Or, Thirty-One Years of Banana Peels

I stood in the kitchen on a recent morning, my hand frozen in mid-toss over the wastebasket. I paused for a guilty moment, unable to let go of the remnants of breakfast. Weird, right? For more than thirty-one years, my partner and I have begun almost every day by sharing a banana as part of our commitment to eating a reasonably healthy breakfast. (Potassium is your friend, readers. Have a banana!) For more than thirty-one years, I have tossed the peels into the garbage without giving it a second thought. Banana peels can’t go down the garbage disposal, so, you know, in the bag they go.

On this particular morning, however, I hesitated, suddenly self-conscious and uneasy about the habit of a lifetime. On this morning, I stood in the kitchen, banana peel in hand, unable to stop thinking about — guacamole.

Hang in there. I swear this is about to make sense.

Reading is one of the great pleasures and occupational hazards of academic life. I love nothing better than sinking my teeth into a new book as a way of exploring an area of knowledge that is unfamiliar to me. At the same time, such explorations always run the risk of taking us out of our comfort zones by shaking up assumptions and unsettling old habits. They can leave us stuck in the kitchen with a banana peel in hand, wondering what to do.

In preparation for the Scholars year in trash, I ordered a bunch of books that most English professors probably don’t have on their shelves. (See the Resources page on this blog. There are some great reads on that list!) One of the books I read was Edward Humes’ Garbology: Our Dirty Love Affair with Trash. The book earns its considerable fascination through a compelling mixture of sobering facts (“Americans make more trash than anyone else on the planet, throwing away about 7.1 pounds per person per day, 365 days a year” [5]) and a wide-ranging unpacking of the assertion that “Trash is nothing less than the ultimate lens on our lives, our priorities, our failings, our secrets and our hubris” (7). Part of that unpacking involves the story of the archaeologist Bill Rathje, known as “the Indiana Jones of refuse” (159) because his extensive explorations of the inner spaces of landfills offer surprising insights into contemporary behaviors, which are often at odds with societal assumptions and ideals. Garbage reveals what we so often try to conceal, so “garbology” — “the study of a community or culture by analyzing its waste” (168) offers a history quite different from the history derived from official records and documents.

In some instances, garbology also reveals important truths about how garbage behaves in the vast landfills we have built to serve as the “away” into which we throw things for which we have no use — which brings me back, at last, to the subject of guacamole.

Humes tells an amazing story about Rathje digging deep into a mountain of trash with a bucket auger and pulling up 25-year-old newspapers that were still surprisingly readable and a white ceramic bowl “of some brown stuff which, when its dirty crust was scraped away, revealed something bright green inside” (159). The something bright green turned out to be guacamole. Rathje’s excavations proved that “garbage does not decompose inside landfills as most people, including sanitation experts, believed. A well-maintained, airtight, dry sanitary landfill was more like a mummifier of trash than a decomposer of trash” (174). That isn’t necessarily bad news, because it means landfills are more stable and less hazardous than many had feared, but it also means that materials people had hoped and expected would biodegrade aren’t breaking down as expected. They’re just . . . sitting there.

Which is why, on a late summer morning, I stood in the kitchen with a banana peel in my hand suddenly hesitant to throw something “away.” In that moment I imagined my household’s thirty-one years of banana peels hanging out in various landfills with all the melon rinds and chicken bones and — yes — avocado pits we had mindlessly bagged and hauled to the curb. In that moment I realized the aging English teacher who runs Scholars was learning her first deeply personal lesson of the year in trash.

What does it take to change behavior? Humans are marvelously well intentioned creatures, but anyone who’s ever made a new year’s resolution knows how hard it can be to follow through on good intentions. The question of how to support individuals’ good intentions with regard to trash is a crucial one. You don’t have to be a (cliche alert) tree-hugging environmentalist to realize that reducing the amount of trash that ends up in landfills will make the planet a healthier and more pleasant place to live. I’ve recycled for years, because the community in which I live makes it ridiculously easy to do so. I’ve never been a composter, probably because I’ve never been much of a gardener and therefore didn’t know what I’d do with the stuff. In the last couple of years, however, my town has launched a curbside composting program, which means I could contribute my stuff to gardens all over my funky little community. I’m enough of a collectivist to find that idea appealing, and yet I hadn’t gotten around to signing up for the program — until I started writing this post.

What does it take to change behavior? Maybe it takes time, an accumulation of insights and experiences that finally makes change feel easier than the status quo. Maybe it takes one compelling detail — 25-year-old guacamole! — that gets lodged in one’s consciousness and imagination and finally breaks through that last stubborn bit of inertia. Change can be frightening, but so can stasis if the status quo is unhealthy.

I’ll let you know how the whole composting thing works out in my household, but consider this an invitation to share something of your own garbology. Do you have trash habits you’d like to change? Go on. ‘Fess up. I won’t tell a soul! Have you checked out the Small Footprint Pledge, which shows you the impact that simple changes in individual habits and practices can have? It’s a great guide to small steps you can take to avoid your own banana-peel moment thirty-some years from now.