2015 Foodies of the Year: Jen Rustemeyer and Grant Baldwin

These thought provokers produced the award-winning film, Just Eat It.

You can find a lot of free food over the course of six months (thousands of kilograms of it, in fact), if you know where to look. Vancouverites Grant Baldwin and Jen Rustemeyer spent half a year perfecting the art of urban foraging—think dumpster diving, haunting the Granville Island market and scouring back alleys for close-dated ingredients—to reclaim just a fraction of the food North America wastes each year. Their award-winning 2014 documentary, Just Eat It: A Food Waste Story, is an inspiring, humbling film that has us rethinking our own consumer habits by exploring the devastating expiry dates, portion sizes and produce aesthetics that compel us to throw away almost 50 percent of our food products. And as Baldwin and Rustemeyer chronicle nearly every (surprisingly decadent) meal they put together from their finds along the way, we find ourselves getting a little hungry: one man’s trash turns out to be a gourmet treasure.