Last June, Maison Robert-Bélanger hosted its first summer artisanal and farmers’ market of the year. This heritage site was restored in 2023 and has since served as a hub for agricultural, cultural, and environmental programs in the Saint-Laurent borough. Vercité, a non-profit, invited other community organizations to sell fresh produce and handmade goods alongside them. Visitors from across Montreal explored the historic farmhouse while purchasing fresh fruits and vegetables, vibrant flowers, and artisanal handmade goods.
Among these local vendors and the rows of products for sale, visitors eventually stumbled upon me: The worm lady.
After hosting a vermicomposting workshop here with my coworker a year prior, I was invited by Vercité to sell worms and hand-picked vermicompost at this market. But having sold at markets in the past, my expectations were very low, as they all ended the same way: with zero sales and a bin full of unsold worms.
Surprisingly, this was my most successful market yet. At the beginning, one cyclist bought a bucket of worms from me. As I admired the whopping twenty dollars I made from this customer, the rest of the day went just as expected: guests wandered through the market filled with fresh produce and artisanal goods, but the moment they reached my table and read the “worms for sale” poster, a variety of disinterested or grossed-out facial expressions came my way. Along with this were a variety of comments, including “Yuck,” “Maybe I should compost more,” and “Food waste is an issue that the city should deal with.”
Composting often gets dismissed as a niche activity for gardeners or sustainability geeks. As someone who composts with worms, I am often labeled a hippie or an environmental extremist in some of my social groups. I get it. There is something about a bin full of wiggling and slimy worms that makes people uncomfortable. But these tiny invertebrates, along with other insects and microorganisms, have the power to turn food that would otherwise go in the garbage into rich nutrients for the soil.
But the value of composting goes far beyond nutrient cycling. It is part of a much larger solution to an escalating food waste crisis that the world is facing. In 2018, the United States alone disposed of over 35 million tonnes of food waste. Meanwhile, the United Nations declared that every Canadian produces an average of 79 kilograms of food waste annually. They also estimated that 931 million tonnes of food waste were generated globally in 2019, a figure that would later increase to a total of 1,052 million tonnes in 2022.
However, accurately reporting how much compost is generated globally is often an impossible task. Most of the available data relies on self-reporting by individuals, businesses, and municipalities, making it difficult to verify its accuracy. To make matters more complex, food waste data is mostly gathered across urban areas, which does not represent food waste produced in rural regions. These limitations raise concerns not only about the reliability of the reported figures, but also about the possibility that existing data underestimates the food waste produced globally.
Organic waste disposed of in landfills contributes significantly to a range of environmental and social crises, including climate change. When food waste is sent to landfills, it is compacted and deprived of the oxygen necessary to decompose properly. It is then mixed with other types of waste, such as plastics. This compression of food and its mixture with other substances releases methane gas, which is at least 28 times more potent than carbon dioxide. Methane, along with other greenhouse gases, traps heat in the atmosphere and contributes to rising ocean temperatures and the increase in extreme weather events that we are seeing today. Along with these issues, landfills are often located near low-income, marginalized communities, exposing residents to harmful air pollutants. Long-term exposure has been linked to higher rates of respiratory illnesses, skin irritations, and other health issues, while some studies have even connected this exposure to increased reproductive health risks.
In these ways, the food scraps in our kitchens are more deeply intertwined with broader environmental and socioeconomic challenges than many realize. And as many researchers point to how climate change is one of the most urgent crises of the 21st century, many are calling for change, for immediate action that we can take to make a difference. Even though composting may be one of the more accessible and impactful actions that individuals can take to fight our climate crisis, there is still hesitation and discomfort when these discussions and practices are brought into the public eye.
So why is there still resistance to something that is simple, effective, and so urgently needed? Next week, I plan on diving into one of the bigger barriers we face and how this obstacle persists in climate change intervention. Stay tuned!