Anyone who wants to reduce food waste has several options to explore. A common first step is to make the most of food scraps that cannot be eaten, and to keep them out of the landfill.
Compost is easily the best-known option, but it’s restricted by the fact that meat, bones and other animal products can’t be put into the compost pile or used for vermiculture. Bokashi composting is a little more flexible in this regard, but it has to be buried after fermentation, and before adding it to the rest of the compost.

The scraps and leftovers from animal products, thankfully, can still be put to use in the garden.

How to Reuse Milk

Milk is a source of calcium. We could argue about whether it’s the ideal source of calcium until the cows come home. But it does provide calcium, which plants crave. (Do not feed your plants Brawndo.) Calcium improves the uptake of nutrients from the soil, which in turn improves their growth and the effectiveness of any other fertilizers you put on your plants. Therefore, it’s a great way to put the nutrients in milk to use when the milk is no longer fit for human consumption.

Unlike us, plants can handle milk that has gone “off.” They live in dirt full time, and have happy relationships with all kinds of microbes that would cause us considerable suffering if we had the same exposure. You can apply milk to your plants straight from the jug, so long as you water it down to decrease the amount of sugar. Just stick your unfinished milk container under the faucet until it’s full, cap it, shake it to mix, and pour it around the base of your plants. My pumpkins loved it…until Squash Vine Borer did them in.

I’m still sad about it.

How to Reuse Meat

So you can’t compost meat, unless you use bokashi fermentation first. (Which is an option worth looking into.) It also can’t go into a worm bin. You can, however, use meat to make liquid fertilizers. The best known example is probably fish emulsion, which is a great source of nitrogen and phosphorus for plants. There are probably as many recipes for fish emulsion as there are fish in the sea, but the base components are the fish, dry organic matter, and water. Then the container is covered, and the mixture allowed to sit and rot. When I did it, using some freebie lox that had gotten funky, I chopped it up to increase surface area for microbes to work, stuffed it in a jar with dry grass, added water, and let it sit to putrefy.

This, admittedly, foul-smelling process quickly breaks down the fish into a nutritious sludge with lots of nitrogen and phosphorus. It can also be used to break down other meats. Anyone who collects and cleans bones by maceration is already familiar with the process, and may know from experience that plants greatly benefit from the drained maceration water. The process is also a good deal quicker than composting, taking about a week at most for household meat scraps.

As a side note, flies are attracted to the smell of putrefaction. They will take interest in the emulsion. I found that keeping the emulsion in a closed jar, and then submerging the jar in a larger container of water was enough to keep them away. The flies are still interested in the smell, but they won’t be able to lay their eggs on anything. Rather, they will just drown.

The water doesn’t seem to interfere with the process of putrefaction, though you will have to pull the jar out and “burp” it every few days, to release the gases that are generated by the process. It smells terrible.

That’s nature for you.

How to Reuse Bones

The obvious first step for making the most of bones is to make stock. But after stock, bones don’t have any other use in the kitchen. Thankfully, bones can also be turned into fertilizer. The process is absurdly easy, because you can just take your used stock bones, scrape the remaining meat and gristle off (which you can eat, though it will be a little bland), and then stick them in the oven to dry. After drying, they only need to be smashed and thrown in a blender to powder them.

This is a great thing to do during the fall and winter. You’re generally not planting anything in the garden, but you’re probably doing a lot of cooking. Speaking for myself, I tend to use cooking as an excuse to warm up the house–including a lot of roasting, and sticking the bones in my slow cooker for stock. That means a lot of bones, and a lot of time to stockpile bone meal to work into your soil once it thaws.

Bone meal is a slow-release source of phosphorus, so it’s worth working into the soil before anything is planted. Much easier to do, when you have a ton of it ready to go.