This Food Scrap Recycler Might Just Help You Waste Less

I want to tell you all about a fun new kitchen gadget I’ve been playing around with for the past few weeks—but first, we need to have an uncomfortable little talk about trash, so strap in.

Here in America, wasting food is practically a national pastime. Per the USDA, we throw out nearly one third of all of the edible food available in our country every year, representing more than $160 billion in total and approximately 200 pounds of waste per person. And before you start wagging your finger at big institutions like schools and hospitals (they’re culprits too), you should know that the worst offenders are average consumers like you and me. The USDA estimates that “1,249 calories per capita per day in the food supply in 2010 went uneaten,” largely due to losses at the consumer level. Yes, you and I waste 21% of our country’s available food supply.

Sure, you might have switched to reusable straws out of concern for poor sea turtles and stopped flushing wet wipes because you saw those horrifying photos of fatbergs on Twitter, but you probably still contribute to the devastation of our planet in plenty of quotidian ways. So many of our kitchen routines add to this national mass of uneaten food, including trimming the crusts off of your kid’s sandwich because she’s a picky eater (what the USDA terms “human aversion”), tossing out an apple because it’s developed a big bruise in the fridge (“consumer demand for high cosmetic standards”), and cooking more food than anyone needs for the holidays. Not knowing how to assess or prepare a food is another factor; for example, the USDA notes that “lack of consumer knowledge of when a papaya is ripe, how to prepare it, and how to use it as an ingredient are reasons for high papaya loss.” And then there’s confusion over “use by” and “sell before” dates, leading many consumers to throw out perfectly edible food before it spoils.

And when you throw something away, where exactly is “away”?

According to the EPA, the average American citizen produces 4.9 pounds of garbage every single day. Food waste accounted for 34 million tons of that garbage—or “municipal solid waste”—of the 250 million tons produced in the United States in 2010. Little of that food is ever recovered or recycled (less than 3%!), with the remainder ending up in landfills or incinerators, at a cost of $1.3 billion; when you adjust for the recycling of waste materials like paper and cardboard, food makes up one fifth of all the garbage we create.

The ecological impact of all of this waste cannot be understated, and it’s all been well-documented. The EPA estimates that “U.S. food loss and waste embodies 170 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent…equal to the annual CO₂ emissions of 42 coal-fired power plants” each year—and that doesn’t include the greenhouse gasses produced by rotting food in landfills. See, it’s not just the food in your garbage can that’s contributing to carbon emissions; it’s also the combined inputs that brought that food to your kitchen in the first place. Raising livestock, tilling soil, packaging and transporting food to grocery stores—all of it takes an environmental toll.

Now that you’re thoroughly depressed, let me get back to that kitchen gadget: the Vitamix FoodCycler.

If you’re the type who collects food scraps in a too-small bucket that turns absolutely rank under the sink after a couple days, you’re already familiar with the routine. The FoodCycler has a bucket of its own—mercifully sporting a lid with carbon filters, drastically cutting down on the ambient rankness in your kitchen—that you fill with fruit peels, vegetable trimmings, egg shells, and even chicken bones. Once it’s full, you place the bucket inside the machine, pop on a different (but also carbon-filtered) lid, and press one large button. Hidden from your eyes, the machine begins a process of heating, drying, and grinding all of those scraps, and somewhere between three and eight hours later, it will beep in triumph: Your food is now fertilizer.

At least, that’s what the promo videos make it look like. Could I really transform discarded plant matter into dirt in a matter of hours, and never again deal with gooey effluvia leaking out of compostable bags as I hurry them to the scrap collection site at my local farmers market? One afternoon, I filled the FoodCycler bucket with the tops, tails, and skins of a half-dozen softball-size onions and set the machine a-whirling. The machine emitted the occasional faint mechanical noise as it stirred the contents of the bucket, but otherwise it was practically silent—just a low hum from the rear exhaust fan, which was also blessedly odorless. By that evening my scraps had been reduced to a mere handful of brownish soil that smelled ever so faintly of onion-flavored chips.

I don’t mean to sound grandiose, but reader, I felt like a god.

Now, to be clear, what the FoodCycler does is not composting, which requires no electrical input but takes much longer to convert food into a soil amendment than this $400 device. Nor does it simultaneously improve soil health while sequestering carbon, which traditional composting does.

But if you’re an apartment dweller like me, without a backyard garden composting setup or a building with a food scrap collection program, the FoodCycler offers several benefits. No longer do I stash those disintegrating green bags in my freezer until Sunday, the only day I have the opportunity to drop them off. Now, I simply have a quart-size deli container that takes about a week’s worth of FoodCycled scrap fertilizer to entirely fill, which I then mix with potting soil to feed my growing collection of tropical plants.

The other, and possibly more substantial, benefit of using the FoodCycler these past weeks has been psychological: I am more keenly aware of how much food I’m wasting, how much is going into that little bucket, and how long, under normal conditions, it would take to break down that food in a landfill. The FoodCycler isn’t going to stop you from buying too many apples or tossing your kid’s sandwich crusts; it only makes those foods take up less space in the world.

But purchasing a not-small kitchen appliance might, ironically, help some people start consuming less. If I fill up the FoodCycler bucket in one sitting, after prepping a meal for just me and my husband, I know that I’m probably creating way more waste than necessary. With that in mind, I’ve started buying less, only throwing away food that is truly inedible, and making sure to use the food I do buy before it ever reaches that state.

My goal, if anything, is to fill up the FoodCycler as little as possible—because every time I use it means that I’m wasting food and contributing further to the runaway rot of our planet. And with this big dirt-maker sitting on my countertop, that’s hard to ignore.