Now that you’re thoroughly depressed, let me get back to that kitchen gadget: the Vitamix FoodCycler.
The makers of the world’s best blender have created a device aimed at reducing food waste—and by “reducing” I mean literally making smaller. With a countertop footprint similar to a premium ice cream machine, the FoodCycler “breaks down food waste into a tenth of its original volume and creates a nutrient-rich fertilizer you can add to your soil,” according to Vitamix.
If you’re the type who collects food scraps in a too-small bucket that turns absolutely rank under the sink after a couple days, you’re already familiar with the routine. The FoodCycler has a bucket of its own—mercifully sporting a lid with carbon filters, drastically cutting down on the ambient rankness in your kitchen—that you fill with fruit peels, vegetable trimmings, egg shells, and even chicken bones. Once it’s full, you place the bucket inside the machine, pop on a different (but also carbon-filtered) lid, and press one large button. Hidden from your eyes, the machine begins a process of heating, drying, and grinding all of those scraps, and somewhere between three and eight hours later, it will beep in triumph: Your food is now fertilizer.
At least, that’s what the promo videos make it look like. Could I really transform discarded plant matter into dirt in a matter of hours, and never again deal with gooey effluvia leaking out of compostable bags as I hurry them to the scrap collection site at my local farmers market? One afternoon, I filled the FoodCycler bucket with the tops, tails, and skins of a half-dozen softball-size onions and set the machine a-whirling. The machine emitted the occasional faint mechanical noise as it stirred the contents of the bucket, but otherwise it was practically silent—just a low hum from the rear exhaust fan, which was also blessedly odorless. By that evening my scraps had been reduced to a mere handful of brownish soil that smelled ever so faintly of onion-flavored chips.
I don’t mean to sound grandiose, but reader, I felt like a god.
Now, to be clear, what the FoodCycler does is not composting, which requires no electrical input but takes much longer to convert food into a soil amendment than this $400 device. Nor does it simultaneously improve soil health while sequestering carbon, which traditional composting does.
But if you’re an apartment dweller like me, without a backyard garden composting setup or a building with a food scrap collection program, the FoodCycler offers several benefits. No longer do I stash those disintegrating green bags in my freezer until Sunday, the only day I have the opportunity to drop them off. Now, I simply have a quart-size deli container that takes about a week’s worth of FoodCycled scrap fertilizer to entirely fill, which I then mix with potting soil to feed my growing collection of tropical plants.
