Composting: Are You Going to Eat that Garbage?
By Brad Masi

Garbage – and dealing with it – seems to occupy a good part of our lives. It accumulates. It smells. It causes a nuisance. It also attracts flies, raccoons and rats if allowed to lie around. Garbage embodies all that is useless or disposable in our lives. We grudgingly drag bags and cans of it to the curb each week. Best that somebody else pick it up and haul it far away. Most of us want to avoid spending time thinking about it.

Much of the garbage that Americans dispose of consists of organic wastes – leaves, grass and food – which is deposited in landfills and gives off methane, a significant contributor to global climate change. Climate change and a variety of other strains on the global biosphere require us to change course quickly. As we look for solutions and alternatives, we should consider the processes of natural ecosystems that have evolved over millions of years. These natural systems treat “garbage” very differently than we do today.

Looking to nature as our teacher, we find a perfectly cyclical and self-renewing system to deal with our refuse. In a forest, there is no such thing as trash. One organism's waste becomes another organism's food. Leaves eventually become topsoil; towering trees fall to feed insects, fungi and micro-organisms. Growth and decay are a necessary part of a dynamic process that produces topsoil and supports ecosystems that become richer and more diverse over time.

We can use the growth and decay cycle that we observe in nature to turn our garbage into an investment in “soil capital” that accrues value over time. To better support our local food systems, we can look at the garbage generated in Northeast Ohio as the investment capital for topsoil that will support next year's harvest. We can change our relationship with garbage by pursuing the art of composting.

Composting is the process of actively mixing organic materials with garbage to facilitate decomposition, which results in compost, the rich organic material filled with nutrients that builds topsoil and breaks up heavy clay soil such as the type we have in much of Northeast Ohio.

The art of composting already is being employed by many Clevelanders to make our city gardens and country farms more productive. Maurice Small of the Cleveland City Fresh program goes so far as to refer to composting as a way of life. “If you do it, it becomes as natural as breathing,” he asserts. “Everywhere you go in the city, you will start to see materials for compost.”

Maurice lists the multitude of materials that he collects and composts in gardens across Cleveland. “Paper bags from McDonald's, shopping bags from grocery stores, paper plates from a picnic, restaurant scraps (300 pounds per week), coffee grounds, brewery waste from Great Lakes Brewing Company and shredded office paper from Cleveland State University.” The emerging network of urban farmers – people who utilize vacant lots and other forgotten areas in Cleveland to grow food for local markets – collect food waste in places that range from homes to large institutions. Processing compost has become critical to the urban farmers' ability to convert abandoned lots and blacktop into productive growing spaces.

Meanwhile, at the George Jones Farm and Nature Preserve in Oberlin, Michael Thompson, farm and livestock steward, looks at the food waste that he collects from Oberlin College as the basis for understanding the fundamental workings of the universe. As he spills out a 45-gallon bucket of food waste onto a bed of straw, he notes that this is “the end of the food cycle, that whole cycle of life and death.” As he mixes the food waste with loose straw, he corrects himself. “Or is it just the beginning?” He goes on to observe that, like life and the universe, “there really is no beginning point or end point.”

The Jones Farm is working actively with Oberlin College and service-management company Bon Appetite to develop a vermicomposting system that will use worms to transform the food waste generated by the college into topsoil for farms and gardens in the area. For Bon Appetite, this reinforces their “farm-to-fork” program beautifully – the food waste generated in its dining halls will be used to improve topsoil and increase the percent of local-food purchases the following year.

The film Real Low Calorie Diet, a local documentary that chronicles the growth of the local foods movement in Northeast Ohio, connects the cycles of growth and decay to a deeper understanding and appreciation of food. The film notes that “food connects us to the land that supports life. The land connects us to our origins in the soil. Soil connects us to our ancestors who, in death, nourish the land. In death comes life. It can be said that food is a gift of our ancestors.”

Compost – the fruit skins, vegetable scraps, coffee grounds and other organics that sustain our lives – honors our ancestors. When we compost, we give back what was given and insure next year's growth. In that way, we begin to think like the forests that preceded us. Garbage can become food. Garbage can become life. Composting can become a way of life.

Brad Masi is the executive director of the New Agrarian Center, based in Oberlin, Ohio. Masi is a graduate of Oberlin College and has a master's degree in urban studies from Cleveland State University. He works extensively on supporting local-food systems through writing, speaking, teaching and organizing. More information about the low-carbon diet and urban agrarianism can be found at www.GotTheNAC.org.