You would be amazed what you can find in a grocery store's Dumpster... Jeremy Seifert/Dive

Each year in the United States, a whopping 96 billion pounds of uneaten food is thrown out, and most of it ends up in landfills and incinerators, accounting for 14 percent of the solid waste stream. But a tiny fraction is rescued by Dumpster divers like Jeremy Seifert, who, until recently, collected so much discarded food from his local grocery store that he had to buy a deep freezer to store it. Such bounty has saved his family of four a lot of money, but it has also opened Seifert’s eyes to the stunning amount of food waste in the U.S., a problem he documents in his new film Dive!, which was released on DVD this week. Sarah Schmidt talked with Seifert about the joy of finding a carton of 11 good eggs and his ongoing campaign against food waste at Trader Joe’s.

What possessed you to start feeding your family cast-off food?

Four or five years ago, we had houseguests, and one Sunday morning they brought home bags and bags of food from a nearby Dumpster -- tons of premade salads, fruit, sushi and a whole garbage bag full of bread. My wife and I were shocked. But after they told us all about it, I got a few guys together and we went to our local Trader Joe’s and tried it ourselves. We found everything you could think of -- fruits and veggies, eggs, a big bag of meat, as well as the premade salads and loaves and loaves of bread. Some was going to "expire" the next day or one egg was missing from a carton, but still, it was fresh, delicious, free food. We were hooked.

Were you a cash-strapped film student at the time?

I was working for a nonprofit, so we had enough to pay our bills and buy food, but we weren’t exactly rich. Saving $300 or $400 a month on groceries was pretty tantalizing. And it was really good food that we wouldn’t otherwise have bought, like steak.

How can you tell what’s safe to eat?

From my experience, I’d say 75 percent of what’s in a Dumpster is edible. Maybe even 90 percent. But I figured this out as I went, and by doing some research -- a lot of food-safety Google searches. But usually it’s pretty obvious from looking, though I learned that you also have to smell it, too.

That sounds ominous.

It is. Once we found some beautiful-looking red, marbled steak, but when we got it home, we realized it smelled horrible. There are chemicals beneath the cellophane to keep meat red because shoppers are so obsessed with the way food looks. And that’s actually part of the problem. People have become removed from the way food is really supposed to look and smell because everything has been engineered to look perfect and packaged up so you can’t smell it. So producers put on these "Sell-By" dates, which are sort of arbitrary, and then stores dump the whole package the day before, even though the majority is still fresh enough to eat. We’d find pristine apples, strawberries, salad greens, even meat and chicken, just thrown out and still cold.

Is every grocery store like that?

Most, but some already do much better. Two Albertsons stores in Santa Barbara just went Zero Waste by donating or composting almost all of their food waste and increasing recycling. There’s also a new store opening in Austin called In.gredients that will be Zero Waste and package-free. So we know that it’s possible to do things differently, but as consumers, we have to expect and demand improvement. Twenty years ago, you might have seen a store making some food donations and said, "Hey, neat, congratulations," but now we know they can do even better, so we need to make them.

You’ve asked Trader Joe’s to adopt Zero Waste principles. Has the company responded?

No, but they are doing a much better job than when I started my quest. I was cc’d on a company-wide email telling every store in the country how to step up donations to their local chapter of Feeding America, a hunger-relief charity they’ve partnered with. So that’s progress.

Don’t grocery stores that give to a local food bank have good reason to worry that they’ll be sued for, say, passing on E. coli?

Food safety is important, and there are definitely some logistical challenges. But they can be easily overcome, and they are overcome all the time, by many grocery stores, including some individual Trader Joe’s. There’s also something called the Good Samaritan Food Donation Act, which was passed in 1996, that specifically helps protect stores from lawsuits when they donate food. I went to a lot of different stores with a copy of it. Some of the managers had never even heard about it. But corporations aren’t really set up to try to encourage things like that.

Why do grocery stores waste so much food in the first place? Doesn’t it cost them money?

It does, and ultimately they don’t want to waste food. Stores actually only waste about five percent, as opposed to 10 percent for the average household. So in a sense, they’re doing twice as well as most of us are, but of course they’re huge, so they have a lot of impact. We need to look at the whole system, because food waste happens on farms, in transport, in the stores and restaurants, and in our homes. Unbelievably, only about half of the food we produce in the U.S. is ever eaten. That means we’re wasting 300 million barrels of oil a year and about a quarter of our fresh water supply on food we never eat. So we need to do better at all levels.

Dive!: Living Off America’s Waste is now available on DVD at divethefilm.com and via Netflix and iTunes.