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Show www.dailyutahchronicle.com 5 OPINION Tuesday April 17, 2012 Dumpster diving won't end hunger •Pr MIMI MARSTALLER rad& StaffWriter eremy Seifert is a dedicated dumpster diver who feeds his family almost exclusively from food he has pulled from the dumpsters behind Trader Joe's — a grocery store chain. Indeed, the table he sets for his friends contains a veritable feast, expertly prepared by a chef friend. Blood orange and red onion salad, roasted chicken stuffed with feta and spinach with an orange citrus beurre blanc. Not bad for a free meal. "There is something beautiful about turning someone's trash into a delicious dinner with friends," he said. Seifert is the writer and director of the documentary "DIVE! Living off America's Waste" Although dumpster divers don't have to pay cash for their groceries, diving shouldn't be considered the easy alternative to the shopping cart routine. Retrieving the goods is no small feat, since diving is typically done at night after grocery stores have disposed of everything that has passed its sell-by date. Sometimes the good stuff is buried beneath bags of real garbage — the stuff we don't serve to our friends. Sifting through produce to remove the odd, rotting lettuce leaf or moldy tomato is another chore. Even after hauling the food home in the back seat, there's still the sorting, cleaning, processing and freezing of the food. In one scene, Seifert's wife confesses that she sometimes dreads the task of cleaning and packing the large quantities of food her husband brings home. The documentary states that half the food produced in the United States ends up in the trash. Except for the fraction that divers salvage from dumpsters, all that food, about 96 billion pounds a -T ONff Dut44Psersn comoc ...mow Go *IOW • a' • 0• `CAI uht.A.05 °4 111/2012.WILLUS BRANHAM/The Daily Utah Chronicle year, ends up in landfills. But encouraging more dumpster diving isn't necessarily the solution. First of all, such food scavenging is illegal. No law bans removing garbage from a dumpster, but doing so almost always involves trespassing on private property. Secondly, dumpster diving doesn't make practical sense for many. "What is a single working mom going to do?" said Gina Cornia, director of Utahns Against Hunger. "She can't bring her kids dumpster diving in the night." Dumpster diving is not a reason- able solution to groceries, especially for those who face genuine hunger. An effective redistribution of the bounty that gets thrown out requires systemic change. The Good Samaritan Act, signed by President Clinton in 1996, aims to redirect excess food by protecting stores from liability when they donate to nonprofit organizations. The responsibility to act lies within grocery stores, and some companies answer the call more valiantly than others. Supervalu, which owns the local Fresh Market stores, started the Digitization shouldn't end printed books T he academic year is coming to a close and textbook buyback is right on its heels. The amount of money exchanged between students and the campus bookstore brings to question the decision of whether or not to purchase digital books. I am here to say that no matter how popular ebooks get, they can't hold a candle to the printed word, be it in novels or reference books. There is no question that the world is headed into the digital frontier. This can be seen by the government's ever-expansive attempts to control technology with legislation like SOPA, PIPA and The Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act, as well as the release of new consumer technologies like the Amazon Kindle or the Barnes and Noble Nook. The eventual destruction of the print industry seems inevitable. Digital literature is on the rise with 21 percent of Americans having read an ebook within the last year, up from the 17 percent in 2010 according to the Pew Internet and American Life Project. An immediate point of interest to students is that digital textbooks do not actually offer a cheaper alternative to printed textbooks. Despite the lowered costs of production, digital texts maintain relatively high prices in comparison to the vast market of available used books. However, this circumstance only affects immediate decisions, rather than where the writing industry is headed in the future. The war between print and digital boils down to the war between art and commerce. Electronic media is portable, sleek and easy. It has been produced to streamline convenience. By no means is any of what ebooks bring to the table a bad thing, it is simply the result of consumerism's effect on the medium. Printed text is wasteful, bulky and costly. Its existence is the result of expression StaffWriter slamming full-force into technology constraints, yet some still fight for the perpetuation of the industry. It is difficult to argue for the printed word over the downloaded one, as the latter is a medium in constant development. Anything that print brings to the table can be replicated by technology given enough time, and that's the underlying assumption to the dying paper industry. Some aspects of print cannot be replicated, though. The book arts program (located on the fourth floor of the Marriott Library) exists because people possess the inspiration to bind books. Ink upon paper is permanent. The foundation of modern civilization is writing, but is fluid enough to be destabilized by the ever-changing beast that is digitization. Obviously, there