It is said that Jesus was able to turn water into wine. While such truly miraculous skill to this day remains confined to the realm of saints and sages, I bring good news about a wine-making technique that is — especially in light of Pope Francis' recent warning about the destructive consequences of unbridled consumerism on the planet— no less uplifting, and most importantly, attainable by any and all:

The composting of municipal food waste into organic fertilizer to provide the nutrients necessary for soils to support healthy vines and carbon-sequestering roots that produce the kind of grapes responsible for heavenly wines, from here to eternity.

The revelation occurred to me last Saturday, when I received a last minute invitation by my garbage guru to join a congregation of the compost curious on a pilgrimage to Chateau Montelena, a vineyard located in the heart of the promised wine valley about 80 miles north of the City of St. Francis.

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Before we pop the orange cork below, a word from the Book of Garbage...

The Genesis With the advent of an economic system in the mid-20th Century that demanded ever more rapidly increasing levels of consumption and inputs of natural resources, communities across the world were faced with the problem of what to do with the mounting heaps of discarded items that were no longer deemed valuable in a throw-away society. Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view. Mountain of plastic trash found on a beach in Lima, Peru in one afternoon. In countries with a lot of open space like the United States, the solution was to simply truck everything into designated open areas and create mountains of trash. Less spacious countries like France and most of Europe came up with what they thought to be a more elegant way to deal with the unwanted excess, by burning the whole steaming pile in high tech furnaces. Countries unable to afford expensive waste disposal infrastructure largely relied on the resilience of their poorest citizens to deal with the mounting piles of consumer goods. However, with the rate of production and consumption increasing so dramatically over such a short period of time, the sheer volume of unwanted refuse overwhelmed the collective human capacity to deal with the excess in a sustainable fashion. There was so much stuff designed for one-time use only— thanks to artificially cheap oil enabling the proliferation of non-degradable plastics— that much of it began slipping through local retrieval systems and washing into the planet's oceans. Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view. Trash-bound food made into meals at "Feeding the 5K" event in Nantes, France. Moreover, one-third of the edible parts of food produced for human consumption in the world — about 1.3 billion tons per year —ended up in the trash, where it not only failed to feed the world's 852 million people suffering from chronic undernourishment but emitted a whopping 3.3 billion tons of CO2. In the United States alone, 95% of uneaten food was being thrown away, accounting for more than 20 percent of all methane emissions in landfills. If food waste were a country, it would be the 3rd largest emitter of greenhouse gases in the world. In other words, humans were not only wasting a sinful amount of food, but the waste was speeding up climate chaos which led to disruptions of agriculture and global food security. A vicious cycle if ever there was one.