Black Gold: The Future of Food...We Throw Away

For a few weeks in 1987, trash was temporarily headline news: a
barge filled with waste that would no longer fit in New York City's
overflowing landfills spent months wandering up and down the East
Coast with nowhere to dump its smelly, rotting cargo. The trash
barge's travels triggered a long overdue public rethink of the
wisdom of sending all of our waste to landfills—including food. But
fast forward more than thirty years, and food still takes up more
space in American landfills than anything else. About 30 to 40
percent of food produced in the US gets thrown away, rather than
eaten. What's more, putting all that rotting food inside landfills
produces a lot of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas. Our ancestors
knew exactly what to do with food waste; the earliest descriptions
of composting were written on clay tablets more than 4,000 years
ago. So why didn't the GarBarge kick off a composting craze? And
why is it so hard for us to keep food waste out of landfills? This
episode, Gastropod visits the future of food waste: the high-tech
facilities as well as the innovative policies that promise to keep
our discarded food out of landfills, keep methane from escaping
into the atmosphere, *and* turn those food scraps into something
useful. Can a state the size of California really keep 75 percent
of its food waste out of landfills, as it has pledged to do by
2025—and what will happen if it does? Listen in for compost
blow-dryers, fruit-sticker bingo, and a lot of microbes! Learn more
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