From Table to Farm

How One Restaurant’s Shift to Composting Food Waste Benefits the Entire Community

By Lynn Cline · Photos by Allison Ramirez

After diners have savored bowls of fragrant tonkotsu, shoyu, curry, and other ramen at Mampuku Ramen, what’s left joins radish tops, green onion ends, red pepper pith, and more in a bin in the Santa Fe restaurant’s kitchen. Until last year, these scraps, aside from some that went home with the prep chef to feed her chickens, ended up in the local landfill. There, piled along with food waste from dozens of other restaurants and thousands of homes, they rotted, releasing methane, a planet-warming gas that is twenty-five times stronger than carbon dioxide.

“We opened Mampuku Ramen right before the pandemic and we were busy, with lines outside the door,” says manager Ayame Fukuda, who runs and co-owns the restaurant with her sister, Iba Fukuda. It was 2019 when the sisters, who grew up helping their parents run Shohko Cafe, Santa Fe’s first sushi bar, opened the city’s first ramen-focused restaurant. Seven months later, the first of many public health orders restricted public gatherings, and soon everything changed: “We had to shut down and convert to takeout. We weren’t thinking about composting then.”

Luckily for Santa Fe, they made it through the ups and downs of the pandemic, and last year, realizing they could do something even more beneficial with the restaurant’s food waste than feed a fraction of it to chickens, the sisters reached out to Reunity Resources.

Making the shift to sustainability was a no-brainer. Food waste contributes to more than 40 percent of waste in landfills. “It felt so right,” Ayame says of signing up for Reunity’s Commercial Food Waste Collection program. “There was no resistance whatsoever to doing it. It’s a double win for everybody. Reunity gives us a sixty-four-gallon wheeled cart and compostable liners and then they pick up the waste. It’s so easy.”

Mampuku Ramen is now part of a growing network of local restaurants, institutions, and households that are helping the environment by sending food scraps and leftovers to the Reunity Resources Soil Yard, where they are broken down into a fertile, microbially rich, fungi-friendly mixture that enriches soil—a.k.a. compost. The compost, in turn, is used locally by home gardeners and landscapers and in community and school gardens, where it supports soil and plant health and helps reduce pollution.

The compost is also integral at Reunity Resources’ own two-acre farm, nurturing healthy soil to grow carrots, tomatoes, radishes, greens, and an abundance of other food. The produce is then donated to families through local food equity programs and Reunity’s onsite Community Fridge, sold at Reunity’s seasonal Farm Stand, and made into hot sauces, pickles, and other prepared foods through Reunity’s Saving Seconds program.

Reunity Resources began in 2011 as a small biodiesel program, upcycling used cooking oil, and expanded in 2014, adding the Commercial Food Waste Collection program to compost food scraps from local restaurants. When the pandemic hit in 2020, Reunity launched the Doorstep Food Waste Collection program, which now serves more than 550 homes in the Santa Fe area. Together, the programs annually divert more than 1.4 million pounds of food waste from the landfill, which is the CO2 emissions equivalent of removing 823 vehicles from the road for a year.

“We started with six restaurants and today we have more than forty-five,” says Juliana Peterson Ciano, Reunity Resources cofounder and program director. “We also have about twenty-seven schools and other institutions. To get all of these restaurants together is a huge amount of food waste that we’re diverting. There isn’t a day that goes by that I’m not grateful for our community and everyone’s willingness to participate. This idea of community-scale solution to climate change only works in a community that shows up, and I think the restaurants in Santa Fe really show up.”

As those radish tops journey from Mampuku Ramen’s kitchen to Reunity’s Soil Yard, they contribute to the fifty-three tons of food waste collected by Reunity each month from restaurants and nonschool institutions. The waste is composted, a process that the Reunity team calls “regenerative alchemy.” When seeds are planted in compost-enhanced soil, carbon is sequestered from the atmosphere, where it’s harmful, and stored in the soil, where it’s needed, contributing to climate resiliency.

“I always love the simplicity of compost,” Juliana says. “Actually it’s food waste, wood waste, air, and water, and we are just collaborating with the natural process so that this material is composting rather than decaying, and you’re preventing emissions. When you have the final result of this alchemy, this compost, and you add that to your desert soils, so many benefits happen. You can grow food and that soil will hold water instead of having that water run off. You’re turning your desert soil into a sponge, holding water where you need it. And whatever is growing in that soil is doing photosynthesis and pumping carbon dioxide into the soil, and that helps things grow.”

As compost, all those radish tops are now returning a favor, helping other radishes to grow in healthy, fertile soil. Once those radishes are grown, they’ll end up providing a boost of vitamins and other health benefits to everyone who eats them, whether at one of Santa Fe’s restaurants or at home.

Reunity’s food waste collection services aren’t just good for the environment, they’re also good for participating restaurateurs. “It was such a relief to start composting,” says Ayame. “I feel so good about raw leftovers now.”

Mampuku Ramen
1965 Cerrillos, Santa Fe, 505-772-0169, mampukuramen.com

Reunity Resources
1829 San Ysidro Crossing, Santa Fe, 505-393-1196, reunityresources.com