When Harry Met Celery

Food waste is a ginormous problem. My high-tech garbage bin is helping to fix it.

We waste a third of our food, which means we waste a third of the land, water, fuel, electricity, fertilizer and deforestation that goes into growing our food. Food waste, like cattle, would be the third-largest emitter of greenhouse gases if it were its own country. Enter Harry, the cool-looking, WiFi-connected “food dehydrator” in my pantry. It was created by Mill, a startup founded by the guys behind the Nest thermostat, and it turns all my kitchen scraps into chicken feed.

I wrote about Harry and food waste for Heatmap, a new climate site I really like. The Mill experience is a bit like composting, except it isn’t a pain in the ass. I included some before-and-after pictures of what it does to my banana peels and eggshells.

Basically, food waste is a hard problem, but not as hard a problem as getting farmers to use less land or getting consumers to eat less beef, so public policy ought to do something about it. I love Harry, but I probably wouldn’t pay $33 a month for the privilege of recycling my food waste unless I had “pay-as-you-throw” garbage collection; Mill customers can save money by sending less trash to the landfill. The Biden Administration is already providing incentives for Americans to reduce emissions by installing solar panels (I did this, it’s awesome) and buying electric cars (I also did this, also awesome) and storing carbon in their farm soils (I’m going to write about this soon, it’s not awesome) — the next farm bill will probably have $500 billion to throw around, and it should throw some of it at stuff like Mill.

Again, here’s the link. Thanks for reading!