“I love being naked in nature,” says Sarah McDaniel. “I love to use my sexual energy, which is just creative energy, in everything that I do.”
The most critical use of that sexual energy? Composting.
Just over a year ago, Dirt Girls cofounders McDaniel, 29, and Jaskrit Bhalla, 26, set off to weaponize that sexual energy to compel Angelenos to dispose of their food waste in ways that better help the environment. “We would see videos of Erewhon and a full basket of produce that was perfectly fine with minor bruises in the trash,” says McDaniel. “We started to observe coffee shops and any food-based event and just see how much waste was going straight to the landfill.” Sure, it’d be nice if that food was never wasted at all, but at least they could promote the next best thing: giving it to the worms instead.
The Dirt Girls collective works with local farms to help facilitate this process, but it also helps foster a community of individuals who compost on their own. “If you grow your own produce, then your own compost is one of the most nutrient-dense things that you can add to that produce,” says McDaniel.
“It is such a beautiful cycle to see that this food, these food scraps, can be food for worms, and they can turn into the most rich fertilizer and soil that we could use,” says Dirt Girls member Kieanna Jolaei, 34. “We call it black gold.”
The process itself is something that the Dirt Girls explain with an aura of eroticism—and mystique.
“The compost is actually the medium between life and death,” explains Jolaei. “Mycelium is in the soil, talking and helping trees communicate. There’s just so much connectedness, and there’s no rush in whatever they’re doing.” As Jolaei suggests, there’s a benefit in approaching our time with the same ease: “I find that when I’m more relaxed, when I have a calm nervous system, I’m able to be more expressive in my sensuality.”
The idea isn’t that composting is just some chore you should do for the good of the environment (which itself is a fine reason), but that composting will make you a happier, more relaxed, more attractive person.
Barring that, McDaniel has some advice for those of us looking for a way to reconnect with ourselves and nature. You can try meditating, of course, or going for morning walks where you stop and touch the trees. “Take a moment to look at the leaves, look at the way that the light shines through them, and look at the sky and think about how it all is working together to create this environment for us,” she says.
Jolaei also has one other suggestion: “Eat more mushrooms,” she says. Yes, those kinds.
Get your copy of the Winter 2025–26 issue and see more from the Dirt Girls pictorial.
