Expired Food
The first thing my kids do when they come to stay with me is throw out food. Expired food. They like to laugh at me about how much expired food I have in the house at any given time. And it used to be because I was a penny pincher and would just eat something if it didn’t taste too bad, without checking expiration. In particular, condiments like salad dressing, which seem to last forever.
But now there is another reason that I don’t often check on expiration dates: I live alone and don’t have the ability to eat many things that are packaged for larger people in a normal time frame.
This week some of the things that had to go in the trash were:
1. Bagels (which I’d kept in the freezer, but apparently 3 months is still too long)
2. Ketchup
3. Peanut butter (which expired in 2021), but I simply don’t eat more than half a teaspoon of peanut butter on any given day and even that is perhaps once a month.
4. Rice Krispies (why don’t they sell these in quantities to correspond with the making of treats?)
5. Potato chips (still sealed, but expired in 2022).
6. Yogurt (it’s already congealed milk, so how can it go bad?)
7. Mustard (a kind I don’t like and bought for someone else a year and a half ago)
8. Ricotta cheese (I was going to make lasagna, and then I didn’t).
9. Tortillas (from a year ago when I used to eat burritos)
10. Hummus in one of those single serve containers( that I inherited from my brother when he went on a mission, a year ago)
Am I saving the planet by eating expired food? Or just saving money? Does anyone else have this problem? Or is it just because I was raised by a woman who had barely survived the Great Depression, and also had 11 children to feed at every meal?
I suspect that there is a metaphor in all of this. I’m holding onto past things. I’m kicking and screaming when it comes to moving on in all sorts of ways. I want to not have to do the work of throwing things out, or even deciding what to throw out. I don’t want to rebuy everything in my life. I don’t want to remake myself, reconsider all my decisions, rebuild the framework I spent fifty plus years using to understand the world and to see what was good and bad, what was true and false.
And yet . . . the food is still expired. Letting it sit there doesn’t make it edible. It’s time to do a spring cleaning, not just of food, but of all sorts of things inside and outside. One of the great gifts of the divorce was starting over, with furniture, a new house, an almost entirely new wardrobe. So why does it still feel like I’m kicking and screaming, complaining about the expired food that I could just throw out and buy new?