Rats Rejoice as Mandatory Composting Hits New York City

“It’s been prepared and plated!” one rodent said. “All we have to do is show up.”

“I detect a hint of rotting salmon skin, with a suggestion of moldy cottage cheese — 2% milkfat, I’d wager.”

 I don’t usually get into conversations with the rats in my Union Square neighborhood – no matter how charming they seem, it always ends up with, “Are you planning on finishing that hot dog?”

But the other day one fat little rat was so excited he blocked my path.

“Joyce, did you hear that mandatory composting has finally come to New York?” the rat says. “The town’s most delectable scraps -- banana peels; chicken bones; Thai take out, even food-soiled paper -- will have to be separated and kept in your building for a week until the Sanitation Department picks it up. You hear what I’m saying?  A full week. Those wrappers with triple crème cheese sticking to them? A chocolate truffle that you take one bite out of and decide is not worth the calories? It’s a gigantic all-you-can-eat buffet, 24 hours a day.  No more pawing through ticket stubs and Trader Joe’s Fearles Flyers to get to the good stuff. It’s been prepared and plated. There’s nothing for us to do but show up. The missus and our 385 surviving offspring have been able to speak of little else.”

I hate to rain on anyone’s parade, even a rat’s, but I felt obliged to set the little fellow straight.

  “Listen, Ratso,” I say. “You have been misinformed. Under the city’s new composting guidelines, which will not become law for six months, residential buildings, such as my 300-unit co-op, will have but one designated day a week to put our food scraps out on the street for pickup. The rest of the time, it will be stored in the buildings.”

  “My point exactly!” the delighted rat says. “That means there will be six days a week of fragrant, exquisitely prepared food put out for our enjoyment in a designated spot, most likely the building basement. You know how good a salmon skin smells when you first scrape it off the plate and toss it into your garbage – and on a personal note, that honey-mustard salmon you make, LOVE IT! Now imagine, if you can with your puny human olfactory sense, how delightful that fish skin smells after five or six days!”

I don’t want to come off like a specist snob, but there are days it is all too obvious that rats have brains the size of a grape.

 “My dear rat,” I say. “Reading scraps of the print edition of the newspaper has obviously not given you the full story. The New York City Department of Sanitation, anticipating just such a problem, is not telling New Yorkers to dump their food waste in a basement container and leave it there for a week. They are advising us to keep our food scraps in our apartments until pick-up day.”

  “No!” exclaims the rat, in order to break up a large block of copy.

  “Mais oui!” I say, to vary the font. ”Moreover, to avoid odors in their homes, Sanitation has suggested residents store food scraps in their freezers. New York apartment dwellers are known to have huge kitchens, with massive refrigerators and freezers. My own freezer compartment is a sprawling 23 inches wide, 17 inches high, and 19 inches deep – before plunging in to retrieve, say, a package of cheese blintzes I tether my leg to the oven handle to avoid getting lost. True, the freezer’s icemaker and bucket take up a quarter of the freezer space, but for that I blame my own lack of concern for the planet. Icemakers are optional, after all.”

“Wait -- you’re going to fit a week’s worth of salmon skin and coffee grounds and apple cores and banana skins in your freezer?” the rat asks, incredulous. “That’s impossible. What if you pick up a rotisserie chicken? The skeleton alone will take up half the space.”                        

“Not all,” I say. “I will just stuff the skeleton into the plastic bag the city suggests I use to freeze food scraps, then jump up and down on it. Then I will slip the bag into the freezer, secure in the knowledge that the ice cubes will not absorb any odor.”

“Using a plastic bag for waste intended for compost seems counter-intuitive,” the rat says.

  “I thought so as well,” I say, “But my building manager assured me that the NYDS website said any kind of container was okay. You’re not suggesting that storing food waste in the freezer is a bad idea, are you?”

  “Not for me,” the rat says, “Because nobody is going to do it. What other bright ideas does the city have?”

“They’re distributing hundreds of composting bins around the city which can be unlocked with an app,” I say. “If you do not wish to store food scraps in your apartment, you can toss them in there. There’s a bin just a block from my apartment, on Sixth Avenue and 14^th Street. I tried it this morning and it worked perfectly.”

“The one with the McDonald’s package and some paper cups and banana peels nestled near the bottom?” the rat says. “Yeah, I stopped by for a snack this morning. Looks promising. One nice thing about garbage containers, there’s always an overflow.”

 “It also has a bit of an odor,” I say.

  “That’s only because it’s autumn and the temperature is dropping,” the rat said. “Wait till July. Then, I can assure you, the stink will make your eyes bleed.”

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