It’s planet protection, not food waste

 Bizarre conversations I have with others.

It seems that there are some that do not use their food waste caddy. They say they never throw food away.

Who does? As I Scrape rice and crumbs from the kitchen sink catcher that lies in the plug hole to stop little tiny bits from getting into the sewage system. As I clean the kitchen washing up bowl and place stray pieces of rice, a dropped blueberry into the kitchen waste food caddy. I ponder on people who don’t have any food waste. Where are the crumbs off the table? Where are the crumbs from food packets? Breadcrumbs fallen from frozen food? Stale cornflakes from the bottom of boxes. The paper-like peel from bulbs of garlic? Are they truly people who have none of these? And if so, how? Food waste isn’t actual food- no one is throwing actual edible food away. Food caddies are collecting scraps that cumulatively between us Otherwise contribute food to landfill, Where it makes methane. Methane is 28 times more powerful as a greenhouse gas and carbon dioxide. The extreme heat and the heavy rains the mudslides the storms, the turbulent air making air flights more dangerous the wildfires. Methane is 28 times more effective at warming our planet leading to these extremes than carbon dioxide. That is what the food caddy is for.

Bizarre conversations I have with other people.

Apparently, some people don’t use their food waste caddy because they “never throw food away.”

Neither do I.

I just scrape rice and crumbs from the sink strainer. Rescue the blueberry from the washing-up bowl. Sweep crumbs from the table. Find stale cornflakes at the bottom of the box. Peel garlic. Deal with all the tiny bits of food nobody is actually going to eat.

That’s food waste.

Nobody is putting perfectly good meals in the caddy. It’s for the scraps and leftovers that inevitably happen when human beings eat.

And collectively, those tiny scraps matter.

Send food waste to landfill and it produces methane — a greenhouse gas around 28 times more powerful than CO₂ over 100 years. Methane adds to the warming that drives the increasingly brutal heatwaves, extreme rainfall and storms, wildfires, economic damage and, ultimately, loss of life.

So when someone tells me they have “no food waste”, I genuinely wonder:

Where are your crumbs going?

That’s what the little brown caddy is for.