the ugly side of composting

(by laci scott)

i read once that 20% of landfill mass was occupied by food and yard waste. TWENTY PERCENT! that was the day i became a composter.

i've never had my own backyard, so composting is a giant pain in my ass. when i lived in kansas city, some good friends had a pile on which they let me deposit my scraps. more recently, i would send home bags full of frozen-food trash home with my parents. by the time the compostables made the 90 minute trek from here to there, they were drippy, slimy, and all around a pain in my mother's ass. as my parents have expressed kindly (but with some fervor) that i extract them from my composting routine, i have taken to dumping my scraps in a field behind my office. (shhhh...) 

rumor has it that my sister is about to establish a pile in her backyard. while this won't eliminate the bags of coffee, eggshells, and watermelon rinds that greet a person as they open my freezer ("why can't you just have popsicles in there, like normal people?"), hopefully it will put an end to my bimonthly illegal dumping.

because while i believe in composting as a matter of stewardship, and have engaged it for years only as such, what i want is DIRT. it's black gold, that stuff.