your curbside garbage disposal: the umido bucket!

Since moving to Mestrino, LeAnn and I have been learning to live like a local, and one of the strange quirks about living here is the use of the umido (OOH-mee-doh) bucket.

In the USA, many people use garbage disposals to put food waste down into their plumbing system via the use of water and electricity, which eventually causes them to pay a plumber to come unclog their pipes, OR causes them to hack and slash at their drain pipes after first putting several bottles of Liquid Plum'r into them, thus causing eye irritation, mental irritation, and interesting clothing color schemes to appear after a time. Sort of like dyeing Easter Eggs while still under the hen.

In Italia, however, there is a small squarish green bucket for getting rid of your kitchen waste that is emptied from curbside on certain days of the week (here in zona 'B' of Mestrino it's Wednesday and Saturday, and in warmer months they add Monday) (that's "mercoledi' ", "sabato", and "lunedi' " for those of you playing along at home in Italian!) Our kitchen sink is apparently designed for such a setup, too, as it features a removable plastic lid over a plastic chute under which is suspended a small plastic trash can. If you ever find yourself in a kitchen fixtures store and see a sink with such a lid / chute arrangement, now you'll know what it is, and will be able to impress your friends with an explanation (as they wonder aloud how you could be so unnaturally interested in kitchen sinks, and then you'll have to come back with a "well it was (whomever's) idea to look at sinks, I didn't even want to!" (unless it WAS your idea, then you're pretty much stuck))! (just don't say it was my fault for putting the information in your head via this blog. That's just weak.)

So, we use the umido bucket to dispose of kitchen waste, instead of tormenting our plumbing system with it, or disposing of it via the traditional trash can. Things like leftovers that became fridge science projects, stale bread, coffee grounds that didn't make it to the garden, moldy cheese bits, etc etc. Sometimes it takes a bit more vigilance to keep the kitchen from smelling bad, but it's a small price to pay to keep the landfills less crowded - er, to keep us from looking like clueless foreigners!

I don't exactly know where all this stuff goes. There's an Aqua Teen Hunger Force episode (Season 2 episode 7, "Super Sir Loin" - ain't Google searches great!) where Meatwad donates food to a charitable cause, but in our case I don't think the contents of our umido bucket goes to the shorties...

Anyway, one thing you have to make sure of is not to use an opaque plastic bag for your umido goodies, otherwise you may find your plastic bag out of the bucket and out on the sidewalk naked on its own next to it. Yuck! At least we don't have squirrels...

We actually had our Italian language instructor tell us that she thought that the practice is unsanitary, and that they don't do it where she's from. (Which btw, is from Naples! So the easy retort would have been to say, "no, you just pile all your trash on the sidewalk together!!!" But it was our second day of class and I didn't want to get on her 'bad list', so I kept my mouth shut.)

So that's the story of the umido bucket!

I'd post pics, but you might be eating something as you read this.

More next time!