At School, Turning Good Food Into Perfectly Good Compost

New York Times ^ | June 22, 2014 | Al Baker

[reaganaut1]

One by one, the children at Public School 30 on Staten Island dumped their uneaten bananas into a bin in the back of their raucous cafeteria, each greenish-yellow missile landing with a thud. Thud. Thud.

John Sullivan, 9, a fourth grader, said bananas “make my stomach hurt.” Julianna Delloso, 6, a first grader, said “they taste funny.” And Joseph Incardone, 7, also in first grade, was almost gleeful as he explained why he, too, had chucked his unpeeled banana. “I didn’t like it,” he said.

The sad voyage of fruits and vegetables from lunch lady to landfill has frustrated parents, nutritionists and environmentalists for decades. Children are still as picky and wasteful as ever, but at least there is now a happier ending — that banana-filled bin is a composting container, part of a growing effort to shrink the mountains of perfectly good food being hauled away to trash heaps every year

New York City’s school composting program, kicked off just two years ago by parents on the Upper West Side, is now in 230 school buildings in Manhattan, Brooklyn and Staten Island, and is expected to more than double in size and reach all five boroughs in the fall, with an ultimate goal of encompassing all 1,300-plus school buildings.

Depending on where the school is, the uneaten and half-eaten leftovers are sent to a compost heap at a former Staten Island landfill or to upstate New York or Delaware, where the slop is churned into nutrient-enriched dirt that farmers or landscape architects can buy. Eventually, the city will send some scraps to a wastewater treatment plant in Brooklyn, where “digesters” turn garbage into usable gas.

“There’s a lot of carbon in that banana that’s going to end up growing something else in your garden at home,”

[libstripper]

Naturally, you realize what you’re getting from them is pure affection. It has NOTHING to do with hunger.

[peeps36]

They should call it Moochell’s Multi Million Dollar Mountain Of Manure. She took millions of dollars and turned them into a big pile of dirt. What a great woman.

[BykrBayb]

I wouldn’t eat a green banana either. Of course it wouldn’t taste good, and it would make your stomach hurt.

We’ve raised at least a couple generations of people who don’t know what real food is, and wouldn’t know what to do with it if they had any. Sometimes I feel like the old guy in Soylent Green. http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=kQQ6wNfkcmc

[RightField]

“There’s a lot of carbon in that banana that’s going to end up growing something else in your garden at home,”

Whaaaaatttt? Now carbon is a good thing?
I am so confused.

[sportutegrl]

I went to an Asian buffet restaurant once that served sushi. A sign by the sushi said to take all you want, but there was a $1 charge for any suchi not eaten.

[A_perfect_lady]

Starting in October here in Los Angeles, we have to serve the little darlings Breakfast In the Classroom, which they will also throw away.