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If you cook and entertain a lot, odds are you’ve come up with some method for dealing with food waste in your home. Maybe it’s a countertop compost bucket, or a big bag full of scraps in your freezer that eventually get turned into stock. As someone who makes a lot of food at home and therefore generates a fair amount of scraps, bones, and used-up coffee grounds, I’ve experimented with an endless variety of ways to keep my household’s food waste in check. Countertop bins, bags kept in the freezer, and five-gallon buckets under the sink all started out well enough, but became smelly and annoying to deal with after a few weeks.
The one solution that’s stuck with me is the Mill. For the past six months, my food scraps have gone directly into the sleek cream-colored trash can that sits next to the stainless-steel work bench in my kitchen. It can handle meat, dairy, and even bones in addition to produce scraps, which means I have to do approximately zero thinking or sorting before I dump the remnants of my cutting board in there. It’s quiet, unobtrusive, and set to make short work of my household scraps on an automatic schedule—so it never starts to smell. I can go about a month without having to empty it, which is the reason I’ve been able to use it consistently for so long.
The Mill isn’t a compost bin and it doesn’t produce true compost. Instead, it’s billed as a “food recycler.†The bin dehydrates and grinds food scraps, producing something that looks more or less like dirt. It can handle up to 40 pounds of food, and will reduce its volume by around 80%. No matter what you decide to do with the by-product (we’ll get to those options in a minute), having a smaller volume of waste to deal with is inarguably an easier proposition.
Because I have a garden and an outdoor compost pile, I dump the contents of my Mill into my compost whenever I empty it. For me, it’s the easiest possible solution. I’m not hauling a smaller bucket or bin of half-rotten scraps outside every few days, and even though the dried, ground scraps still have a long way to go before they’ll become true compost, it will all make its way into my garden eventually.
If you have any kind of local composting initiative, like curbside organics bins or a community garden with a compost drop-off, you can take the contents of your Mill there too. It will be a lot lighter and less bulky to schlep wherever you need to schlep it. And if there are absolutely no local compost initiatives where you live (or you simply don’t have time to deal with it), you can schedule pickups. Mill will provide you with large paper mailers where you can empty your bin and have it collected by USPS. From there, it will be taken to one of Mill’s partner farms, where your food scraps will go on to become chicken feed.
The main drawback to Mill is the cost. It’s normally $999 to buy, but it’s currently $200 off for Black Friday. Considering how much I’ve spent over the years on food scrap solutions that didn’t work (and were messy and difficult to keep up with), I think it’s worth the price. And if the full price is still prohibitive, it is possible to rent a Mill for around $30 a month—though the sale offer doesn’t apply to rentals.