From KCRW, I'm Evan Klyman and this is good food.

Every week, I tuck my food scraps in a bag and stow it in the freezer.

I greet it many times because as it gets bigger, it falls out each time I open the freezer door.

The night before trash collection day, I put the frozen scraps in the green bin,

hoping that there are enough dry leaves and landscape trimming so the vegetables don't pool

at the bottom of the bin.

All this is to say that there is some effort to compost food scraps that is tolerable

because there is hope that at the end there is something positive.

Enter Janik Schaller, Good Foods Julia Child Foundation Fellow,

whose work is focused on the intersection of food and climate.

Yannick, you're relatively new to L.A. You moved here roughly six months ago, and when you took

on this story, it probably seemed pretty straightforward. But this is L.A., a sprawling city

that is made up of many diverse neighborhoods. So I'm curious was a story straightforward,

and if not, what makes talking about compost in Los Angeles so complicated? I don't want to spoil

the story, but can you tell me, is it good news? Should I feel like all my

efforts are worth it? It's a really good question. It's an important question. I would say that

there is definitely light at the end of the tunnel, but it's not entirely clear how long the tunnel

is if you catch my drift. I think maybe just to start

off my own experience coming here six months ago, until then my composting background had

really been kind of confined to my own parents' backyard experience. They live in rural

Indiana. We don't have any haulers coming by to grab our food scraps. We just kind of put it in

bins that are maybe 20 yards from our back door. And over time, it just turns into mulch,

...