Today (or rather yesterday - it’s one hour past midnight) was my son’s first day of school. He started 1st grade. I dropped him off at school and saw excited parents and their kids, some happy, some nervous. I recognized a parent. He was at a birthday party I attended last year. I spoke to him. His daughter is in my son’s class.
It was also garbage day. A few weeks ago we Fremont residents received a new recycling cart to replace the old recycling bins. In it was attached a covered kitchen pail. This pail is to be used for food scraps. The food scraps then need to be emptied into the “organics cart.” The organics cart was originally for yard waste only but with the addition of food scraps and food-soiled paper, high quality compost can be made out of the mix. According to the city newsletter, the following can be thrown into the organics cart: fruit, vegetables, cheese, meat, bones, poultry, seafood, bread, rice, pasta, coffee grounds, filters, and teabags.
This makes taking out the garbage a highly nauseating chore. Emptying the putrid contents of the kitchen pail into the organics cart never fails to test my gag reflex each time. It is not uncommon to see me in dry heaving fits as I walk from the trash cart outside all the way to the kitchen.
This actually reminds me of a form of food scrap collection back in the motherland. A guy would come around the neighborhood collecting food scraps from every home. He’d dump the stuff into two huge pails that hang at both ends of a bamboo pole which he then would balance on his shoulders. The stuff would reek from a block away. The guy would call out, “Kanin baboy!,” which literally means rice for the pig. Yes, the food he collected were fed to the pigs (it’s a third-world thang).
