The story of the Lomi, and how our technology handles death and decay

Jordan I’d like you to do me a favour. Take a look right now at whatever your favourite piece of modern technology is. It could be an iPhone, a laptop, a wearable device like a Fitbit, a video game system, a smart appliance like a refrigerator or an oven, whatever you like. Now take a real look at it. Is it pristine? Is it sleek and perfect? Does its design go to great lengths to appear as futuristic and streamlined as possible? Even if that design has nothing whatsoever to do with its actual purpose? Even if that actual purpose is to, say, get filled up with literal decaying garbage every day? And that brings me to the Lomi, which is a device made by a Canadian company called Pela. It bills itself as a smarter way to deal with garbage. In short, the Lomi is an incredibly clean, sleek, beautiful piece of modern technology that promises to turn something yucky and disgusting that also happens to be necessary for life into a spotless, sparkling process that you never have to think about again. Which is what all technology promises, really. The Lomi just takes it to the natural extreme.

I’m Jordan Heath-Rawlings. This is Interconnected on The Big Story, Part Four: When technology meets death and decay. Tynan Stewart is an independent journalist based in Fort Worth, Texas. He wrote about the Lomi and, by extension, technology’s relationship to decay in Real Life magazine. Hey, Tynan.

Tynan Stewart Hey, Jordan. How’s it going?

Jordan It’s going really well. I hope this topic isn’t too depressing, but I feel like our urge to conquer death is kind of universal.

Tynan Stewart No, I would agree with that. It seems like there’s a long history in humanity of trying to find ways to overcome our eventual demise, whether that’s the search for the fountain of youth or in more recent times, sort of Silicon Valley’s quest to find technologies that might bring an end to aging as we know it.

Jordan Listen, we’re all going to live forever in the Metaverse, so we can start with that. But no, first, why don’t we start with a gadget at the center of this? Because I found the way you drew the parallels in your piece to be fascinating. So maybe just first describe the Lomi to me. What does it look like?

Tynan Stewart Sure. I guess I’ll further describe sort of how it’s pitched by the company that makes it. So it is a home composting machine. I might compare it to a bread machine. It’s sort of a sparkling white appliance. There’s not much on it, no screen, just a little button that you press to start the cycles. And it’s used to dispose of food scraps that you generate from your cooking. And it’s pitched to people who maybe live in apartments or in urban settings where they might not be able to otherwise compost their food. The whole ethos is to divert sort of food waste that would otherwise go straight to the trash into perhaps a more eco friendly direction. So they say that they’re turning food scraps into dirt, I believe is the word they use. And they recommend that you put the dirt on your plants or put it in a green bin program or sort of throw it out. So that’s sort of how they pitch themselves to their potential consumers.

Jordan It’s a composter in other words.

Tynan Stewart Yeah, exactly.

Jordan So why would somebody use a Lomi instead of then just a regular green bag of compost or a green bin program or a pile of mulch in the backyard? Like what’s supposed to make it different?

Tynan Stewart So that’s sort of what interested me about Lomi’s pitch to potential buyers. The marketing pitch that Lomi makes is that, look, food waste is sort of gross and smelly. If you put it in a green bin, it’s going to rot within a few days and you don’t want that sticking up your kitchen. So what we’re going to do is we’re going to take your food scraps, put it in this machine, grind it up, dehydrate it and essentially do away with the smells that would come from, say, a green bin program. That’s their pitch.

Jordan Does that work?

Tynan Stewart I don’t think it works. I didn’t approach this essay I wrote for Real Life Magazine as consumer expose. I didn’t come out and say, hey, let me see if a scam don’t use it. I do think that based on what scientists and people who are far more knowledgeable about the science of composting than I am, it does seem clear that what they’re promising sort of overnight transformation of food scraps into compost doesn’t seem biologically possible.

Jordan What is that biological process? Leaving Lomi aside, like compost is supposed to stink and sit there, right? That’s what it does, right?

