Let me tell you about Millicent.
Millicent lives in my garage, next to the door to the house and the glass recycling bin. She is white and rounded and about the size of a regular trash can – think one of those fancy simplehuman cans that a lot of people have in their kitchens – and she has a wooden-looking lid and she is, genuinely, one of the better decisions I have made in recent memory. I named her myself. I stand by this.
I’ve had her for almost a month now, and I want to talk about what she’s actually changed, because it’s more than I expected, and I expected quite a bit.
But first, let me back up and tell you why I needed her in the first place, because this is a food blog that talks about where food comes from and what we do with it, and what we do with it at the end is something I think about more than is probably comfortable.
The Guilt Was Already There
About 30 to 40 percent of food produced in the United States gets thrown away rather than eaten. I knew that number before I really understood what it meant. It’s the kind of statistic that’s big enough to slide right off your brain without leaving a mark.
What left a mark was a Gastropod episode called “Black Gold: The Future of Food We Throw Away.” If you haven’t listened to it, I’ll give you the relevant part and then you can decide whether you want to ruin your afternoon with the full version.
When food goes to a landfill, it doesn’t quietly decompose. Without air, a different set of microbes takes over — anaerobic ones — and they break down organic material and produce methane. Methane is a greenhouse gas that’s roughly 84 times more potent than CO2. Your banana peel, your leftover soup, the sad half-avocado you forgot about: in a landfill, they’re not becoming anything useful. They’re generating a particularly nasty form of climate pollution.
And that’s before you get to leachate. Leachate is the liquid that forms as food breaks down in a landfill, mixing with everything else in there. It’s toxic. It’s gloppy. Landfills need heavy-duty liners specifically to contain it and keep it from poisoning surrounding groundwater. Gastropod called it “a disgusting name for a disgusting thing,” which is accurate. The name sounds like what it is.
I listened to that episode and did what any reasonable person does with uncomfortable information: I sat with my guilt for a while and mostly kept doing what I’d been doing.
What I’d been doing was this: keeping a bowl on the counter for food scraps destined for the compost pile. The compost pile is around the side of the house, by what we call “the barn,” approximately thirty feet from the back door. Thirty feet. And yet, walking out there at night — in the dark, in the cold, in the cold AND rain, which is most of Georgia winter — was apparently beyond me. The bowl sat. And sat. Zach’s name for it was “that gross bowl,” delivered with the tone of someone who has said this before and expects to say it again.
The cooked food was worse. The half portion of soup. The two tablespoons of rice. The scoop of roasted vegetables I fully intended to eat. Into a container, to the back of the fridge, discovered three weeks later during what I can only call refrigerator archaeology. Into the trash. Every time. Methane-generating, leachate-producing, landfill-filling trash.
I cared. I just wasn’t doing anything about it.
Enter the Mill
The Mill is a food recycler, and the version I have is not a countertop appliance (other companies do make smaller countertop models). This one is the size of a full-sized kitchen trash can — a 20-gallon situation. Mine lives in the garage because that was the obvious move: same spot as the glass recycling, right next to the door I already open to take things out. The friction of walking to the compost pile was the whole problem. The Mill is in the path I was already walking.
On pricing: you can buy one outright, and they are not cheap. The white model runs $999. Want black? That’s $1,149. Stainless steel? $1,199. Alternatively, you can rent one for $35 a month with the option to buy out after twelve months — which is what I’m doing. The rental has one meaningful advantage beyond the lower upfront cost: if it genuinely doesn’t work for you, you can return it. I wanted a black one. The rental program is currently only available in white. So white is what I got. I have made my peace with this.
Here’s what the cycle actually looks like: food scraps go in throughout the day, and when the bucket gets full enough, you either let it run automatically or start a cycle manually. Tonight I started one manually — Millicent was getting full — and the app told me it would take about seven and a half hours based on the volume and weight. It runs a Dry & Grind cycle. What comes out is dried, shrunken food “grounds” that can go directly into the compost pile on the weekend when I’m already out there anyway, mixed directly into garden soil at a one-to-four ratio, or — and this is a big deal if you keep backyard chickens — used as part of your flock’s feed. The loop closes without me having to be heroic about it on a Tuesday night in the rain.
What can you put in it? More than your backyard compost pile handles, which was a big part of the appeal for me. Fruits and vegetables, obviously. Meat and poultry and fish. Shrimp shells. Chicken and fish bones. Eggs and dairy. And here’s where it gets genuinely impressive: the hard stuff that would defeat most composting situations. Avocado pits. Cherry stones. Pumpkin seeds. Whole peanuts. Corn cobs (break them in half or thirds first). Fibrous vegetables like celery and carrots — chop them into big pieces, and yes, the sad soggy ones you just strained out of your chicken stock, coated in chicken fat and all, are completely fine. The Mill app has a full library of what’s in and what’s out, but the short version is: if you’re hesitating about whether your compost pile could handle it, the Mill probably can. The hard limit is the big shells: crab, lobster, oysters, clams, and mussels are all out, and so are bones from beef, lamb, or pork. Everything else is fair game.
Almost a Month In
The app has an Impact screen. It tells me Millicent has helped divert 22 pounds of food scraps from landfills since I got her. Twenty-two pounds in under a month, from one household, with one person who is not especially disciplined about this and is mostly just dropping things in on her way through the garage.
I keep coming back to that number. Not in a guilt direction — I’ve had enough of that — but in a “the gap between what I care about and what I’m actually doing is closing” direction. That’s a genuinely different feeling. I still haven’t needed to empty the bucket. The compost pile gets fed on the weekends when I’m already out there. The gross bowl is gone from my counter. Zach has said nothing about anything sitting anywhere that shouldn’t be, which in the language of long relationships is basically a standing ovation.
Twenty-two pounds. One household. One month. I’ll take it.
If you’re thinking about getting one, I do have a referral link: use this link if you’re buying outright and you’ll get $150 off your purchase. Full transparency: when you use it, I get $100 credit toward my final lease payment. I’m telling you about the link because $150 off a $999 appliance is real money, and I’m telling you about the credit because you deserve to know it exists. That’s the deal around here.
P.S. I leased Millicent with my own money and I’m telling y’all about her because she solved a real problem. I’m not in their affiliate program, but I do have a referral link in the post above — use it and you save $150 on an outright purchase; I get $100 off my final lease payment. Fully disclosed, as always.
P.P.S. The Gastropod episode is “Black Gold: The Future of Food We Throw Away,” April 2022. It will absolutely ruin your relationship with your own trash can and I recommend it unreservedly.
P.P.P.S. I wanted the black one. I got the white one. It’s fine. She’s still Millicent. She doesn’t care what color she is.