The Dad who worked with a bunch of Fairies - blog post 2.

Hello again.                                                                                                                                                                           Do you remember where we were when we left this story last time?   Yes, that's right, we had got to the bit about how all your yukky bits of left-over food can be turned into something good just like magic.

Have you thought about what you threw in your food-waste bin this week?   That half-eaten cereal the other morning, more sandwich crusts, a sweet you spat out because it tasted horrid and some of the cat food Kodi wouldn't eat - even though Puppy thought he should have it.  Oh yes, hundreds of tea bags too and (I'll whisper this bit so Mum doesn't hear) those vegetables you really didn't want and hid so you could have pudding...well they went in too didn't they?   Now can you imagine all the people in the village putting the same sorts of leftovers in their food bins too?    It all adds up to

 loads

      and loads

             and LOADS of leftover food.

All that food gets put into the back of the dustbin lorry.   Do you remember last summer when the weather was damp and humid how many maggots were in the bin too?   Loads of food and sometimes loads of maggots go into the lorry and off it goes.   Now that doesn't sound much like magic does it but it is the beginning.

What happens next?

The dustbin men work hard all day picking up all the waste food bins and when they have emptied all of them they trundle off to deliver the whole slimy, greasy unappetising lot, liberally sprinkled with fat maggots in maggot season to an Anaerobic Digestion Plant or AD Plant as we now call this busy place.   No, not one that grows as big as a tree not that sort of plant at all.   The use of the word 'plant' here describes an industrial building though I did wonder why a growing plant and a building should share the same name so I looked through my dictionaries and books for an explanation and couldn't find one;  then I looked online and click here to see how it all happened...otherwise, if you are not curious as to why, just read on but take it from me that the picture I've drawn you is certainly not the sort of plant where the lorries took their loads of smelly rotting waste, that is completely untrue but I thought it would be fun to imagine a rubbish-guzzling tree - a bit like  a super enormous Venus Flytrap.   No this AD Plant  is where you will see a place full of huge enormous tank-type buildings ...and this is where the magic really begins to work.   The dustbin men are joined by hundreds of other lorries that have been all over the place, not just to people's homes but to places such as the supermarkets that also throw out piles of waste food every day, and restaurants, hotels, hospitals, schools, dairies, oh every sort of place that deals with  food and has leftovers.

All these are taken to the plant where Dad and his bunch of fairies mix it together and shred it into little bits in a giant mixer and then heat it till they are very hot (more than 70C)  to kill most of the bacteria - so pretty much like cooking on a giant scale - with truly disgusting ingredients.   To tell you what I think - well, I think these guys have got much worse things in their good magic generally speaking than those Macbeth Witches of yore had in their dubious cauldron of evil.

So that is the start of the magic but more happens.   No, I can't stop to tell you about it now because it is time to go and feed the hens, they are all sitting in the rain waiting for their afternoon titbits, left over cabbage, a rotten apple and some stale bread...which I could have put in the food waste bin or the composter, but which are also very good 'tea' for my 6 hungry hens and their rooster.  I'll be back next time to tell you more.