It was a Tuesday evening, the kind where everyone is tired and dinner is rushed. My daughter, who is six, watched me scrape the leftover dal and half a roti from the plates into the dustbin. She looked up at me and said, very seriously, “Why are we throwing food away?”
I didn’t have a good answer.
The question that wouldn’t leave
Adults learn to stop asking these questions. Children haven’t yet learned that some things are “just how it is.” She wanted to know why food, which we’d spent the morning shopping for and the evening cooking, was now being scraped into a bin to be taken to a place she’d never seen.
I gave her a stumbling answer about how leftovers spoil and how the garbage truck takes everything to a big yard. She accepted it, but didn’t look satisfied. The next morning at breakfast she said, “Can we not throw it away tomorrow?”
What I started noticing
After that, I couldn’t unsee it. The amount of food we threw away every week was startling. Not because we were wasteful by choice — we ate normal portions, finished most meals — but because of how things added up. Vegetable peels. The bottom of every rice container. Bread crusts. Forgotten leftovers in the back of the fridge. A few small wastes per meal, multiplied across a week, became a real volume.
And it was all going into a black plastic bag, getting tied up, going down to the truck, and disappearing into the city’s landfill somewhere.
Trying to give her a better answer
We bought a home composter that month. I wanted to be able to tell her the truth: that we weren’t throwing it away anymore — we were giving it back to the soil. That the peels from this morning’s potato would, in a few weeks, become food for the plants on our balcony, which would grow tomatoes she could pick.
She found this enormously satisfying. She started carrying her plate to the composter herself, scraping the bits in. She started naming the worms and microbes she imagined were inside. (They’re not technically worms in our composter, but she didn’t need to know that.)
What changed in our house
The composter changed something I didn’t expect. It made our household more aware of its consumption. We started serving smaller portions, knowing leftovers would either be eaten or composted — not wasted into a landfill, but not produced unnecessarily either. We stopped over-buying vegetables. We finished things before opening new ones.
The dustbin emptied less often. The balcony plants grew greener. My daughter stopped asking the question.
The point
Children don’t ask sophisticated questions, but they often ask the right ones. “Why are we throwing food away?” was a question I’d never asked myself. The answer, when I tried to construct it, was uncomfortable: because we’d built a system where the food we cooked with care ended up rotting under plastic.
The composter wasn’t a moral victory. It was just a way to give a six-year-old a better answer to a fair question. And in the process, it gave us a better answer too.