Reflection on Cleaning the Fridge

Sometimes I can be a 'go-getter'. If I see a process that could so obviously be improved to be more efficient, I'll take it upon myself to improve it. And sometimes when I see things that need to be done, and no one's doing them, I will take charge. 

So I took it upon myself last week to make myself the Self-Appointed Fridge Nazi at work. The last time anyone cared to clean out the fridge was in 2011. And as I recall, they didn't take much out of it. The people at my work leave so much stuff in the fridge. From salad dressings, to salsas, to water bottles, it got so bad that there was no room left for me to place my lunch and some days it was hard to close the fridge door.

I got so fed up with it I decided to do something about it...

So last week I put a sign on the fridge telling people it would be cleaned out today and that ANYTHING left in there would be thrown out. The first day, there was a small surge in people taking things home. After that, it didn't look much better. Today rolled around and there was still tons of stuff in there, so I highlighted the words on the sign to reinforce the fact that 'Hey, it doesn't matter what kind of container you have, or what it is, it's goin' in the bin!' 

I got to work and started pulling out everything in there. I think I threw away 90% of what was in there. I filled up a large 60 gallon trash can about 75% of the way. Some notes:

• I brought home 25 water & soda bottles to recycle—that's ridiculous.
• The award for Oldest Item goes to: an opened bottle of Diet Mountain Dew, expired in February of 2011.
• The 2nd Place award for Grossest Item goes to: a tub of some sort of soup or potatoes from Dierberg's Kitchens that was growing both green and white molds. 
• The award for Grossest Item goes to: what I think were green grapes??? They had decayed so much that all that remained was a bright green liquid (in a bag, thank god) and some sort of yellow-green mush. I took a photo of it, but I'll spare you. I find it 200% more revolting looking at it now than I did when I pulled it out of there.

So where does this reflection come in? Well, I realized that there was enough food in the trashcan when I was done that we could have made a serious dent at a food pantry, had that all been donated when it was new. I'm not the best at not wasting food, but today's escapade made me realize again just how much food we all waste in our very-blessed lives. It's something I need to work on: making sure that the food I buy and consume does not go to waste.