음식쓰레기

It's summer time in Korea, and that means the street smells are blooming. Sewers and trash piles are becoming hot and pungent. This is as fitting a time as any to write about the on-going miniature debacle that is food waste disposal.

The system is pretty simple, but really foreign to how things work at home. You don't just throw food out in the trash. You either put food waste in a big neighborhood compost bin or you put it in individual buckets. My neighborhood uses the individual bucket system. You have to buy tickets to put in the buckets to get your shit taken care of. I got my bucket at the neighborhood office when I moved in, and they wrote my address and apartment number on it so everyone would know it belonged.

I used to keep my food bucket inside, but it got too gross, so I finally got the bright idea of keeping it outside and bringing out my food waste in a bag like most people. I don't know why it took me so long to figure that out.

There's a little cluster of the buckets outside my building's door. In winter, you hardly notice them with the cold slowing down the decay of the food, but you can't miss the stench now. People come by early in the morning three times a week to empty the buckets.

I don't leave my bucket on the street anymore. I put it in the parking area by my motorcycle because I was sick of random people throwing their nasty food into my filthy god-dammed bucket. It's annoying to bring out a stinking bag of food rot to get disposed of, setting loose all the flies that gather on the buckets when you open it, and finding some jackass already filled it with their own disgusting rot, and having to force yours in, and then sticking a ticket in the bucket to pay for their shit to be taken care of.

Sometimes I put my food in the bucket, and stick the ticket in the lid because the handle with the special ticket-holding slot broke off, and the next morning my food is still there, but the ticket is gone. I can only assume some clown comes by and takes advantage of the fact that they can steal my ticket.

Once I went around the back of my motorcycle to get my bucket to find it missing. Someone had not only put their shit in my bucket, but gone through the trouble to finding the damn thing, and then bringing it out to the street full of their rot. They didn't even have the decency to put a ticket in, I had to do that.

Once, I saw an ajumma rooting around the cluster of buckets by my door one day when I was coming home. She was poking around to see which one would be best to put her rot into. This immediately pissed me off. Why didn't she get her own bucket? It's so cheap it might as well be free. It probably has to do with some sense of Korean community-entitlement, but I don't have that, so I didn't care. She shouldn't have been dumping her rot into someone else's bucket.

Fortunately my bucket was out back. If I had seen her dropping her rot into my bucket, I would have probably been forced to break out my weak Korean to tell her to get that nasty shit out of my disgusting bucket. What's this world coming to when someone can't even take responsibility for her own food waste?