We used to have a garbage disposal. Every house in the States seems to have one. It's that big monster thing that growls under the drain in the kitchen sink, chewing up every little scrap that you didn't eat off the plate, sometimes grinding away at orange peels and melon rinds.
We don't have one here. Instead, we have a little basket in that great big hole. That's so all the stuff that USED to feed the garbage disposal monster doesn't just clog the relatively light duty Taiwanese drainage system. Whatever is too big to wash off the plate, we have to toss into our kitchen garbage bucket which has to be dumped by hand (i.e., by Mark) into a sometimes overflowing public bin on garbage nights.
Cleaning soggy bits out of the little basket is kind of a pain, so we've gotten used to pre-cleaning the previously disposal-worthy fodder off of our plates before we wash the dishes. It's surprising how much material we used to wash away! Now we eat virtually every crumb--at least when we don't have company. It's easier than cleaning out the basket or scraping stuff into the garbage bucket. Plus, some of those bits are pretty tasty!
It's also one more reminder of how abundantly we are supplied with food.
If you have a garbage disposal, what would you do differently if you didn't have one?
Oh, one more thing: we've gotten so good at pre-cleaning our plates that we don't have to clean that basket very often. In fact, Mark went to clean it recently and discovered a healthy crop of soybeans...well, okay, one soybean, but it had a very vigorous little sprout.
(Yes, he's cleaning the basket more often now.)
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