Our kitchen remodel is in its final throes. It’s starting to become obvious what it’s all going to look like in the end. We still don’t have a sink (and doing the dishes in the bathroom is getting really old) but the island has shaped up nicely and we’re starting to talk about what will go where. We should be done in time to host a rollicking Thanksgiving feast.

Toaster Oven where soon a sink will be

During the months we’ve been planning and constructing our new kitchen, my thoughts have kept returning to one item. No, it’s not our super cool new bamboo countertop or the soft spongy new cork floor. It’s not the amazing amount of light that now filtered in to what used to be a rather dark space or all that usable storage space just waiting to house my large collection of cooking implements. The one item that has been taking center stage in my thoughts is the garbage can.

Still under construction but check out the cork floor and bamboo countertop

From the beginning of our project, the garbage can has been worrying me. I could conceive of where I’d store all the items I wouldn’t use while we were working on the kitchen. I found a home for the few dishes and pans that we would need during the remodel. We set up an outdoor cooking space and we have a pretty good system for doing the dishes camp-style with a quick rinse in the bathroom sink. But I couldn’t figure out where the garbage would “live” while we tore the place apart and slowly put it back together.

The can moved from one location to another, always necessary but always in the way. And it was the fact that it was so necessary that really got me thinking.

When did a place to throw stuff away become so essential to my life? For that matter, when did our society decide that it needed to throw away so much stuff and why do we predominately throw it away in the kitchen?

It turns out that our society hasn’t needed the garbage can for very long. It wasn’t until the industrial revolution that we even had enough stuff to think about throwing some of it away. When you only have one change of clothes, you wear them until they fall apart and then you make them into rags or turn the good bits into quilts. When you grow most of your food, you don’t need a plastic bag for the minute it takes to get your head of lettuce from the garden to the kitchen. When the food you do buy from the local store is sold in bulk, you don’t need fancy packaging to lure you into buying it, you just need to bring some kind of reusable container to bring it home in. When you spend a large percentage of your income on food, you don’t let it rot then toss it in the trash, you eat all you can afford, then turn the not so perfect parts into soups or stews and feed the little bits of scrap to the chickens in exchange for eggs. What you really can’t use anymore goes to the junk man who sells it to small manufacturers; rags go to make paper, bottles are refilled, and even bones go to make gelatin, fertilizer, and knife handles.

The industrial revolution made it possible to produce stuff cheaply and, at the same time, gave people more disposable income. Cheap stuff and more money to spend combined to greatly increase the amount of garbage society produced. But it wasn’t until after WWII that we really started throwing stuff away in earnest. Cheap plastics made it possible to produce single-use packaging (in the US, up to 80% of products produced are used only once). Cheap extraction methods put the junk man out of business, making it cheaper to use new materials than recycle what the rag man had to sell. It became cheaper to buy something new rather than fix it. Food became cheaper, we bought more and ended up throwing lots of it away.

Today, the EPA estimates an average US citizen throws away 4.62 pound of garbage a day. 4.62 pounds a day!? No wonder I didn’t know what to do without my garbage can.

And we don’t really throw stuff “away”. It goes somewhere; we’ve just gotten good at hiding it. Today’s landfills aren’t like the midden heaps of yore where we put bits of broken pottery, shells, bones, and rinds in small piles right in town. And they are not like the open dumps of a just half a century ago that were on the edge of town and stunk enough to remind you of where your trash went. The modern sanitary landfill is enormous (some cover thousands of acres) but out of sight of it’s users. All the trash mixes together in a toxic stew, where landfill operators try to keep the toxins from leaching into the groundwater or polluting the air. And, surprise, much of the waste is from the kitchen. The EPA estimates that 31% of waste is from containers and packaging, and 12.5% is from food waste.

Now, I consider myself a pretty eco-conscientious person. We recycle everything we can. We take canvas bags to the store when we shop. I rinse out any plastic bags we acquire and use them multiple times. Jon and I both have a reusable water bottle and coffee mug. And we compost all of our food scraps. We even save all of our bottle caps and wine corks in the hopes that some day we will get creative and make something cool out of them.

So if I’m doing all those thing but still feel like I can’t be without my trashcan, what was in it? It turns out that the EPA had my number. Most of the stuff I tossed was food packaging and meat scraps, plus the occasional dustpan of floor sweepings.

All of the effort of package designers was working. I “needed” to buy my mushrooms covered in plastic and my cookies individually packaged for freshness so I could throw away all those wrappers. Whether I wanted to or not, I had bought into the world of modern convenience and I needed my garbage can handy to deal with the aftermath.

Now that the remodel is just about over, I need a new project. Maybe spending a little more time thinking about my purchases and a little less time filling up the trashcan is a worthy endeavor

Garbage Soup

Ingredients:
Whatever you have in the Fridge plus some water or broth

Directions:
Take a good look in your refrigerator for any leftovers or produce that is past its peek. Leftover chicken or a chicken carcass is a great score. If you have any beef bones from large roasts, those make a great addition as well, and roasting them first brings out even more flavor.

Heat some oil in a stockpot over medium high heat, then chop and add any type of allium (onion, garlic, leeks, shallots, or scallions) you found to the pot. Cook for a few minutes then add any chopped root vegetable or celery. Stir and cook for a few more minutes then add any bones and cover the mixture with water (if you have lots of flavorful ingredients) or broth (if your fridge was pretty empty). Bring to a boil then reduce heat to a simmer. Add any soft veggies. Simmer for about an hour adding more broth or water as needed. If you added bones, strain the soup and return it to the pot. Add any leftover grains or pasta and cook for a few more minutes. Taste and adjust the seasoning. Enjoy your recycled soup!