It's the best day of the year to start composting

It’s Thanksgiving, the most [pick your descriptive] American holiday.

As a composter, the food that matters to me the most this week is not the stuff on our tables—it’s what ends up in our trash cans. Every year, an estimated 300 million pounds of food waste is generated in service of this celebration, most of which ends up in a landfill somewhere.

But it doesn’t have to be this way.

If you haven’t done it already, Thanksgiving is the perfect invitation to get started with composting, by nature of its primary byproduct (food) and typical volume (enormous). By the end of the day, and even in the coming weeks, you’re likely to have a relative bonanza of high-nitrogen material to kickstart any pile with, which is an opportunity that should not—no pun intended—be put to waste.

There are many, many items part of any traditional holiday spread that can be composted. Some of them (bread, citrus) you might think you can’t compost at all, and some of them (meat, oils) you might need special strategies to compost correctly, but all, I assure you, can ultimately be composted.

Here we go:

1- Cooked Food.

Yes, you can absolutely put cooked food into a compost. The potential downside to adding leftovers to your pile is their proclivity to attract animals, so you’ll just want to be careful in how you go about it. Chop cooked food waste into tiny pieces, in order to maximize surface area for decomposer microbes to get to work as quickly as possible, and make sure to cover any of it that you add with a thick layer of high-carbon material. That means twigs, dried leaves, sawdust, wood chips, or cardboard. This will help smother any critter-enticing odors.

2- Oils.

“Oils” are a companion to cooked food, but yes—it’s worth emphasizing that they are also fine to compost. Some folks may tell you to avoid putting oil into your compost because the viscous-quality of the liquid may slow your rate of decomposition, but in response to those concerns I counter with considerations of both proportion and urgency. One, you aren’t adding a gigantic volume of oil, overall. The pile will be fine. Two, you probably aren’t in a hurry. The average backyard compost is not on a tight schedule and can handle ebbs and flows in their rate of decomposition.

3- Meats.

If you don’t plan on making stock from the bones of any animals you consume this holiday, then make sure to compost them. If you have a tightly-enclosed compost structure, like a tumbler, you might be fine adding any carcasses directly to your pile. If you have an open-air pile or a single-bin structure, you might want to go about it a bit differently, though, as meat products are particularly attractive to animals. Instead of adding them directly, try digging a deep hole nearby your compost heap, adding the carcass alongside some high-carbon material, like leaf litter or sawdust, and burying it completely. One important caveat to this advice, though: If you live in an area with bears nearby, do not compost meat at all.

4- Bread.

Bread is fine to compost, although the idea that you shouldn’t add it to your heap is a persistent one. (This is one of the most frequent questions I get, in fact!) Bread is fine to compost, in my experience. You can compost it fresh, you can compost it stale, and you can absolutely and especially even compost it when it’s moldy.

5- Citrus.

Yes, compost citrus! If you make your cranberries with orange or lemon zest, you can absolutely compost the remains of your citrus. The arguments against citrus are, in my opinion, unjustly severe and a little neurotic. It is said that citrus can impact the pH of your pile, slow the overall rate of decomposition due to citric acid having antibacterial properties, and that the peels are too slow to break down. To all of it I say: who cares! Unless you’re adding two tons of citrus at once, your average backyard compost will be fine with a little asynchronous decomposition, or even a slightly fluctuating pH. Compost the citrus! I’ve written about this extensively before.

6- Cheese.

You can compost cheese. It can be tricky, and potentially smelly, but you can definitely do it. Similarly to meat and cooked food, above, your best bet for adding cheese is to bury it deep down in the pile, make sure you have added a proportional amount of high-carbon browns, and then cover the entire thing over with a thick layer of odor-smothering material like sawdust or dried leaves. You want a solid 3-4 inches on top.

So, this is all to say that no matter what kind of meal you’re making or how many people you’re serving, you can compost literally anything that you otherwise would have planned to put in your mouth. If it’s good enough for you, it’s going to be good enough for the microbes. I promise.

PS. Of course, it merits mention that the best use of food is never a compost—it’s to actually consume it. Your aim should always be to waste less food overall, and compost anything you absolutely can’t avoid not using. For tips on this front, I recommend the lovely Anne Marie Bonneau, otherwise known as the Zero Waste Chef.

From the archive of decomposition

The Australian brush turkey is famed for building what can only be referred to as a “hot compost pile” for a nest.

The male of the species will accomplish this remarkable feet by gathering together a large amount of organic material, such as leaves, twigs, soil, and grasses, until they’ve built up a mound of approximately three feet in height and anywhere from thirteen to sixteen feet in width. (Notably, it is common knowledge in the composting world that at least 3×3×3 feet is the size required by a pile in order to begin to get high temperatures. Perhaps we learned from the turkeys, at some point.)

Once eggs are laid (up to 24 per pile), the turkey parents will continue to add material to the pile and re-layer its ingredients, in order to maintain a perfect incubation temperature of approximately ~90°F until the eggs are ready to hatch. This can take anywhere from 60-90 days.

This is, all things considered, a stupendous achievement.

Some of the most qualified composters I know might struggle to succeed at such a task without at least some level of technological intervention, and here the humble turkey has become an intuitive master. If you want a refresher on why compost gets hot, I have one of those for you here.