I don’t such as composting.
I realize this is practically heretical, given that I live just outside of Portland, Oregon, ground zero for environmental awareness, but I would rather not have a bin full of slimy, rotting kitchen scraps sitting on my counter. It attracts fruit flies and leaves my house smelling like a federal prison prune, especially in the heat of summer.
Instead, my family of three has been relying on a garbage disposal in the sink, which is not very good. Our septic repairman is adamantly against this, and garbage disposals are also a bad idea for those without septic systems, because the waste ends in the water coursesThrowing food into the kitchen trash eventually leads to the local landfill, where uneaten food constitutes 24 percent of urban solid waste. Its decomposition leads to the release of dangerous methane gas.
To combat this, many cities have their own composting programs. My rural suburb doesn’t, so I’m forced to choose between a normal-smelling kitchen and actively contributing to global warming. That’s why I was particularly interested in the Mill, a fully automatic, odorless food recycling bin designed by Matt Rogersformer Apple engineer and co-founder of the pioneering Nest smart thermostat.
My family, prolific in home cooking, tested the mill for six weeks and related it to a power meter to test its performance and cost of use, as well as feed it as diverse a batch of food scraps as we could (including sauces, hundreds of egg shells, and one particularly pesky batch of melon rinds), to see if this particularly expensive bin might be worth the cost of adding to your home.
From the beginning
There’s no denying that at 23kg, 68cm tall and 40cm wide, the grinder requires a fair amount of space. Even in my kitchen, which is fairly spacious, it was a challenge to find a place to put the grinder where it was accessible and out of the way (already a couple feet from an electrical outlet). For those who don’t have a lot of counter space, the fact that the grinder is on the floor may give it an advantage over countertop competitors like the Lomi.
Photography: Kat Merck
