Our friend Diane sometimes comes by St. Joe’s Villa on Monday morning after we collect the compost from one of the local restaurants. Diane likes to get first pick of their kitchen scraps. The outer leaves of the cabbage and romaine lettuce she feeds to her chickens. Then she scours the bin for other morsels she can use in her own kitchen – celery heads, the outer layers of onion skin, chunks of potato. She finds good use for all these scraps that the restaurant considers too unsightly to plate for their customers. Much of it will end up in a large pot being cooked up on Diane’s stovetop in her next batch of Compost Stock, which in turn will end up providing the base for many a spring and summer soup to come.
I can’t think of any better way to illustrate the revolution that’s necessary to change how we think about food waste. Ordinarily the food cycle runs one way – from farm to kitchen to table to trash but Diane has found a way to intervene with a secondary loop that repurposes some of the trash and diverts it back to the kitchen and table. It’s a measure of just how fundamental waste has become to our American way of life that delicious meals can be concocted from what a restaurant throws away.
This week Diane surprised me with a Leap Day gift – a mason jar filled with the most recent batch of her Compost Stock. It was still warm when I got home and took a taste. A delicious mix of onion and celery that I will most certainly make use of to liven up dinner tonight.
It’s not too late to sign up for the spring season of our community compost program. Be part of the solution by adding your food scraps to the compost pile!
