Goethe Institute and Camcorder Guerrillas: Skipping Dinner / Taste the Waste

A film double-bill exploring the reasons for and consequences of mass food production and waste, and the ways in which people are coming together to fight back against a culture endangering the environment and the world's growing population.

Skipping Dinner

A tasteful documentary by Glasgow-based collective camcorder guerrillas on the connections between industrialised food production, supermarket-based shopping, climate change and consumer waste. Most people in the UK get the majority of their food from supermarkets. But this food is mostly produced from a global agricultural system that requires the use of vast amounts of unsustainable fossil fuels and pesticides. As a result, global food production is the biggest contributor of carbon emissions that are causing climate change. In the UK, 8 million tonnes of food is thrown away by households every year. In Glasgow and in every other city across the western world, the food industry throws away tons of surplus food. But wherever there is waste, 21st-century hunter-gatherers are at work! Skipping Dinner follows Glasgow's freegan community gathering food for a special performance banquet where the diners will feast on the finest, locally sourced, discarded produce.

Taste the Waste

The food thrown away in Europe and North America alone could feed the world’s hungry three times over. Affluent societies live in abundance: around half of all foodstuffs end up in the rubbish, mostly before they’ve even gone to the consumer. The public is only slowly becoming aware of the extent of this misuse. Taste the Waste examines the reasons for this and looks into the consequences food waste has on the feeding of a growing world population, as well as its impact on the changing climate. The documentary was filmed in Europe, Africa, Asia and the USA. Should anyone dare hope that a single film could change the awareness of its viewers, Valentin Thurn’s work could very well fulfil this wish. “A globe-trotting survey of conspicuous consumption’s downside” - Dennis Harvey in Variety.