Sunday, December 06, 2015

Lemonade Out Of (Moldy) Lemons

Perhaps some of you wonder whether or not I clean out my fridge anymore. After all, there haven't been any posts featuring long-expired leftovers in a long time.  I'll tell you the truth: for a while there, I just gave up. Occasionally Larry, in a fit of desperation, would rummage through the fridge and get rid of things that looked suspect, but on the whole things have been left to run amok, as it were.

Never again...
But all that has changed, people. No longer do I have items sitting in my refrigerator for months; no longer is the entire back third of that particular appliance given over to what we euphemistically referred to as "science experiments." No, a new day has dawned in The More, The Messier household, an era of good feeling, if you will - and it only costs me $25 a month.

You see, someone tipped me off that there was a new composting service in town - that is, for a monthly fee, this company would pick up all of my organic-matter refuse and turn it into dirt. The company then distributes bags of this dirt to community gardens (oh, and 2 bags a year to its customers).

Icing on the cake - the company was started by a returned Iraq War veteran, and it makes a point of hiring other veterans.

So I took the plunge and signed up, whereupon I was rewarded with a 7-gallon heavy-duty plastic bin to stick all our organic refuse into - everything left on our plates, plus paper towels, chicken bones, you name it. Pickup is on Fridays, when they take the full bin and leave me a clean empty one. For $300 a year, I can pride myself on doing my part for the environment AND helping veterans find jobs; but, truthfully, for me that's not even the best part.

My new best buddy
The best part is, every single Thursday I feel GREAT as I go through our refrigerator, because everything I toss will be transformed into dirt and donated to community gardens.  I am part of the circle of life, people - me and my wasteful food habits. That's right, no more guilt over wasted food, no more self-flagellation over good intentions left to rot in our vegetable crispers, NO MORE REGRETS.

True, this still doesn't solve my condiment overload issues, judging from the number of little jars and bottles that persist in crowding my fridge. But those spiffy refrigerator bins I bought last year in Costco do seem to be helping to prevent a repeat of the vinaigrette fiasco of 2009, so that was money well spent, also. I'm sure Larry appreciates my spending all his hard-earned cash to solve problems caused by my domestic incompetence. But maybe he is used to that by now...

9 comments:

  1. I'm glad I'm not the only one that feels like all the food I throw away is because of my domestic incompetence - when it fact if that would just eat what I serve them we would have no problems. And since we have a garden, perhaps I should look into composting but that just seems like a huge hassle...totally worth $300 to have it done for you.

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  2. What a great idea for a company!
    We compost at our house. It takes away so much of the guilt of wasted food. It's not wasted! It's used in the garden! And the fridge never looked better.

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  3. I love this because I feel sooooo guilty when I throw out uneaten food from the fridge. At least you know it it going for good

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  4. There I was, smugly composting our outdated and uneaten food waste…and then discovered with horror that RATS had been rummaging around in the pile. I'm already paying for the city to haul it away, so…out it goes.

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  5. What company? I would do this in a heartbeat!

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  6. OMG, I need to see if my community has something like this. In the summer, I do toss all our vegetable trash into an ersatz compost pile in the vacant lot next door, but in the winter, I need another method.

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  7. Definitely a win-win solution! (Actually, it's triple win, because you don't have critters rummaging in your yard for a free meal of rotted vegetables and chicken bones.

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