Dirt Worship

Like any parent, most of what I do embarrasses my kids. I will grant them one habit that puts me in weirdo territory: I love composting.

I bring home my lunch remains and tea bags from the office, and put them in the bin. All the bits from dinner prep and anything the dogs won’t take go into the bin. Then neighbors endure the nightly spectacle of me, trudging through whatever snow, ice and gunk a New England's winter hands out, to deposit the day’s gatherings in the compost bin out back.  

I’m a diehard. I didn’t quit after I disturbed the skunk sampling stray bits near the bin. Oh yes – he got me and how. But I kept composting, adding a flashlight and dog to the nightly trek-n-toss.

It’s extreme, I understand. I wasn’t always this wacky. The journey to my starring role as neighborhood compost nut started with the divorce that left me a substantially reduced budget, a kitchen with no cooking equipment and no resident chef and with absolutely no food-related skills of my own.

It was just like the skunk encounter: once the shock wore off, I had to come up with a strategy, or else. Moving into an apartment over a Chinese restaurant did not seem viable, so I decided I’d make friends with food. I learned how to buy it, how to cook it, what’s in it and where it comes from. I bought pans and read magazines; a friendship blossomed.

Later, I met a man who cooked simple, delicious things his grandmother made. He made the insane suggestion I should stop using complicated magazine recipes and make things I liked.  Later, he made another crazy suggestion that we should get married. Now, food knits our family together; it is the thing that can nourish the kids into that brief, happy silence at the table when they start into a favorite dish.

And it is all about nourishment; nourishment of our material and spiritual lives. There are books on how dinner tables and banquets knit our families together and traditions, and on the Bible’s food imagery: the Last Supper and the miracle at Cana. Cana’s become my favorite – a lesson of the power of hospitality, generosity and common celebrations (not to mention the priceless lessons: don’t run out of wine at a party, and always listen to your mother).  

Food is also about resources. Americans spend anywhere from 7 to 15 percent of their household budget on food; how we spend that money has great impact on our families and the well-being of others. I’ve always thought Jesus would have hung out with farm workers. And as my friend Margot says, “It’s been put on my heart” to avoid wasting food. I prefer to see the good gifts from the table nourish not just the people, the spirit and the dogs, but at last the earth.  

So I started with a bowl for composting, then a bucket and finally found a discarded farm crate on green-up day that fit the bill as my bin. Eventually, I looked at the tea bags I used at work and realized I could stuff them back in the thermos and take them home to the bin – not out to the landfill in the office trash.  Small disciplines can take root, like the mustard seed. So home they go to the set of Extreme Composting: New England Edition – to nourish the earth again or at least to nourish the skunk.

An environmental consultant, Juli Beth Hinds lives with her husband and their children, dogs and fish on an unlicensed wildlife refuge that is frequently mistaken for a  regular, single-family house in South Burlington, Vermont.