Red tins in a red cart

 The Chinese Moon Festival has come and gone this year; the students on my campus celebrated with many, many moon cakes (yum).   As a consequence of the student celebrations and my own determined efforts at gleaning, I present a red cart containing red tins. 

Voila!

The cart is nearly full, but the tins are all empty; and all of them are things that would have gone to the landfill if I hadn't rescued them.

I've rescued these from the landfill; the more relevant question might be what I'm rescuing them to.   The answer about the future of these tins, I'm hoping, is the freezer.   

We have a lovely chest freezer that we fill up (and then empty out) with all kinds of food.  One of the perennial challenges of chest freezers is figuring out how exactly to stash food so that it's easily recognizable and retrievable.   We have a pillow case of cheeses, and that works well.  Another pillowcase of bags of various veggies is also partly useful.   The working theory is that having a bunch of similarly sized, stackable tins might make efficient storage and retrieval of other kinds of foods.

The next few months, we'll get to test the theory out.   I am still trying to figure out how to best add labels without adding plastic trash (e.g.,  tape is out).  I've tried chalkboard paint on two tins, but I'm guessing that's going to flake off quickly.   The nice part of this experiment is, it's entirely free.  If the tins don't work well as freezer storage, I'm sure I can use the tins for other food-related tasks (taking meals to friends and church members in the meal train, for example).    And if it does work nicely, I know I just have to wait until September of next year to snag my next round of additional storage containers!