Can You Compost Cooked Foods?
Once you get use to the idea of composting various fruits and vegetable scraps, yard waste and so on, if you’re like most people you start loving how easy it is and how much it reduces your household trash output. So you begin to wonder what else can be composted.
Now the general rule of thumb is that anything organic can be composted, so many people wonder if they can compost cooked foods too. Maybe you have too many leftovers from supper and you don’t like to eat left overs, or maybe things have been sitting for too long in the fridge and it’s no longer edible.
So can you actually compost these types of foods? Yes you can, but you may or may not want to.
If you look around online you’ll find most people say you cannot compost cooked foods, but this is technically wrong. Because food is organic whether it has already been cooked or not, it can be composted. The reason most sites will say it can’t however, is because composting cooked foods will create horrible smells in your compost bin.
If you primarily compost in a small kitchen container or bucket, adding cooked food to that bin will make your kitchen smell very badly after a day or two when the food goes bad. Spoiled food smells. Horribly sometimes.
You can easily neutralize compost bin odors but the worse the smell is, the more neutralizing materials you’ll need. So in some cases the job will be too big for your current composting system to handle.
If you live in an apartment or house with no yard space for example, then your composting is limited to indoors. Usually kitchen composting is about the best you can do because you’re very limited for space. In this limited situation it’s a very bad idea to try composting cooked foods, because you won’t be able to add enough odor neutralizing compost materials and your home will stink very badly.
If however you do have yard space or even a large home which can accommodate larger composting bins, then yes you probably can compost cooked foods. …
