This is not the case in many other houses where trash production is evident in the high bins to residents ratio, noticeable on garbage day.

The Torontonians have a great system. Garbage every two weeks and recycling every week. food scraps are also collected with the paper, cans and plastic.

For those who don’t want to compost at home, the municipality will do it for them. This eases the load on landfills and provides useful compost for council projects.

My chickens eat most of my food waste. This way I can recover both nutrients and calories from food waste, and the chicken manure becomes compost in the end anyway.

I freeze some vegetable scraps to make broth. I also make broth out of the bones from my meat, and I save the cleaned bones in my freezer.

I toss these in the hot coals of my fireplace, where they add phosphorous to the fireplace ash, which I use as a fertilizer. Burning bone smells bad; I only burn it long enough to char it to the point where a rat couldn’t eat it.

This may seem like a lot of work, but I see food as sacred and can’t stand to see it go to waste. Food scraps make my chickens happy, and they help them produce healthy eggs. Broth is expensive in stores, but it can easily be made from waste for free.