As mentioned in a post about this week's drop-offs and pick-ups, which were already pretty large, there was also the baby cereal.
The food pantry had quite a bit of expired baby cereal. Did I want it? Sure!
OK, so we're talking about a LOT of baby cereal. They had roughly a pallet and a half of baby cereal. Organic whole grain oatmeal cereal with bananas, to be specific.
I took all this crazy amount of baby cereal for a few reasons. One was simply to keep it out of the landfill. This would have easily filled the dumpster at the food pantry and cost them extra to have hauled off to the landfill, where it would have generated methane as it decomposed.
The other reason was that unlike much of the food waste we acquire, the cereal was well packaged, and could be stored for a period of time without going bad. While out of code, the cereal is not rotten, and is quite stable and edible.
The cereal can be opened, mixed with water, and fed to the flock on an as-needed basis over a period of months. So, on days in between food waste pickups, I'll have something to feed. I imagine I'll open and feed a few boxes a day.
Based on the massive stacks in both our basement and our shed, working through all of this may take some time...but there's something fascinating about the whole thing. The absurdity of the amount of it. The fact that it was all landfill bound.
Regardless, it totaled about 2 1/2 pickup trucks full of cereal, out of 5 total pickup loads over the course of the week.
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