Ep.241: Food Communion: Rethinking What We Throw Away with Daniela Ochoa Gonzalez

It's the autumnal equinox as we record this one — rain all afternoon, a first cup of hot tea for the season, the kind of cozy day that makes you want to slow down and pay attention. Fitting, since Mary and Emma open this episode by pausing to say hello properly: a reintroduction, for anyone new to the podcast, of who they are and why they've kept this conversation going for years, even as the pace has slowed to something more sustainable than weekly.

Then Mary sits down with Daniela Ochoa Gonzalez, a food systems circularity advocate who's spent more than fifteen years turning zero-waste ideas into real programs — from a green-barter pilot she built in her hometown in Michoacán, Mexico, to her current work here in the Montgomery County Agricultural Reserve. Daniela's story moves through Cornell, a favela-inspired recycling exchange in Curitiba, Brazil, and a front-row seat to just how much food — avocados especially — travels a long, tender distance before it ever reaches an American kitchen counter.

This conversation lands just ahead of Food Waste Prevention Week, and it's full of the kind of practical, no-guilt wisdom Daniela calls "food communion" — not just what we eat, but what we do with what's left over. Expect real numbers, real hacks, and a genuinely moving reframe of a habit most of us do without thinking twice.

In this episode:

Mary and Emma's reintroduction to the podcast — where Lady Farmer and The Good Dirt have been, and why the podcast has settled into a monthly rhythmDaniela's path from international relations and conflict resolution studies to food systems circularity, by way of Cornell, the Pan American Health Organization, and a green-barter pilot she built in Michoacán, MexicoThe Curitiba, Brazil program that inspired her work: exchanging recyclables for fresh produce in low-income communitiesWhat "food systems circularity" means — from soil to plate to what happens afterThe scale of avocado waste moving through the DMV region, and what that waste costs the farmworkers and land it came fromHow Daniela ended up in the Montgomery County Ag Reserve, and what she learned about the incinerator eight miles from homeThe difference between landfilling, incinerating, and composting — and why methane from food waste is a bigger climate issue than most people realizeA tour through the local composting landscape: decentralized vs. centralized composting, drop-off locations, and why "closer to home" mattersPractical food waste prevention hacks: the