EP #10: After the Farm & the Table—Daniel Brown Wants Your Food Waste

Since 2014 a team of scrappy (pun intended) environmentally-minded superheroes has been gathering food waste from restaurants and homes and turning it into a nutrient-dense soil that can grow more food.  Daniel Brown is a co-founder of Rust Belt Riders and Tilth Soils and in our interview he reminds us that there is no "away" when it comes to waste—our trash will always find a home in someone else's neighborhood.   With 40% of all food in the U.S. heading to landfills, while plenty of people are food insecure, Daniel urges us to consider not only where our food comes from and how we handle it, but where it goes when we are done with it. His hope is that we start to normalize the act of composting and that collecting our food scraps will become as commonplace as recycling.  Rust Belt Riders provides an easy, convenient and clean option for commercial enterprises and those of us who can't (or don't want to) compost at home. And, even better, they are using that food waste to make living soils that can be used to grow more food.  We discuss why people don't compost when it is one of the easiest and cheapest ways to help our planet and climate, what the Rust Belt Riders team needs to make an impact on a larger scale, and how they can make finished, usable compost way faster than I can at home.