What Is NOT Compost
Calling dried and ground food waste soil or compost right out of the machine is the equivalent of telling people that a raw potato will taste as good as a crispy French fry.
By Sally Brown
BioCycle
Mar 14, 2023
Excerpt:
Looks can be deceiving. I have a Mill, one of the new kitchen appliances that dries and grinds your food scraps overnight. I was contacted very early on in the Mill development process by one of the founders and have had contact with the company ever since, which is one of the reasons that I got an early delivery of a machine. As part of my involvement with Mill, I’ve also had the pleasure of testing a few other machines, including ones that also dry and grind. I wrote about some of these before in Connections. I truly hope that these represent the wave of the future. I hope that they become dishwasher equivalents — meaning something that every kitchen must have. My wish is that these devices end up coming in different shapes, colors and sizes, and that someday they respond to voice commands.
The one thing that these dry and grind machines don’t and can’t do is make compost. This is the big issue that I have with Lomi. The Lomi is a lovely machine that dries and grinds food waste. The photos of the stuff that comes out of the Lomi looks much like the stuff that comes out of my Mill bin. Mill asks that I send the output — what it calls Food Grounds™ — back to them so that they can turn it into chicken feed. Lomi says that the “dirt” that its “home composter” makes can go directly to soil in my garden or right in the pot for my indoor plants.
