Home cooks can add to a counter-top compost for a more sustainable kitchen

Home cooks can add to a counter-top compost for a more sustainable kitchen
                        
I cook a lot, at least two meals a day. We usually skip breakfast (I know, I know), except on the weekends when there is more time for a leisurely morning meal. During the work/school week, there’s no time, and we aren’t pouring cereal out of boxes, people. Whoever said breakfast is the most important meal of the day was wrong. I always say, eat when you’re hungry. That’s the most important meal of the day. Lunches are generally packed, but they still require a little cooking and preparation the night before. Leftovers make great lunches. Cooking provides us with a variety of tasty and healthy meals and a boatload of stuff for the compost pile. When you cook with fresh food, there’s going to be some waste. Vegetable scraps like onion skins and celery leaves make great vegetable stock before they find their way into the compost pile. Apple cores, grape stems, banana and citrus peels, the part of lettuce no one wants to eat and eggshells make up the bulk of the kitchen counter compost collection that is emptied every other day, sometimes once a day, depending on the menus. Coffee grounds, bread crusts (because someone in the house, I’m not naming any names, doesn’t like them) and cucumber skin (ew, what’s with the wax?) end up in the bin. It seems like there is less kitchen waste for the compost during the growing season. I don’t peel as much stuff, because it’s not wax-covered like conventionally grown food from huge agricultural operations. My peppers have less of that weird, white bitter stuff inside; lettuce can be picked when it is very young, before it gets tough. I could eat more seasonally if it was just me, but my family would quickly tire of potatoes and onions. I draw the line at tomatoes. I will not consume another fresh tomato until July. I have accepted that. Alternating between green waste (kitchen scraps) and brown waste (leaves and yard debris) will keep the compost cooking all winter if you stir it up a bit each week. Even if it’s left to its own devices, and you never so much as look at, it will eventually decompose. No, it does not stink. Consider all the stuff not being trucked to the landfill. Modern humans are rather good at creating waste, but not so good at dealing with it sustainably. Food waste that goes to the landfill breaks down anaerobically and produces methane; methane is 21 times more potent than carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas. Greenhouse gases are bad through and through. Period. Between the cow farts and the rotting food at landfills, we’re stinking up and heating up the planet with little regard for the future generations who have to live here. With as many scraps that end up in the compost bin, it doesn’t make a dent in what I would need to continually amend my garden and flowerbeds. I buy compost from a local producer for that. I see the backyard compost bin as a way to put waste to good use, keep it out of a landfill and provide a habitat for several varieties of beneficial creatures. Worms dig it. Seriously.


Loading next article...

End of content

No more pages to load