Anna Chai

(On TV, February 2021) It’s difficult not to feel pangs of waste of an entirely unintended sort when watching Wasted! The Story of Food Waste, as the late great Anthony Bourdain (who committed suicide in 2018) begins the film by wondering if we even deserve to live and concludes it on a spectacularly dark comic riff on how a film built to his specifications would have viewers kill themselves. Ouch. Still, there’s a great documentary beyond those unfortunate allusions, as directors Anna Chai and Nari Kye explore the roots and solutions to the problem of food waste. The statistics are horrifying (a full third of all food produced is never eaten), and they’re not solely made of people throwing away what’s rotten in the fridge: Whether we’re talking about farms throwing away most of what they grow, of a production chain discarding useful by-products, of supermarkets overstocking and then throwing away unsold food or, indeed, of household food waste, Wasted! examines the problem at all levels, and also offers a number of solutions, both systemic and personal. Celebrity chefs make up a good chunk of the talking heads featured in the film — as they repeat, chefs are trained to waste as little as possible, and they know what’s delicious to eat and what’s not. As someone who gardens, owns and fills up a full-sized composter, I hardly need to be told about the personal aspect of avoiding food waste. But the film does treat it as a systemic problem first, and the solutions (in order: Feed People; Feed livestock; use as fuel; compost; never to landfill) are used to structure the film itself. Peppered with Bourdain’s typically likable narration, the film takes us around the world in search of solutions and ideas. Wasted! The Story of Food Waste is a good overview to an underreported (but immediately relatable) problem, and it’s frequently an eye-opener. If nothing else, I’ll try to feed my composter less often from my kitchen.