Grange Notes by Tim Swartz, Grange President (with everyone’s help), November 27, 2019
We know this is not what your Thanksgiving Dinner looks like!
But we all know that no delicious food gets prepared without generating some “leftovers”–even before the kids leave their vegetables on their plates. For decades, we’ve been able to put food waste in the trash, where it ended up in what used to be “the dump”, and now is a sealed, supervised “sanitary landfill”.
In 2015, the Legislature passed Act 148, the “Universal Recycling” law, which has been moving us toward more and more recycling, and toward producing less “waste”. Starting on July 1st, 2020, residents of Vermont will join the restaurant and institutional kitchens who have become subject to “mandatory composting” of all food waste.
On Dec. 7th, we’ll help you get prepared by hosting 2 speakers from the Central VT Solid Waste Management District, Theron Lay-Sleeper and Dora Chi. They will help us learn about options:
- Ways to compost food waste at home–including meat, fish and dairy scraps!
- Finding “haulers” who will pick up food waste–in some areas at least
- Finding drop-off locations for food waste
- How to keep your food waste from smelling up your home!
There will be opportunities for discussion and question-asking too!
Saturday, Dec. 7th, from 5:00 to 6:00 PM
at the Grange Hall!
Followed by the Community Potluck Dinner at 6:00, bring your favorite dishes and share!
There will be a short, non-ritual “Executive Session” Grange meeting from 4:30 to 5:00, before the Food Waste program–all are invited to that as well.
What’s wrong with these boxes?
They’re not full of food!
You can help–by donating non-perishable food items, or making cash donations, we can fill up these boxes. As the signs on them say, these are for our annual Holiday Dinners for Local Families food drive. We’ll be providing a LOT of tasty food for 6 families, selected by Barre Head-Start, who need a helping hand to have a fun holiday season this year.
Merry has gotten Shaw’s to reserve 6 turkeys at a sale price already, which they are holding in their freezers, and a couple of donors have already stepped up with some “starter” food items. Jacinthe, who ran the “Sweet Treats” workshop a couple of weeks ago has donated the honorarium we offered her to the food drive, too.
We’re looking for basics and also for fun food items that will be easy to prepare–last year we provided pie crusts and chocolate pudding, for example! What would YOU like to have in your cupboard to make it easy and fun for the kids?
If you want to donate some money, we’ll buy some perishables when we’re getting ready to hand the boxes off to our friends at Head Start.
So that’s how you can fix the problem we have with our boxes.
Don’t Forget!
Please join us for singing at 4:00 PM for singing, and 5:30 PM for Holiday Potluck, on Dec. 21st!
Below is a picture from the holiday sing-along last December! We never planned on a dress code, but note the number of red sweaters!