don't eat meat anymore) 3x irish salmon, spanish air dried pork, 8x Chiemgauer Naturfleisch, tomatoes, loads of oranges and mandarins (approx 10-15 kg), spelt-buns, toast, a head of red cabbage, brocolli....
....Camembert, tofu, goat and sheep cheeses, kefir, 3 giant red beets, butter...
sTiLlLife there still IS life in this!! The Loot of the day in total, minus what A. & J. had hauled away Perhaps I should change my name to Loot-wig (from Ludwig and "wigged out" meaning "crazy high")
Well, that's that for January I think!!! Many Thanks for all the abundance!
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