Waste Not, Want Not

Energy and food crises are finally turning attention toward waste (see Sunday NY Times article on food waste). It takes talent, I’ve realized, to be a good steward of resources, to be creative and smart about recycling and repurposing so that nothing goes to waste. And vigilance, too. We Americans, as a whole, seem to be lacking this talent, mostly because we’ve not been forced to develop it. Once we are forced to, though, it will hopefully become habit.

I’m working on it. Food waste makes me crazy, so I’m paying more attention to quantities – what we buy, what we cook, what we consume, what goes straight to the freezer. Your freezer is your best friend when it comes to food conservation. In the country, we have a compost pile—which also takes talent. Been trying to master the fine art/science of composting, including turning the thing regularly (and banning J. from it, with his manly insistence on throwing hunks of meat and all manner of protein on the pile).

We used to collect kitchen scraps in the city and bring them out with us to the country. But that got sort of icky. In San Francisco, an innovative city-run composting program is getting some attention. How to make it happen in NYC? Garbage disposal is very expensive in NYC, so any financial incentives for people to compost would work, I think. Plus, the city can then sell the compost to small-scale farms and gardeners.