Bucking the Trend.....

As the rest of the World focuses ever more anxiously on possible remedies for Global Warming, what does the Commune di Pisa do, but cancel the eco-friendly garbage recycling system that it expensively introduced five years ago! Admittedly, they made it as complicated an arrangement as you could possibly imagine: 'Organico' goes out on Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays, and has to be in a brown plastic bag (giving off a slightly unpleasant, chemical odour); glass and plastic (blue bag) goes out on a Tuesday - the only-once-weekly collection of bottles causing a major problem in this household; Paper (in a paper sack - great if it's raining!) is on Thursday; 'indifferenziata' - i.e. everything else - goes out on Thursdays and Saturdays, in a grey bag. And if you can't be bothered to recycle, then just leave your rubbish in any old bag on the street, and it will be collected anyway! Bags are distributed in great quantities every six months, and if you need more, then you have to order them in person from the Geofor Office before the Wednesday of the week before the Wednesday of the week when you can go along and collect them. I hope everybody was concentrating on all of that - there will be a test at the end!
Two years after the scheme was introduced, RAI 5 ran an expose programme that secretly filmed the garbage collectors merely dumping all of the carefully sorted rubbish in the same dump, anyway, which caused much amusement at the time.........and suggests that maybe Pisa has been bucking the trend all along on the quiet.

Surprisingly, most people knuckled under and seemed to follow these complicated rules. Tullio - owner of Cagliostro Restaurant, renowned for the best food and the slowest service in town - was of the opinion that Italians are either wedded to chaos, or else demonstrate a surprising fondness for rigid regulation. Hence the support for the regime in power in the thirties, I suppose. Anyway, it is to be assumed that the recycling figures just don't add up, financially speaking, and so we're about to return to lugging rubbish to centrally located dumpsters.....

Maybe somebody should tell Al Gore.......?

Tonight's Menu:

Polpettone of Spinach and Tuna. (See below for the recipe)

Lamb Cutlets in a Parmesan Batter.

Crepes Suzettes