Composting Changed My Relationship to Food Waste

Maybe it has to do with my decade-long career as a young gymnast where I was always reheating dinner at 9 p.m. after practice. Or maybe it’s a general microwaved-texture thing. Either way, I will go so far as to say I loathe leftovers.

 

Yet, leftovers are inevitable in my household. Between varying hunger levels, my occasional brain melt when I am “inspired” (for the 40th time) to do food prep on Sunday, or recipes written for eight servings when it’s only me, my husband, and a toddler (enough said), our Tupperware containers are almost always in full use.

 

But as much as I hate leftovers, I also hate wasting food. I was raised to not waste food, and I am still recovering from a poor-graduate-student mentality. Throwing out food is so hard for me. It brings me immediately back to Nature’s Classroom, sitting on cafeteria picnic benches with a counselor holding up a giant five-gallon bucket measuring our food waste and challenging my entire 6th-grade class to only take what we plan on eating.

 

I love being conscientious about food consumption and waste, but you can see how this runs in direct conflict with my hatred of leftovers.

We started composting in our condo in the city before we had our daughter, but I’ve never appreciated it more than when our kid started eating solid food. As my daughter has grown from mashed foods to toddler-sized (and toddler-nibbled and toddler-rejected) food, we are left with a lot of leftovers that should never see the insides of a Tupperware container.

 

I try to maintain a pattern of exposing and re-exposing our daughter to a variety of foods as we move through the toddler picky eating stage of her life, but this leaves me feeling frustrated and guilty as she throws, spits out, and rejects every new thing in front of her. All that leftover food has surfaced memories of five-gallon buckets of melded food scraps, shopping on a grad school budget, and feeling guilty every time I couldn’t bear to reheat my leftovers one more time.

 

Composting has offered me a new option when I feel guilty about wasting food but can’t bear to keep it. Knowing our food scrapes are being professionally composted and donated to local farms provides much-needed mental relief.

 

And it could not be easier. Our compost goes out once a week on the same day as our trash and recycling, through the partnership the composting company has with the town. We are provided with a large container that has a tight lid, plus composting bags (which we purchase refills of on Amazon but could also buy through our composting company). The large container stays in our garage, and we have a small compost bin on our counter for easy access. The only time the compost smells a bit is the hottest two weeks in August, and it has never attracted insets or critters in the four years we’ve composted.

 

I’m so grateful composting is becoming the norm, simplified to allow city and suburban dwellers like me, who don’t have the time or space to do it on their own, to participate. Now, when I clean up my daughter’s dinner plate, the remaining turkey slices, half-eaten hummus, and a partially chewed grape get immediately and unapologetically dumped into our bin on the counter. I gleefully rip through our fridge on Sunday morning before I grocery shop, emptying any and all leftover containers that have aged to the point of no return.