This blog is now officially one year old, where I've been posting pretty religiously about once a week. I've been thinking about hosting a dumpstered dinner party in celebration soon!
I'm proud to be living this lifestyle, and I'm happy to be sharing it with you all, not to mention recording it for later (on more than a few occasions I've looked up my own recipes on here to use with recently dumpstered food if I'm in a hurry).
Reflecting on all the entries of this year, I've noticed that I've been good about giving recipes to use with dumpstered food (which is sometimes incredibly hard), but haven't offered as many hard facts about waste and its impact on the environment or as many dumpstering tips as I'd been hoping to. So, this year, I'm fixin' to change that. I'll still be including recipes I'm whipping up, but to omit information about the real reason I'm doing this in the first place seems to place Trash to Table in the realm of a food blog with a gimmick. I want to fully educate myself about the impact one person can make (and therefore y'all by proxy).
A(n ambitious) preview for the next year of Trash to Table:
- Visiting a Grub community dinner in NYC (a monthly-ish dinner party comprised entirely of dumpstered food), possibly interviewing its founders.
- Food Not Bombs entry - what do they accomplish?
- Saving any grocery receipts that purchase "items not dumpstered/donated," then mentioning how much I spend on groceries per month vs. what I would have spent otherwise, then totaling my grocery spending/saving on T2T's 2nd birthday. I only thought of doing this about half way through the year and dropped the ball once I did think of it. This will not be the case going forward.
- Sharing how much landfill space I saved in the last year due to dumpstering and making a goal to save more this upcoming year...meaning I'll have to dumpster a bit more frequently.
- Finding out what charities use food donations (i.e. discarded produce from grocery stores, etc.) and to what end. How do they make a little food go a long way? Who eats the food?
- General rules on how to tell if food is spoiled. Explaining the dangers of botulism, etc.
- General rules on how B.S. expiration dates can be.
- More ways to preserve the food you get.
- Entries on my volunteer work with the Howard County food bank and how many people are seriously hungry out there.
- Statistics on hunger, homelessness, and the 99%.
- Better photographs (unfortunately, I've only had my cell phone camera this whole year. I'm getting a better one soon, and then I'll try to become a bangin' food photographer).
- They're building a Wegman's near my house. I solemnly swear to dumpster the shit out of it if possible...
- Hunting/raising animals/finding farms for sustainable food - are these methods any better in the end? If so, time to try them.
- As per some of your requests, I'm going to try to add more personal stories to recipes if possible, since a lot of the people that read this apparently feel like they can't cook but want to read the blog anyway...and food by itself can be kind of boring...
That's a tall order to fill! Hopefully you'll get to see all of these ideas appear on the blog over the next year. It may take a while to get going, or possibly more time in between entries to work on research, but I'm in this for the long haul.
Thanks for reading; I'm really happy to still be doing this a year later.
Love,
Kate
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