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HOW ONE RESTAURANT’S SHIFT TO COMPOSTING FOOD WASTE BENEFITS THE ENTIRE COMMUNITY By Lynn Cline · Photos by Allison Ramirez
Radish tops at Mampuku Ramen going into Reunity Resources’ compost bins.
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. 36
edible New Mexico | LATE WINTER 2025
“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.”