Culture

Activist Crosses Atlantic Consuming Only Out-Of-Date Food

food waste Dreamstime
Elizabeth Licata|

Food waste is an enormous problem across the globe. People throw away tons of perfectly usable, nutritious food every year. Now one French activist pedaled himself across the Atlantic ocean in a boat while eating only out-of-date food to raise awareness about unnecessary food waste.

According to the Daily Mail, 29-year-old Baptiste Dubanchet had the idea to pedal himself from Paris to New York, using only calories from food that would have been thrown away. In January, 2017, he left Paris on a bicycle and pedaled through France, Spain, and Morocco. He ate only out-of-date food during the journey, and he estimates he traveled between 40 and 75 miles per day on the bicycle.

When he got to Morocco, Dubanchet switched from a bicycle to a pedal boat, and he set off across the Atlantic Ocean, taking his store of expired food with him. It wasn't just a couple days past the "use by" date, either. Among the expired food Dubanchet ate on his voyage were 50-year-old honey, decade-old lentils, and rice from 2011.

Last month someone shocked the world by donating a 46-year-old can of soup to a local food pantry. Maybe they should have donated it to Dubanchet instead. He might actually have eaten it.

Dubanchet spent 91 days alone on the boat, and he said he felt like his life was constantly at risk, but not from his diet.

"A giant whale came right up to the boat," he said. "She was two times bigger than the boat so she could have flipped it or broken it with her tail. It was so scary."

Dubanchet also had problems when his machines broke down. Like when his radar detector broke and he could not tell if other boats were coming, so he could only sleep for 20 minutes at a time, because he had to be awake to avoid collisions.

"I would be afraid in these times because it was very dangerous, I would ask myself more than ever if I would still be alive the next day," he said.

Once Dubanchet arrived in Miami, he switched back to a bicycle and pedaled to New York. The bicycle part of the trip was much easier, because he would always meet people on the road. On the boat, he was completely alone.

"This project was a way to find and promote ways to end food waste for good," he said. "Fresh food should be freeze-dried instead of thrown away. And dry products should no longer be thrown away if we remove the best before dates, people will keep them until they are eaten.

Dubanchet hopes his extreme, grueling journey fueled only by calories that were meant to be thrown away will help shed light on the fact that every year people waste more than a billion tons of food, food waste is the biggest contributor to landfills, and other mind-blowing facts about food waste.

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