Celebrate Garbage

COOKING A MEAL is sometimes the easy part. Often cleanup is tougher than pre-meal labor. A kitchen disaster scene -- grated carrot on the floor, flour in the counter cracks, a zillion greasy measuring cups -- is much more fun to make than to clean up.

Better writers than I have espoused the spiritual benefits of washing dishes mindfully. But how about the garbage produced when peeling vegetables, opening cans, or removing protective plastic wrappers? How a person treats these leftovers also says a good deal about his or her worldview: Is it linear or cyclic, result- or process-oriented, myopic or global?

Modern America calls leftovers "waste" -- the messy remainders of a finished task that are shoved into a bin, placed on the curb, and taken away to be dealt with by someone else at an unknown location ... out of sight, out of mind, and out of my sanitary kitchen. Such a kitchen and such a mindset defy the cyclic nature of life, where things come back around and the death of the old nourishes the new. Thus re-cycling. It is a hopeful trend that many people now do indeed recycle.

I am impressed by the various ways different families handle their kitchen garbage. I watched a Seattle friend, who has a yard surrounded by field and forest, open up the window above her sink and with flair toss lettuce leaves and tomato cores out onto the lawn. A D.C. couple, living in a second-floor apartment, freeze their food scraps during the week, then take a Saturday jaunt to a friend's garden. Occasionally they may make a midnight foray to a wooded riverbank with a shovel.

A community household in Wilmington, Delaware utilizes a vacant lot next door, leaving the orange peels in their uncovered compost heap in clear view of all passersby. One friend has hundreds of special garbage-gobbling worms in a bucket underneath his sink. My father has a row of galvanized pails for glass, tin, aluminum, and plastic on the back porch; my father-in-law has city-provided blue bins in his garage. (In both cases the fathers are more enthused than the mothers about recycling.)

I have seen industrial kitchens where cooks take time to peel off labels, wash, and smash big tin cans; restaurant managers who save day-old food for homeless shelters; produce managers who save clippings for local goat breeders. I have noticed that clothespins seem to be the common solution for drying newly washed plastic bags.

It is indeed work to clean up food containers and to haul collections to recycling centers. But like anything else, once it becomes habit, those neat and compact piles become a source of satisfaction. And then one has energy to move on to the next challenge -- not using so many containers in the first place. The tomatoes my partner and I put up last summer have greatly reduced the contents of our tin can basket, which used to consist mainly of tomato paste and puree cans. Our next goal is to learn how to make yogurt, as most of the plastic in our cupboard seems to be old yogurt tubs.

Composting, as seen in these not particularly orthodox examples, is not as much work as some would make it out to be! Things want to rot. It's the natural order. Solve your individual hurdles (small backyard, city rats, cold weather) as creatively as you can, and let the creatures do the rest. You'll have some entertaining conversations along the way as you develop your own system.

So eat, drink, and remember that your garbage is a merry gold mine.

Carey Burkett was an organic vegetable farmer in Hallettsville, Texas when this article appeared.