Anna Getty's Easy Green Organic - Anna Getty [16]
Never add the following to your composter:
Meat or fish
Grease or oil
Cooked food scraps
Cat litter
Manure
Diapers
Barbecue ash
THE KITCHEN SCRAPS
So what about those kitchen scraps—are they green or brown? They’re either, depending on what you’re cooking. In the kitchen it is not necessary to separate the green from the brown layers in your compost pail. The contents in your pail will most likely make up a brown layer, so when you dump it into the compost pile, add a green layer, unless you know the pail is filled with greens—scraps of kale, spinach, and romaine lettuce, for example. In that case, you would put a brown layer on top of that in the compost pile. Ultimately, it does not matter; the layers from your kitchen scraps will compost.
What does matter is that all of the scraps going into your pail should be uncooked. Raw food has the living enzymes essential for the decomposing process. Cooked food is dead and will not contribute to the process; in fact, it will hinder it.
You’ll need a bin or pail in your kitchen dedicated to collecting the scraps that will end up in your composter. This doesn’t have to be a large item; ours is a simple stainless-steel bucket with a lid, which we keep on the kitchen counter within easy reach. That’s the whole point—to make composting easy and productive.
Put your uncooked food prep scraps into the bin. When it’s full, simply empty the bin into your composter and mix it in. If it’s your first time and the composter is empty, you’ll need to toss in some grass clippings or prunings to cover your kitchen scraps in order to deter any pests.
If you’ve never composted before, don’t worry; you’ll get the hang of it. You’re basically throwing stuff in a bin and mixing it with other stuff, rather than tossing it in the garbage can. And it’s oh-so-eco because you will add other materials from around the house that you used to consider garbage, such as dryer lint, pet hair, and paper products. And those materials will decompose into feasts for worms and microbes in your garden. Composting does take time, though; it will take between 6 and 12 months for your composter to produce dark brown, nearly black material. Add this material to your topsoil. More than anything else, your composter will connect your kitchen, and therefore your household, to the cycle of life. It actually uses your waste to create more life in your garden, which will ultimately end up back in your kitchen in the form of fresh, organic food.
There are two other significant aspects of organic gardening that I do not cover here: mulching and pest control. For the purposes of this book, I’ve chosen to focus on composting because it is the most direct extension of cooking and the kitchen. For more information on the benefits of mulching and organic pest control, consult the Internet, find a good book, talk to a local organic gardener, or, my favorite option, ask a friend who already knows everything about it.
key terms
Here are a few keys terms to help you follow the “Did you know” boxes provided by the Organic Center.
The PESTICIDE RESIDUE DATA are from the annual reports of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Pesticide Data Program. For each food, the data presented is for the most recent year for which data is available. (The USDA tests about ten to fifteen fresh foods, plus four to eight processed foods each year.) The data appears each year in an appendix.
The DIETARY RISK INDEX (DRI) is a relative measure of pesticide dietary risk from a 100-gram serving of food, and is based on the mean residue level of a given pesticide and its toxicity, as evaluated by the Environmental Regulatory Agency in regulatory risk assessments. (For more on the DRI, see the March 2008 report by the Organic Center, “Simplifying the Pesticide Risk Equation: The Organic Option” at the center’s Web site, www.organic-center.org.)
ORAC (OXYGEN RADICAL ABSORBANCE CAPACITY) UNITS are a measure of the total antioxidant capacity of food. The more ORAC units per serving, or per calorie, the greater the