When you start composting more seriously at home, whether in a worm bin or in a backyard pile, you become much more conscious of the amounts of food waste needlessly consigned to the trash heap: garbage bags full of rotting-but-nevertheless-great-for-composting vegetables left curbside by the local supermarket; apple cores and banana peels tossed out; fruit rinds at your favorite juice bar.

The cumulative weight of it all begins to, er, weigh on you, and you start to get obsessive about guiding these discards away from the methane-spewing hereafter of food garbage. When you go to a friend's dinner party, you find yourself grabbing the scraps from the trash to give them a proper burial at home—in the worm bin. The molding baby carrots and rotten salad in the fridge at work? Yup: Worm food.

All of us can contribute to this effort by setting up a home or office composting operation (it's easy!) and by rescuing these organic goodies from landfilled oblivion whenever we can. But it would be helpful if we had the support of our cities to reduce this waste stream. With a few exceptions—San Francisco among them—there simply isn't the municipal infrastructure to get food compostables from Waste-Generating Site A to Composting Site B, if B even existed, which it doesn't in most cases.

Yet conceiving—and advocating—a plan for a Brooklyn-wide food-waste composting system is precisely the Gaian ideal that our teachers Joshua and Karla have asked the Master Composter posse to consider. As part of the class, J. and K. have enlisted the MCs to research different aspects of the food-waste conundrum, focusing on three "audiences": businesses (restaurants et al), greenmarkets, and community gardens. Our assignment is to research what each of these does with their organic waste, to highlight successful 'posting models, and to figure out how to promote composting among the groups.

New York City, foodie capital of the Milky Way Galaxy, produces three Yankee Stadiums worth of garbage every day; one full stadium of that is compostable. Wouldn't it be delightful if DSNY collected this matter to give it a second life as black gold? The logistics of such a borough-wide, much less citywide, effort would be daunting, but it's certainly not impossible, as programs in other cities and the food-waste program on Rikers Island shows. I'd like to think that composting organics will be to cities of the future what recycling once was; an activity that was off the radar but becomes an integral part of everyday urban life.

While we wait for that notion to blossom, 'post devotees can prove the model works. For instance, restaurant chefs/owners (Michel?) have several options: composting the food waste on-site indoors (vermicomposting) or outdoors (hot pile, covered with plenty of browns); giving scraps to a local community garden or farm that would happily transform them; or setting up a "compost cooperative" with other like-minded organizations.

In a future dispatch, I'll report on the research the MCs dig up.