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Let me just start there. I say that now because I don’t want it to seem like I am in love with garbage or that shooting for a sustainable life is all rainbows and butterflies. I can think of a lot of other great uses for my time. But for what I want, what I really want? None of the other choices are quite as good as bokashi.

For almost as long as I’ve been with my (now) husband, whenever a special occasion has come up and he’s asked me what I want for a gift, an indoor composter has always been on my list. Being the smart guy that he is, he has never bought me one. He says a gal can’t ask her guy for that for her birthday and seriously expect him to get it for her. I think there are some male honor reasons behind the objection and also he really doesn’t want our apartment to smell like worm poop.

I appreciate that. And I also really don’t like putting my food waste in the garbage. So I kept trolling for a solution. A few weeks ago, I found bokashi. Bokashi isn’t new. I either wasn’t looking hard enough or not looking in the right places until now. I haven’t watched all the how-to videos at Each One Teach One Farms yet or read the dozens of websites singing its praises. Mostly, my research has focused on corroborating that it doesn’t smell. Everything I’ve read says it doesn’t. Which means both Francis & I can be happy and that it’s a go. But it still isn’t beautiful and it isn’t easy. It’s going to be a lot of work to maintain these fellas.

An upside of being an edupreneur, I can organize my own work time to integrate business and personal life demands. Usually, Fridays end up being the day I do all the housekeeping—business paperwork, laundry, recycling, etc. Tending to the bokashi bucket will probably get folded into that routine. I’m not tickled that I already have to spend the time separating my paper and plastic, and taking the #5s to a grocery store that will recycle them. I’m not thrilled to have to carve out even more time and dispose of a little more of my income to buy more stuff to make my life more compatible with the planet’s well being. And as much mischievous pleasure as I take in gaming a System that doesn’t work well for most people (and that’s an awful lot of pleasure), there really are gobs of other things I could be doing with this time and money.

But I set aside part of my Fridays for it because the costs of not doing it are too high to me.  In the U.S., we waste about 25% of all the food we buy. There’s not enough space to hold everything we throw away and the chemistry that happens to the stuff we do toss out compromises everyone’s quality of life, scientific fact.

Garbage is a public liability. I’d like there to be less garbage to begin with and then to have public systems that accommodate all our waste sustainably. This is why I pay taxes. The BioFuels Washington Program is a hopeful government response that’ll use landfill gases to power around 3,000 homes a year. In most places, the demand and incentives aren’t quite there yet to put whole systems in place that make living sustainably the status quo. Momentum is going in that direction and one day, enough of us will be putting our energy into collective solutions instead of individual ones, and good thinking, good materials, good laws, and good systems will be the norm. Until I can work with others to get those systems in place where I live, I will bokashi.