The Promises of the Home “Composting” Machine

In the course of a week, my kitchen produces a shocking quantity of what we might think of as edible trash: apple peels, garlic nubs, a bit of gristle from a steak, Dorito dust, tea bags, the iron-hard heel of a loaf of bread that’s been sitting out overnight. The meat scraps I feed to my dog. The bones and vegetable scraps I store in the freezer in gallon-size ziplock bags and periodically bung into a pot and simmer into stock. But even then, once the stock is made, and the chicken bones or onion ends are leached of all their flavor, I’m left again with edible trash—only now it’s soggy. And then there are the times when the strawberries aren’t sealed right and become fuzzy with mold, or the delivery sandwich turns out to be gross, or the refrigerator’s compressor breaks and somehow we don’t notice, or I’m just exhausted and overwhelmed and want everything gone.

I hate putting food into the trash, because food that goes into the trash is bound for a landfill, and landfills—dense, lightless, airless mountains of waste—are the worst possible place that food can go. In that nightmarish, anaerobic environment, organic matter produces the greenhouse gas methane with terrifying efficiency. Globally, landfills are the third-greatest human source of methane emissions, just behind the fossil-fuel industry and factory livestock farming. How much food we waste, and what we do with it, is both an urgent issue and—like so many facets of the climate crisis—one that feels entirely remote in the day-to-day. A large portion of organic matter in landfills (forty per cent by one E.P.A. estimate) comes from households, so on this front, at least, our individual choices do matter—even when it feels overwhelmingly as if they don’t. Obviously, we should buy less, and we should eat more of what we buy; the weekly package of baby spinach that turns to goo in the crisper drawer benefits neither self nor planet. Cookbooks dedicated to minimizing food waste are a good place to find tidy strategies for salvage and reuse: puree the spinach glop into a green soup, for example, or take root-vegetable peelings, toss them in a bit of oil and salt, and roast at four hundred for twenty minutes to make superbly crispy little snacks. (“The Everlasting Meal Cookbook,” by Tamar Adler, is chock-full of smart ideas like these.) Pulverizing eggshells into powder for a homemade calcium supplement? Brilliant, babe. Go with God.

But, lately, I’ve been thinking about what food-waste people call diversion, which encompasses all the places we can send scraps besides the large intestine and the landfill. It’s a mistake to think that anything not eaten is necessarily wasted, that consumption is the only valid form of use. Take composting, for example: you really don’t need to torture yourself by making and eating and claiming to enjoy a bitter carrot-top pesto if the carrot tops can simply be flung into a thoughtfully maintained organic-matter pile and, with time, be converted into fuel for further carrots, whose bitter tops you yet again will not feel obligated to eat. Admittedly, it’s work: there’s a lot more to converting unwanted vegetable matter into nutrient-rich fertilizer than just making a big heap and walking away. (This is, more or less, exactly how to make a landfill.) It makes sense that compost is the provenance of the gardener: in a way, it is its own category of cultivation, requiring care and consideration, a proper balance of dry and wet matter, regular aeration, attentive temperature control, and season-spanning patience.

For those who lack the space, the time, or the diligence to do such things, solutions must be found elsewhere—for instance, in a slew of new (and newish) consumer appliances that promise to help reduce food waste and its impact. One such appliance is the FoodCycler ($399.95), which is distributed in the U.S. by Vitamix, the same folks who make extremely expensive and effective blenders. It is hulkingly large, like a night-black bread machine. The Lomi ($449, or $359 plus a twenty-dollar-per-month accessory subscription), manufactured by a company that also produces bioplastics, is satin white and curvy, with the countertop footprint of an upright stand mixer. Both the FoodCycler and the Lomi are very heavy. (The two machines were recently provided to me as samples, without cost.) The function of each is mostly the same: a user fills a provided bucket with food scraps, inserts it into the machine, sets a lid in place, and presses a Power button. Then the machine spends several hours using heat and abrasion to grind down and dehydrate the food scraps. The end result will vary in color and texture based on the raw materials you started with, but it always comes out looking pretty much like dirt.