is no reason why someone cannot engage in either form of literature. Some might find that it works best to supplement their personal libraries with a digital device for practical reading. However, to say that print is dead is succumbing to the idea that forward progression is all that matters. Archiving is a strong aspect of humanity and while the digital realm is now part of that, there is always something to be said about having a hard copy of an important work. So while the digital media takes the world by storm, it is important to hold onto the value of the written word. letters@ chronicle.utah.edu "Fresh Rescue" program for expired food that is still safe to eat. Furthermore, the U's campus food service, Chartwells, donates to food charities in Salt Lake City. They also give the fruit and vegetable scraps from the kitchen to the campus gardens for compost. "Chartwells' donations allow us to make our own compost, which can be quite expensive," said garden coordinator, Alexandra Parvaz, and the bags of scraps are good for more than compost. "Much of the food that comes from the kitchen is perfectly fine. We let the volunteers go through it before we compost it." Some grocery stores don't tolerate free-riding dumpster divers. Trader Joe's and Walmart are known to lock their dumpsters. At first, the business argument may appear reasonable. "They should pay in the store like everyone else!" But that logic crumbles when seen from a more comprehensive standpoint: How can one protest to filling hungry bellies with food that a store considers garbage? letters@ chronicle.utah.edu Online Comments "Don't deny theory of evolution in schools" (Michael Ukkestad on April 16) Opinion ■ Mark Hausam posted on 04.16.12 at 9:50 a.m. According to this article, the scientific theory of evolution includes in it the assertion that God's activity and guidance were not involved in the evolutionary development of life.This would imply, for example, that humans were not created intentionally by God.The article advocates that only the scientific theory of evolution should be taught in public science classrooms. If the scientific theory of evolution excludes God's activity and intention, then the article is in effect advocating that public schools, in their science classes, teach that human were not intentionally created by God, which is a dramatic rejection of a central truth claim of nearly all theistic religions, including pretty much all forms of Christianity, Islam, Judaism, etc. Am I understanding this correctly? Is the author of the article saying that our public educational institutions should teach that humans were not intentionally created by God? And we can take this beyond the theory of evolution. Do all scientific theories exclude divine activity and guidance, as Dr. Clark's comments about gravity suggest? If this is the case, then whenever a scientific theory is taught, it is also being taught that God had no role in whatever the process under discussion was. So God had no role in the origin of the universe, the creation of galaxies, stars, the earth, the origin of life, or pretty much anything else in all of known reality.This sounds to me like a position indistinguishable from the position usually known as "atheism." So is the author of the article advocating that our public educational institutions should teach atheism to students in our science classrooms? RAndreason posted on 04.16.12 at 11:10 a.m. Mr Hausam, your use of the word 'atheist', Cone who is without religion') is a great way to describe the way science should be taught in classrooms. I find your attempt to harness the power of the 'A word' to fuel an ad-hominem attack laughable, though. I can't say I've ever heard a fellow atheist claim to know that there is no god. Such a claim, we can surely agree, is unreasonable. We just say that we simply see no reason to believe in gods, just as we see no evidence to support the existence of purple flying unicorns. We find claims about the origins of life contained in ancient books of myth written by bronze age goat herders to be a bad source for science, and we don't want creationists taking something so sacred as science and reason and profaning them by moving their book of bedtime stories from the fiction section into our nonfiction section of the library, so to speak.Atheists are fine with sharing shelf space in the library with all kinds of books, but books about Zeus and Thor and Bigfoot and Jesus do not belong in the nonfiction section. If you want to teach your kids that Satan buried dinosaur bones just to tempt people not to believe in Jesus, do that at church on Sunday or when you're doing your bedtime stories. I want my kids learning science and reason in taxpayer funded classrooms. ColoradoRob posted on 04.16.12 at 3:06 p.m. How come we educate kids? Is it to churn out people who think like us and believe all the same things we believe? Or is it to create reasoners, capable of researching things and forming their own opinions? I homeschool. Don't worry, Mr. Extreme Athiest, I'm aquainting my kids with your position, including the fossil record and the various dating techniques, and the principle of uniformitarianism and all that.And fear not, Mr. Extreme creationist Christian, we know all about the works of Bishop Usher and the varying opinions about the book of Genesis, and we take them to church where they learn God created the earth. I figure if both of you are equally ticked off at me, then I'm doing it right. |