I was the king of garbage. I am not proud of it, but it's true. And when throwing out garbage was in fashion, I was the best at it. Every one or two weeks, I would grab a big green garbage bag and digging deep into our fridge, I pulled out leftover food. Then I went around from room to room, filling up the bag. You name it, it went into the garbage.
And then something changed and suddenly I realized that it become practically impossible to throw out your garbage anymore. City workers drove by my house once a week with a big truck that looked a lot like a garbage truck, but they weren't taking the garbage. The garbage started piling up in my garage and I knew that something had to change.
When I started complaining out loud about how ridiculous it was that you couldn't throw out your garbage anymore, my step-daughter broke down into tears one day and started telling me all about Al Gore and global warming. "If you don't change your ways" she said, "soon we will all be under water". Whether I agreed or not, one thing was for sure -- if I didn't change my ways, we were all going to be under garbage.
Eventually I reformed and now I am now the garbage nazi in my house. Nobody is permitted to throw food in the trash -- it goes straight into the green bin. And today as I carried this very heavy green bin down to the curb, it occurred to me how much food had gone to waste in the past week, and I realized that we probably could have fed double the number of people in our house with the amount of food wasted -- time for another family meeting.
