One Man's TRASH

How composting, once the domain of free spirits and farmers, entered a new era.

- BY MATTIE KAHN

It wasn't until Samin Nosrat began working at Chez Panisse that she was introduced to composting. Nosrat, whose cookbook Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat: Mastering the Elements of Good Cooking is the reason your friends brine their chicken in buttermilk, was 19 and had taken a job as a busser at the Berkeley, California, institution. She was tasked with separating out “green food waste” after service.

Hauled to Chez Panisse’s farm, that cutting board detritus—cilantro stems, onion skins, lemon rinds—would be transformed into compost and added to the soil to grow produce for the restaurant. What Nosrat calls a “tidy, beautiful” closed loop process made an impression.

Later she would take part in less aspirational versions of the same sequence: food scraps allowed to molder in a tub on the counter, municipal curbside pickups, hulking devices that produced incessant buzzing. Composting at home was less sun-dappled science experiment, more chore.