Tynan Stewart Compost, I guess it’s a basic overview is when organic matter goes through a process of decomposition. Now that involves many things. So microorganisms working on the food and involves sometimes worms adds to the process of the composting and in certain situations, yeah, it does give off like a pretty major stink. Although I do want to stress that if you properly manage a normal compost pile and give it plenty of oxygen, it normally won’t stink that much. But yeah, Lomi really does seem to be an attempt to sidestep the things we would normally associate with composting, sort of earthy smells and maybe some unpleasant smells. I can see why people would want to avoid that.

Jordan Sure. And I mean that makes sense, but does what the Lomi produces, and look, I’m also not a consumer expert here, so I’m not trying to tell people to buy it or not buy it either. But I guess my question is, does it do what it says on the box? Does it turn your organic waste into viable compost that will help your plants grow? What happens if I put the Lomi waste on my plants. Is it fertilizer?

Tynan Stewart It’s not clear to me whether it’s fertilizer or not, honestly. And no, I don’t think it accomplishes what some of its advertising claims have said it could. Originally it was funded through a campaign and the slogan of the campaign was turn your food waste into compost with the push of a button. I do not think it accomplished that. And it’s interesting actually, because the company’s advertising and sort of marketing strategy seems to have pulled back from that. Right? So now they say that it produces dirt, which is a more ambiguous term, I guess it’s accurate because dirt is just sort of waste products and all grimy and gritty. And that does seem to be what the Lomi produces. Whether you should put it on your plants, I don’t know. I wouldn’t put it on my plants, but it does not seem to produce the sort of quote unquote black gold that is surprised by gardeners.

Jordan And here’s where we’re going to get into a little bit of the bigger picture and why we wanted to talk to you about tech and death and decay in general. So who is this product for then, given that it’s not going to produce like the viable fertilizer type of compost we’re talking about? And if it’s not going to do that, why wouldn’t people just throw out the food then, or toss it in the nearest green bin or whatever, get it out of their house? There’s no real need for this product, yet people are buying it.

Tynan Stewart Right. And I think that’s really interesting. It seems to be pitched at a certain type of very eco conscious urbanites, the type of person who lives in a situation where they don’t really know how to deal with the food waste that producing. You can’t get around eating food, you’re going to produce food waste. And I think people are more and more aware that food waste is a major contributor to climate change. When it is put into the normal garbage streams, it goes to landfills, it rots in landfills, produces a lot of methane, and a certain type of person does not like contributing to that process. We don’t like thinking that our actions are making climate change worse. So I think it appeals to that type of person who wants to do good and wants to change their daily habits so they are more sustainable or eco friendly.

Jordan And also that person just doesn’t want to deal with the mess.

Tynan Stewart Correct, yes. So that goes back to the other main thread or a theme in Lomi’s advertising, which is food waste in general is just gross. That is one of their big pitches. They say that the company behind it, Lomi is for people who don’t like cleaning up, Lomi is for people who think garbage is gross. Their advertisements are filled with these great visuals of leaky, smelly, plastic trash cans full of sludge and rotten banana peels, and they really appeal to a sense of disgust in the sort of view of those ads. It’s like you were disgusted by garbage. Here’s a solution to that. And at the same time, it is a way to make you feel better about your sort of contribution to climate change.

Jordan Now, can you draw the link for us from that kind of approach to marketing and the way that Silicon Valley sees messiness, death and decay in general?

Tynan Stewart Right. So I think it’s probably worth stressing Lomi itself is not strictly a Silicon Valley company.

Jordan Right, it’s homemade, it’s Canadian.

Tynan Stewart Right. Based in British Columbia. Its parent company is a company known as Pela, and it seems like they’ve been in sort of tech adjacent for a while. Their first big product was biodegradable smartphone cases. But it’s worth stressing that the Silicon Valley ideology, for lack of a better word, of disruption, of we’re going to break things and change things through tech, not just limited to California, seems like it’s more of a state of mind than anything else. But I make this link in the essay that I wrote between Lomi’s general distaste for decay and decomposition and a trend that has been very prominent in Silicon Valley for at least a decade now, in which the owners and founders and the folks who have gotten rich off of technology have poured their efforts into avoiding death and its attendant decay and decomposition entirely.

