The Diet of Worms

Earthworms love coffee grounds. Worms are simple organisms from a human perspective—a tube of muscle around a digestive system that will attempt to eat whatever’s in front of it, really—so maybe “love” is a human projection. But earthworms are also not so simple as that. They have a brain and a central nervous system. They can sense touch, and temperature, and humidity, and a version of taste, and some can even sense light. Why can’t they love?

Earthworms burrow, eat, and defecate, their feces called “castings” and much prized as fertilizer. You can buy casting-rich soil from worm farms, or get your own worms involved in your compost and garden. Summer before last, I bought a bag of red wriggler worms from Uncle Jim’s Worm Farm in Pennsylvania. The avuncular Uncle Jim has been farming and selling worms for more than 40 years. His employee spotlight videos are not to be missed.

Jim’s worms come in a cloth bag, packed in dry peat for transit. I dumped them out in the compost bin, where they lay unmoving, seemingly expired. Uncle Jim warns that the worms will be listless from traveling, and sure enough after a bit of rest and a gentle dousing, the worms began wriggling redly, true to their name, and burrowed down into the compost.

Supposedly, a vivacious earthworm population can double in as little as sixty days. I never attempted a census. But when I transferred a bin of compost that had been cooking for a year into the new garden, there were quite a few worms briefly and indignantly exposed.

Coffee grounds are good for compost, as they provide nitrogen for bacteria among other things. Note we’re talking about used coffee grounds, which are mostly blanched of their acidity in the process of making coffee. Worms like coffee grounds because they’re small organic material that can be eaten ground by ground, and even help break down other things in the worm’s digestion before breaking down itself. Through the action of bacteria and the consumption of worms, coffee grounds turn into a nice dark loamy earth after a few months of composting.

Hardcore vermiculturalists and vermicomposters closely monitor what they feed their worms, and they avoid citrus and other acidic produce like onions or garlic or tomatoes. Unfortunately for my worms, I don’t respect these rules. First and foremost, my compost is for composting discards from the kitchen. Fortunately, other bugs and microbes seem content to handle the acidic menu, and the worms are content to eat around them.

Yesterday was World Earthworm Day, established by the Earthworm Society of Britain to honor all things vermiform. In commemoration of the day, London environmental podcast Worm from Home posted a special episode about earthworms that goes into much more detail for the worm-curious.

The Diet of Worms was a big meeting called in 1521, in the German city of Worms, by Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, where Martin Luther was asked if he did in fact want to fight the Pope, and Luther said no, but also yes, he must, and then Luther was officially branded a heretic and the Protestant Reformation got into major gear, going on for several decades or another hundred years depending on who you ask.

I could have sworn I was taught “Diet of Worms” was actually pronounced something like /deet/ of /vorms/, but even though it seems like Germans do pronounce Worms as /vorms/, videos of contemporary Catholic scholars just say it like the stuff that worms eat.

Last year I noticed a dormant Twitter account that somebody had taken over for bot testing, where the account posted an AI-generated image prompt, but no image. However this was enough to draw countless replies from other bots complimenting the deep emotional resonance of the nonexistent image, as described.

I think about this often as a representative of the machine internet—the likely vast sea of generated content and communications between algorithms that humans will mostly never see, or even be aware of. Compare this to the similarly deep well of mostly unseen digital content generated by actual humans, new and old, in the forms of blogs, social media posts, emails, articles, newsletters like this one. Compare once again to browsing books in a thrift store or secondhand shop, weird little tomes from the distant or recent past, published somehow by some nobody who was never heard from or known again, and whose only remnant might by this copy of this unread book languishing in a cardboard box.

I take a sentimental pleasure in paging through books like that. Who was this person? What did they think would happen? How did this book end up here? Who else has touched it or opened it? Am I the first? I think the same things sometimes when I wander into an unremarkable field or stretch of woods in a remote or liminal area. Am I the first person to step on this dirt, kick this rock, lean on this tree? So what? I don’t want answers actually. I’m not thinking about it beyond considering it in the moment and enjoying that feeling, which is a form of affection if not love. I’m just moving through these things and places, digesting what’s in front of me.