Waste Stream: Days six and seven
The waste stream week is over, and I feel it was pretty successful. The final meal was some out-of-date turkey bacon and a couple fried eggs made into sandwiches. No salad tonight, mainly because I did not bring home any vegetables that go well on a salad.
I still have a couple of brown artichokes and a burly looking rutabaga to cook. They can wait until tomorrow or the next day; I’m not in a hurry with those.
Overall this has been an interesting experiment. It has reminded me that I can go quite a while without buying groceries or relying on the food stashed away in various cupboards. More than anything else it became a project on relearning some survival skills. This is never a bad thing. The fact that the grocery bill was zero dollars for the week is an added perk.
The waste stream is not a solution to anything. The waste stream will not feed tons of hungry people unless it were managed with numbers in mind and included a dedicated group of people. If anything, the waste stream is a reminder of the excess that our current economic model creates day in and day out. It speaks to an exploitation of resources and indicates that we waste food simply because we can. All the energy that goes into producing, harvesting, transporting, storing, boxing, unboxing, etc is lost as soon as the product goes into the trash. Sure, folks are paid during every step of the process, but you can’t eat a paycheck and hope to get any nutritional value from it.
What am I trying to prove? Basically I am saying that we can eat well balanced meals out of the trash. I am saying that we should be mindful of our waste and take responsibility for it. I am saying that we should reincorporate food waste back into the system that brought it to market – get it back to farm workers, integrate it into new food, anything to keep it out of the landfill where it will be buried and sequestered from the nutrient cycles. Compost the leftovers that went bad instead of throwing them in the trash can. Disregard all the warnings about not putting oils, fats and meat in the compost pile. The critters will dig for it and aerate your pile or, if they don’t, those things will all break down just like any other organic matter. Cooked food decomposes just like vegetable scraps, maybe even faster.
Take responsibility for your waste…