Jordan Can you give us some examples of that?

Tynan Stewart Sure. So the founders of Google have poured lots and lots of money into a company that was originally called Calico with the goal of finding ways to slow down aging or at least prevent the sort of physiological side effects of aging. Right. The diseases of aging, the increased risk for heart attack, etc. On the one hand, you’ve got the folks who are sort of attempting to slow down aging or stop the side effects of aging. And on the other hand, you’ve got folks who foresee a merger of human and artificial intelligence, an uploading of brains to the quote unquote cloud. Right. And I think Elon Musk and his company Neuralink is one example of that.

Jordan This is where it gets really interesting, because one of the things you do is you point out this is not unique to the 21st century cutting edge Silicon Valley. How far back does our rejection or attempt to overthrow death and decay actually go?

Tynan Stewart I think it’s pretty old. It really seems like humanity has an almost instinctual aversion to death. I think we all know that on a sort of instinctual level, like, we don’t want to die, we’re afraid of death. But the example I like to cite is sort of the search for the fountain of youth. In 14th and 15th centuries, when European explorers were first colonizing America, and even further back than that, the attempt to avoid death appears in all sorts of ancient Greek and even older myths and legends. I think possibly the oldest myth in a story in human history of Gilgamesh includes Gilgamesh attempting to unsuccessfully avoid death. Right? So it seems like this impulse is very deeply ingrained in our culture or in our psyche or what have you.

Jordan Beyond just avoiding death, though, there’s also something there about avoiding the process of decay or degradation of the human body. Right? And I think the compost example is a great one because anybody who’s used or been around organic compost knows that, yeah, it can get messy, but that’s the point. And that’s what happens during the cycle of life and rebirth. And so many of the technological solutions that you just mentioned and that are also out there are not necessarily just trying to live forever, but trying to avoid the aging process and decay process entirely.

Tynan Stewart Yeah, I’d say that’s true. I mean, look, I understand the impulse, and I’m not even necessarily saying it’s a terrible thing. I think it is very scary to human beings, especially maybe even younger human beings or human beings who haven’t really started aging, to know that we are eventually going to break down, we are going to sort of lose control of our bodies that we value so much. And that’s a very scary thing. So I understand where these sort of impulses to avoid it come from. At the same time, it does seem like we are in some ways in the pursuit of this. I feel like we risk further alienating ourselves from our environments, from the ecosystems, which sort of rely on I used the image, which is not my original image, but the idea of the wheel of life, right. We cannot escape. And it seems like it may be a mistake to try to artificially divorce ourselves entirely from the sort of natural process of aging and life and aging and death. That’s sort of where I land at the end of the piece.

Jordan One of the images in your piece is the bucket on the farm post. Can you tell us about that and kind of what it signifies and how many people have that kind of bucket in their lives right now?

Tynan Stewart Right. So I took that image from a very wonderful essay by the farmer and poet Wendell Berry. He’s a writer based in Kentucky, and he very much practices what he preaches, so to speak, and that he writes a lot about localism and rural life and living in more in harmony with ecosystems, while also sort of maintaining his own farm, which he’s done for decades. And in this essay, the work of local culture, he has this really beautiful image of sort of really battered he uses the word galvanized bucket that hangs on his fence post on his farm and has been hanging there for as long as anyone around him can remember. And he writes about the way that leaves have fallen into the bucket and rain has fallen on it and other organic material has sort of accumulated. And slowly, over time, this organic matter has decomposed into, I guess what we would call compost, but he refers to as hummus.

