Greetings,

When I was younger, eating dinner with my dad was an intimidating experience. During the week for nearly 40 years, he has basically only eaten one meal a day for no rational reason other than that he can. At dinner, he would go to town. After he finished all the food my mom had prepared that night, he would make all the leftovers in the kitchen disappear. He would often tell us that he was the sole member of the “Clean Plate Club” at school, which apparently was pretty selective. Even now that I am bigger than he is, I still cannot keep up with him. In my family, there was never really a need for composting—my dad could work miracles.

Here at Yale, composting is an important part of reducing our environmental impact. We all see the composting bins in the dining halls, but very few of us know much about the other steps in the process of turning our food waste to useful compost. For this week’s cover story, Calvin Harrison, CC’17, visits New Milford Farms to see where our food scraps go after we dump them off our plates in the dining hall. At the compost piles, he reports on the downstream consequences of what we choose not to eat and talks to the workers whose jobs become harder when we contaminate the compost bins with regular garbage after finishing a meal.

There is plenty more content for you to check out while you join the Clean Plate Club. In Features, Will Nixon, PC’19, questions whether we should pay attention to YCC elections (why do none of their platforms feature composting?). And in Reviews, Emma Chanen, TD’19, revels in the products of a very different farm at Arethusa Dairy.

Yours,

Luke Chang

Reviews Editor