 I’ve been thinking a bit more about food waste,
and the several ways it might be reduced, or at least redeemed.
While it’s too wet to burn,
food waste can be
digested by our little friends the anaerobic bacteria to produce methane. (This happens in
landfills, but the conversion under those conditions is inefficient and
recovering the gas is hard.) In South Africa, a new factory fattens fly larvae on
animal manure, blood and brains, then grinds the adult flies into fish food. An
Ohio company is gearing up to do the same, using leftovers from breweries, ethanol production and food
processing waste as feedstocks for black soldier fly larvae.
However we used unusable food
once it’s hauled away, the hauling only compounds the waste. Think about your
morning cantaloupe. Diesel fuel was burned toÂ
bring it to your store from (probably) California, and you burned
gasoline to haul it home. More diesel is burned to haul away the rind and
seeds, each step reducing supplies of non-renewable energy, adding to an
atmosphere already burdened by carbon dioxide, and depleting another resource
not usually thought of as such, clean air.
It gets worse. There a fifth of a gallon of water in a
two-pound cantaloupe, water that had to be pumped into the fields.
Drought-ravaged California has been shipping billions of pounds of water out of
the state in the form of farm produce. Whatever the store charges for it, that’s an expensive cantaloupe.
Somewhere in and around Springfield there are families that preserve local fruit and vegetables in season so that fruit can be enjoyed in the
winter by traveling to their cupboard and not to Shop ‘n’ Save. I think of them
as our equivalent of the Irish monks on Skellig Michael, dedicated to keeping the old
knowledge alive in the hope of civilization reawakening.
Their evangelizing is falling on deaf ears.
Leaving aside the national aversion to useful labor, a home compost pile, even
one that is tidied up by being put into a compost pot or a compost box or a
compost cage, will never do for homeowners whose model for a nice backyard is
the miniature golf course. Here’s a test for those who aren’t sure. Take a
photo of you living room with no one in it. Then have someone take a photo of
that room with you sitting in it. Would a compost pile really make your
backyard look worse than you make your living room look? Of course not. Get
over yourself.
This article appears in Oct 16-22, 2014.
