🔑 Turn Trash to Gold
The best kind of dirty talk and make $500 eating fast food!
Good morning. Here’s a fun history lesson to start off your weekend. Hot Dogs weren’t really called hot dogs till much later. They were named dachshund sausages after the breed. However, in 1901, while observing vendors in New York selling “red hot dachshund sausages”, a cartoonist drew a barking dachshund in a warm roll.
Not having participated in the National spelling bee, he didn't know how to spell 'dachshund'. And without Google or autocorrect to save him, he simply wrote “HOT DOG” on the drawing — a name that has stuck on till date!
In the food world
💤 Sleepy chicken
The FDA has just learned what you've been doing — or joking about doing — and it would really like you to knock it off. They recently posted a warning about a bizarre social media trend that involves both marinating and cooking chicken in NyQuil — for obvious reasons. DayQuil is the way to go to avoid the drowsiness.
🥗 Extra sides
Misplaced money isn’t the kind of lettuce you'd usually expect with a KFC sandwich. But that's exactly what a Georgia woman received last week when her drive through order came with a small envelope filled with $543 in cash! It was later revealed that someone had mistakenly placed the restaurant's daily bank deposit in the carryout bag.
🍔 Not so plant based
Beyond Meat’s COO, Doug Ramsey has been charged with felony after he was accused of doing something that isn’t really plant based — biting a man's nose and ripping his flesh! According to a police report, the Mike Tyson-esque move was triggered when someone cut across the lane and made contact with Ramsey’s SUV. Beyond Meat has suspended him indefinitely following this incident.
Talk dirty to me
Each year, 108 billion pounds (or approximately 40%) of food gets tossed in landfills! To reduce this waste, California passed a new law in January this year requiring every person and business to recycle all of their organic materials.
So what is organic waste? Everything that’s scraped off plates into the bin, fruit and vegetable peelings, restaurant waste, whining about a raise to your manager to that moldy lettuce in the back of the fridge.
What happens to it? Microbes — the tiny living things found everywhere, break down food scraps into a soil-like mixture that can be used as a fertilizer. However, microbes are like a fussy toddler. They need the right quality, environment and playlist to eat. Any deviation will result in tantrums — biologically known as anaerobes.
What is the problem with tossing food in the garbage? Landfills being far from the ideal environment, result in microbes producing anaerobes. They release methane in the atmosphere which is 84 times more potent than carbon dioxide.
Think of it way…if regular composting produces Autobots, then landfill composting produces Decepticons — both do the same thing but who would you choose, Optimus Prime or Megatron?
Composting processes: There are two popular ways by which the magic happens:
CASP composting is sorting the waste and roughly shredding it. Air is blown from underneath and after 20 days of huffing and puffing, the
wolf blows the little pig’s homecompost is ready.CORe composting takes a 7/11 type approach by turning the organic matter into a (bio) slurry. This is mixed with sewage water and sealed in a tanker for 20 days to undergo anaerobic digestion. The methane gas (remember, it’s bad!) is trapped and converted to energy.
What can I do? The easiest thing is sort your waste and start filling up the green trash can as much as possible. If your city is does not offer food waste collection for composting, here are some ways to compost in your backyard or your apartment.
Quiz
As discussed above, organic waste is a pretty broad term. So for our quiz this week, we wanted to see how well you know your trash. The link below has pictures of common kitchen items. All you have to do is guess whether they are compostable or not. Trashy may just be the new classy with this one!
Self check(out) mate
Recently, Wegmans and Amazon Fresh decided to stop the self checkout aisle in their stores. And while self checkout represents 30% of all grocery transactions, the topic of the “just walk out” type of system has become increasingly polarizing lately.
Why the hate? Stores attributed it to a double whammy caused by high initial costs and poor sales with this technology. Without supervision, there is also speculation that this method makes it easy to shoplift, adding to the losses.
Why the love? The main reason — efficiency. Anyone who has been to a Costco on a weekend knows how annoying the snaking lines are. Moreover, one — “just meets expectations” — employee can oversee up to 10 self checkout aisles. And for some, they just don’t like the small talk with the cashier about the weekend plans.
What next? Despite the errors and thefts, self checkout is here to stay. It is faster and more efficient. The fallback for such stores doesn’t involve adding more cashiers. Instead, it involves adding more supervised self-checkout lanes.
Did you know?
Seattle created a bingo game to get people to take off stickers from their produce. The locals got a free bag of compost upon filling a bingo card with these stickers.
In Victorian London, city workers sorted street refuse to turn coal ash and oyster shells into a fertilizer.
The spinning cotton candy machine was invented by a dentist named William in what appears to be a classic create your own demand by selling the problem type of move.
Zero Waste Recipes
Almond pulp cheese: This spreadable vegan cheese is a genius way to use up the pulp left over from making home made almond milk.
Carrot gnudi: A great tip to reduce waste in the kitchen is to use the whole vegetables so nothing gets tossed in the bin.
Bruised tomato galette: Crisp and golden leek, almond and bruised tomato galette.
While this simmers…
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