The first day that I had the Lomi, I happened to come into possession of a somewhat ridiculous quantity of leeks. In the interest of science, I cut off their fibrous, dark-green tops (which I’d normally save for stock) and stuffed the machine’s bin up to the fill line. The Lomi has three modes, one of them meant for conserving microbes for eventual composting (it runs for a long time, at low heat), and another for breaking down bioplastics (it runs for a medium-long time, at high heat). I processed the leeks on the third mode, “eco-express,” to which the machine is preset; it runs fast and hot. Five hours later, what had started out as a football-size clump of dense vegetable matter had turned into about a half cup of dark-brown, crumbly dust that smelled faintly—though unmistakably—of burned onions. It was thrilling. I had made—well, not compost, exactly, but something that was much smaller and easier to dispose of than what it had originally been.

During the next few weeks, I continued to process food waste in the Lomi, and later on I switched to the FoodCycler. I’d often run the machines overnight, and then giddily peek in the next morning. Twisting off their lids felt like taking a nickel to a scratch-off ticket: Would the new crop of dehydrated muck be pale tan? Chestnut brown? Wispy? Chunky? Dirt-like? Mossy? For a period, I found myself cooking with more vegetables than usual, just to have material to feed the machine: potato eyes, wilty, green carrot tops (my nemesis), perhaps a larger chunk of the root end of a shallot than my fussy dicing habits might otherwise have allowed to remain. I put in shrivelled tortellini that had stuck to the sides of the pot and—goodbye, five-second rule—crackers that had fallen onto the floor. Leftovers were no longer just for eating or throwing out. A container of week-old pho need not elicit guilt when you find it languishing in the back of the fridge; simply feed your FoodCycler a snack of soup-logged sprouts, onions, noodles, and herbs. Sure, you could probably get the same net effect with a blender and a low-temperature oven, but it would smell worse. At one point, I left town for two weeks without emptying the Lomi, and returned to a kitchen smelling like absolutely nothing: these machines have activated-charcoal filters that trap seemingly every single molecule of odor.

Using the machines was fun; they made disposal feel like creation, not waste. But is that a good thing? Many proponents of traditional composting find products such as the Lomi and the FoodCycler galling, because, despite what a person might infer from how they’re marketed, they do not actually create compost. They have blades or shears, to grind, and heating elements, to dehydrate. What emerges, at the end of a process cycle, is not the nutritious black gold that results from a proper compost system but, rather, an organic fluff of nicely cooked, thoroughly dried-out stuff. (The FoodCycler’s manual dubs the end product “RFC”: Recycled Food Compound; the Lomi just calls it dirt.) “It’s like the exact opposite of composting,” one Reddit user wrote, in response to someone’s query about the Lomi, but that’s not exactly true, either. Even throwing your dehydrated food scraps straight into the trash is, if not a net good, then at least a net better: a round in one of these machines leaves would-be trash both lighter and smaller, lessening its landfill impact. Even better, the end product can be disposed of through community composting—it provides a useful fibre layer—or added to the soil in gardens or houseplants, where it still contributes trace nutrients. You can also buy add-on probiotic tablets that reintroduce all the microbes that the dehydration process has burned off, but this, to me, seems almost farcical: if you’re equipped for the compost process that follows the reintroduction of beneficial bacteria, why are you buying one of these machines in the first place?

Mill, a startup that promises an “entirely new system to prevent waste,” is not just a device but a service. Mechanically, Mill’s “kitchen bin” functions almost identically to the Lomi and the FoodCycler—dry it out, grind it down, catch the smells—but it is several times larger and is designed to sit on the floor. For thirty-three dollars per month, customers lease the machine and are provided pre-labelled boxes so that they can mail the end product back to the company. (I was loaned a sample machine for a few weeks, before the device was made available to the public. It’s now popular enough that there’s a waiting list.)