Food Porn

Coffee grounds served on a bed of onion and tomato skins, eggshells, the tops of some scallions and a squeezed lime, all in a stainless steel bowl.  Mmmm.  I feel like I've been transported to Eleven Madison, or someplace.

Like any backyard gardener, I compost.  I have a beautiful black polyurethane drum into which I dump a range of kitchen debris.  It sits atop a contraption with wheels that lets me rotate the drum to make sure things are mixing properly.  And since nobody wants to take kitchen scraps outside on an eggshell by eggshell basis,  I employ the compost bowl you see here as a kind of temporary way station.  When it's full, I wander outside and throw it in the composter.

I used to just throw the stuff in a bowl that I kept near the sink with a dishrag over the top.  But after a couple of funky bananas and the resultant fruit fly invasion, I started keeping the bowl in the freezer, pulling it out as needed.  Perfect system.

The best part about the photo was me thinking, hmmm, maybe I'll take a picture of my compost bowl.  Then looking down through the camera and seeing that the cutting board and some random fork happened to be almost perfectly lined up.

Truth in composting:  I actually straightened out the fork.  But the rest of the shot was taken as is, with not a single edit in photoshop after the fact.  In retrospect, I wish I had policed up the rim of the bowl at about the 8 o'clock mark.  But hey, that's composting.

As a brief aside, friends, it's worth reflecting that this is, on some level, the fundamental nature of art.  A lot of it is found, in one way or another.  Sometimes it's found in such a perfect state that all you have to do is line up the fork.

Other times, more work is needed.