Beware the people who want to 'fine tune' everything to absolute perfection. What they're doing is complicating things out of proportion to what is necessary. Just because food has been processed to death doesn't mean it shouldn't be used in compost; think of it as newspaper, just carbon.

Technically, anything that came from the soil (even indirectly) can be composted: paper and cardboard (from trees and fiber), milk, meat (from cows, chickens, etc), dead rabbits, dead chickens, dead earthworms and drowned slugs/snails, natural-fiber fabrics (cotton, wool, jute, hemp, silk), aquarium and pond algae, discarded pond plants, weeds, leaves, burlap bags, pet and people hair, dust bunnies (or cattle, in my case) from under the furniture, cotton dryer lint, popcorn (popped, unpopped, buttered, salted, all okay), shrub prunings, grass clippings (non-poisoned), coffee grounds, tea bags, egg shells, rotten eggs (bury them in the pile or they stink), old pasta (cooked or uncooked), moss, pulp left over from juicing, all parts of the newspaper, wilted flower arrangements, stale potato chips, cattails (plants, not kitty parts), clean wood charcoal (not briquets), moldy onions, the unidentifiable stuff in containers in the back of the fridge that have turned into life forms and are scratching to get out.

But some you might want to exercise some judgment about some things, like meat, milk, oily things and dead animals that tend to attract varmints and pets. Bones work best if they're burned or pounded into shreds and don't have meat on them. Rancid peanut butter fits in with these things -- opossums seem to like it.

Pet and human poop need special consideration -- do your homework before you use these.

Don't accept greens (grass and plant clippings) from people who use poisons. Some of them break down, and some don't.

I try to avoid adding weeds with hard seeds, and running grasses and other invasive roots unless I've left them on concrete in the summer to die thoroughly.

Just ask yourself two questions: is it organic matter, and, is it likely to cause trouble?

Sue

Oatmeal doesn't "expire". But if you feel like wasting it instead of eating it, sure, go ahead and put it in your compost.

And I find that almost any grain will develop a stale taste after awhile. I suppose vacuum packing or sealing in a nitrogen atmosphere would help. Whole grains are worse, like whole wheat flour, because the oils go rancid.

Claire

Curt