And I find it a very beautiful image and I use it as essentially an inverse of Lomi. They are both human containers, right? And they both attempt to participate in this cycle of decomposition and death to produce something that we think is valuable, right? Some sort of compost as a result. But where the Lomi attempts to shortcut what we would probably think of as a sort of more natural or slow cycle, the bucket is working at a much slower time scale. And it’s interesting because that is not even its purpose, right? Someone probably just left a bucket there and forgot about it. And slowly, over time, nature has worked, has done what it does and incorporated the bucket into the ecosystem.

To answer the second part of your question, whether or how many people have something like this kind of bucket in their lives, I don’t know that too many of us do. I mean, I certainly don’t. I live in a big city, I do have a yard, and I have been trying to compost, but I don’t have anything that operates on that sort of very slow time scale. Perhaps I can only speak for myself, but it does not seem to me that many people have that sort of bucket in their lives.

Jordan The last thing I want to talk to you about is what happens next. And, you know, you’re not a technology expert. I’ve talked to lots of them for this special week. I’m not a technology expert either. But I think one thing we can both agree on is that it keeps getting better, it keeps getting closer to what it sets out to achieve. You’ve described everything from the fountain of youth up to where we are with some of our current technology. Eventually somebody’s going to be able, probably to make something like a Lomi that actually makes compost or at the very least to take an opportunity to try to upload somebody’s consciousness into a robot or whatever. Like at some point there’s going to become an inflection point where people will have a choice of whether or not they want to embrace this. And are we even in touch enough now with death and decay to make an informed choice when we’re given it?

Tynan Stewart I don’t want to make too many predictions about the future. One thing I will say is that if that sort of technological progress or innovation is achieved, let’s say people are able to upload their minds to the cloud or we do figure out how to extend human lifespan beyond its present hard limit, I don’t necessarily know that that in itself is truly a bad thing. What I am worried about, though, is that this will take place in a world that is already extremely stratified along lines of wealth, class, race, etc. and I talk a little bit about this in the piece, but it does not seem plausible to me that the people who will sort of produce or control these technologies will necessarily want or even think to extend this to the rest of humanity.

I genuinely do believe that Lomi sees itself as something that it wants as many people as possible to sort of buy its products, and it genuinely thinks it’s doing good. So I don’t want to lump Lomi or an eventual perfect countertop compost or in with Silicon Valley tech billionaires who wants to upload themselves to the cloud, but I do worry about this type of technology being introduced into a society that already has so many problems and in which existing lifespans are already so desperate. I’ll just end by saying I think there are other ways that we can think about expanding most people’s lifespans that we absolutely know work, like providing better access to clean water or universal health care, right. Like, these things that we know will expand most people’s lifespans. And that just seems like a better use of resources and time and effort than attempting a technological fix to aging and death, to me.

Jordan That’s a great way to end it. And I’ll just note, as we close it, while you were saying that, I went and looked up how much a Lomi was going for right now. And so they may want to save the world and they may want people to have them, but $499 U.S. is not going to get a lot of people home composting, even if it did work, right?

Tynan Stewart It’s a bit pricey. Yeah, I mean, I’m not rushing out to buy one.

Jordan Thanks so much for this, Tynan. Great chat.

Tynan Stewart Yeah, I really enjoyed it. Thanks so much for the interest in my piece and for inviting me on.

Jordan Tynan Stewart writing in Real Life Magazine. That was The Big Story. We have one more episode to go in this special series. I hope you’re enjoying it. It is certainly helping me clarify my relationship to the modern world. If you want to let us know what you think of it, we’d love to hear from you. You can find us at thebigstorypodcast.ca. There’s a contact us form there. You can also find us on Twitter at @TheBigStoryFPN. You can just email us [click here!], or you can call and tell us with your voice a very human thing to do. 416-935-5935 if you are enjoying this series, or if you’re hating it, one thing we’d love to know is what would you like to hear us explore in our next special series? All ideas are welcome. Thanks for listening. I’m Jordan Heath-Rawlings. We’ll finish this up tomorrow.

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