To get the year off to a good start, I want to let everybody know that I am mostly over my unhealthy obsession with featuring overhead wiring in my photographs. That’s the good news.
The bad news is that it recently came to my attention that flues can be fun:
My kitchen experiments continue and I teeter on the brink of becoming one of the total converts to Nancy’s® dairy products, a consumer group locally known as “Nancy Boys.”
Nancy’s yogurt has long been a favorite, but I only recently discovered Nancy’s kefir, most especially Nancy’s peach kefir. Actually, I discovered kefir in 2004 in Amsterdam, for some reason never having tasted it here and somehow thinking that it was totally exotic. Then upon my return I found that it is in all the grocery stores. Yes, moi, the great gourmand.
Nancy’s kefir is even better than the Lifeway® brand, especially if it’s cut with a bit of milk to thin it slightly and then augmented with just a splash of dark agave nectar to brighten it up a bit.
Another reason to buy Nancy’s is that it comes in a standard cardboard carton, which I definitely approve of because it is not only itself compostable but also serves as a practical container for my kitchen trimmings and scraps so that they can be placed in the compostables bin in this closed container and not create a mess or a great stink before the bin is emptied on Wednesdays.
See, in most of San Francisco, the recycling program collects not only the usual glass, metals, paper, cardboard, and a variety of plastics; but also, in a separate bin, compostables – garden trimmings and kitchen scraps
Most especially, as far as I’m concerned, the kitchen scraps, because unlike garden trimmings, so many people in the United States use that Appliance of the Devil, the in-sink garbage disposal, to get rid of the onion peels, avocado skins, chicken bones, etc.
Surely somebody has done the math on these atrocities and calculated their cost to society. Think about it. Here we are in California, and what are we faced with shortages of? Water and electricity. Second question: What does your garbage disposal consume in order to overburden your municipal sewerage system with puréed kitchen trimmings?
Oh, water and electricity.
Yes, gobbling up electricity and water in order to send more trash down the drain to the sewerage system, where it requires additional processing, consuming even more electricity and water.
In an ideal world, we’d all have backyard compost piles, but I admit that that’s not practical for many of us. But how hard it is to put kitchen scraps into a milk carton and the milk carton into the compostables bin?
And if that’s too much trouble, a reasonable compromise would be to just throw it into the trash, which cannot be any more difficult than washing it down the drain through the garbage disposal.
So, yes, I’ll be doing some homework and spewing out a disquisition on this subject, yes I will, but that’s for later. The above observations are just so that when you’re at the Pearly Gates you can’t plead ignorance.
Oh, and to lighten the tone, here’s some Castro Street flues:
