Managing my kitchen, the influx of groceries and the outflow of meals, has never been my strong suit. It’s my job. I do it. But it’s a chore. The longer I am in my kitchen, the nastier I get. Every day I wait as long as I possibly can to even enter the kitchen, and then I try to come up with the meal that will take the least amount of prep time, cause the least amount of mess to clean up, with the ingredients I happen to have on hand.

It is like an Escape Room challenge, “how to get out of this room before Mommy Dearest emerges and traumatizes my children?”

Shopping is a matter of making sure I have the basic building blocks for all of the kinds of meals I might want to make. Multiply this by the fluctuating and spontaneous number of mouths I might be feeding on any given night, you come up with a not too tiny sum of perishables that get thrown out in any given year.

And each one of those trips from the fridge to the garbage bin weighs heavily on my conscience! I’ve taken to saying a little prayer of repentance each time I throw out a rotten cucumber or a moldy tomato. “Lord, forgive me for I have sinned against you and your bountiful provisions!” Those leftovers that have been in the fridge longer than anyone can remember? They travel “The guilt-avoidance-underground.” First stop is offering them to my husband to eat. If he passes, they are doomed for the bin, but not before they do their time on the counter waiting for me to summon the courage to actually commit the crime. All the while, I pretend I’m weighing my options. The condements and products that have expired in the fridge or pantry are not a problem at all. I just completely avoid them until my college girls come home and toss them for me.

But for the past year, my conscience has been much lighter. This is not solely because I am only cooking a few times a week for just the two of us now, and thus might have less that goes to waste.

No, it is because I have discovered the secret to life itself!

I grew up in the inner-city. Everything went into one bin, back then, in DC. Plastic, paper, cans, glass, old shoes, sanitary napkins, banana peels. We didn’t have a garbage disposal and we didn’t have a garden, just a back lot with a lot of junk on it. That all changed when I moved to Germany thirty something years ago. When we first married, we lived in a town where we had to even separate out a few different kinds of plastic in addition to the paper, metal, organics, brown glass, green glass, black glass, and clear glass. We had one whole room in the cellar full of boxes for sorting and collecting these different items of trash, and every Saturday morning we would take them to the dump. Thankfully here in Augsburg, the city isn’t so particular about plastic. We have four large garbage bins, brown, green, yellow, black. Organic, paper, plastic & metals, and the rest. We have to bring our glass to a large sorting container on the corner. All very doable.

But having a large brown bin for organic “waste” is not the same thing as actually doing compost, as I have recently found out. Though for the last twenty years, we have lived in a home with a rather large garden for being in a European city, we have only started composting about a year ago. I still don’t know heaps about it or gardening, slow learner that I am, but composting has taught me something pretty essential to life, something I only actually knew in a bookish way. A proverbial truth that I might have even glibly offered to others as a comfort, all while still carrying the burdens a deeper understanding of this truth could have lifted from me.

Nothing is wasted!

It is really true. If it grows, it sows.

My (organic) trash is my garden’s treasure!

Actually seeing this process of egg shells and rotten apples and wilted brown iceberg being turned into soil right in my own yard is a revelation.

There is no garbage in nature.

There is nothing organic that is unusable.

There is no ‘expires-by’ date on plants for being able to replenish the soil.

Just because I can’t or won’t eat it, does not mean I have denied it some fundamental purpose or removed it from the cycle of life. One way or another, my two-month old zucchini will go the way of all living things: From dust to dust.

What a relief this has been. I’m not saying I now think I can let my vegetable drawer become a greenhouse for fungus, or that I can flush left-overs with impunity. I try to do right by the contents of my refrigerator. I do try!

But at the most, it is a sin against my own wallet when I fail, and not a sin against Mother Nature herself. She graciously accepts my slimy, smelly, green and brown gifts, and with willing and industrious hands, she folds them back into herself.

In return, she gives me color, flavor, sweetness, fiber, vitamins, air and beauty.

I give her death, and she gives me life.

Nothing wasted.