You Gotta Give to Get (Addressing a few Bokashi Complaints)

If you truly want something, you’ve got to be willing to give something.

Using bokashi is much different from tossing your scraps into a traditional trash can. If what you want is ease of use and to contribute to the ever-growing trash heaps, then bokashi is not for you.

However, if you’re willing to separate your food scraps from household trash, toss them in a bokashi fermenting bin and sprinkle bokashi bran, then congrats on your progressive way of thinking.

Bokashi Complaints

With any good thing, there will always be complaints. The complaints, however, are an indication of the person’s dedication to improving the environment or the need/want for easy, hassle-free convenience.

A few common bokashi complaints:

1. The bran smells: Well yes it does smell. It smells a bit like molasses. If you don’t like the smell of molasses, you’re not going to like the smell of the bran.

2. The fermented food scraps smell: Hmmm, this one is a kicker. Ever toss food scraps into the household trash and forget to take the trash out at night? Yep, yesterday’s broccoli and shrimp shells had 24 hours to sit in the trash bin. That’s what I call offensive odor. The smell of fermenting pickles with a hint of apple cider is nowhere near as offensive as rancid meat/fish/vegetables left in a trash receptacle. Besides, the bokashi fermenting bin takes weeks to fill and still doesn’t smell like a 24-hour “forgot to take the trash out” episode.

3. Bokashi is not a complete solution: In other words, you must take another step after the container is filled. Yes, that’s right (sort of). It’s not a complete solution at this stage. There is more work involved such as burying the scraps. Compare that to tossing food in the trash can, hauling it to the curb or end of the driveway so a hired service can then take it to a huge trash pile or landfill. Although the trash left your premises, it’s not done yet. As a matter of fact, it will never be done because evidence shows the plastic trash bags will be around for 500 to 1,000 years  or slowly decompose while releasing toxic chemicals  (unlike bokashi which nourishes the soil and in the long run is a complete solution).

4. Washing the recently emptied bokashi bucket isn’t fun: Nope. It isn’t, but neither is going to the dentist and we go anyway, don’t we?

C’mon folks. If we want to do something to help our environment, we have to change our way of thinking.