Our disposal broke years ago at a rough time in our lives when my wife was in and out of the hospital and we had no money. I took the broken garbage disposal out, replacing it with a simple drain. I think that cost about twelve dollars in parts and a lot of cussing by me.
Remarkably we haven't had any clogged plumbing since. When we had the garbage disposal blockages used to be a regular problem, and not just at the sink. I didn't associate those other blockages with the garbage disposal.
My wife's a vegetarian and I'm mostly a vegetarian. When I cook a meal with fish or other meat, usually when my wife's away at work, our dogs get any leftovers. We compost any other food waste for our garden.
I installed a new garbage disposal at my wife's parent's house last year that's pretty nice. It's smaller, quieter, and more powerful than the one it replaced. Yeah, I tried to convince them that a garbage disposal was unnecessary when their old disposal broke, but I was not successful. We bought the new one for them as a gift, and maybe as a bit of apology for my anti-garbage-disposal evangelism.
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