You may ask yourself, "How did this get here?"

[cjsmith]

I just cleared out the fridge. It was appalling.

I'm one of those people whose refrigerators are ruled by guilt. I throw a party and carefully store the remaining third of a bottle of ranch dressing that didn't fit on the veggies plate, because pitching it would be wasteful. I take a failed cooking experiment and put it into Tupperware anyway, guilting myself into believing I will someday be hungry enough to eat it.

Then I open the fridge and see all this stuff I don't want to eat. Reminder! My Cooking Sucks! Reminder! Eat This Before It Develops A New Civilization! Gee, that's appetizing. Maybe it's time for a run to the grocery store, to get something I do want to eat? But the fridge is full...

Gone now. All gone.

At that, it isn't even a complete sweep. We still own soft drinks, which is ludicrous given that neither of us has touched that sort of stuff in years. We still own six distinct and separate jars of mustard. But anything we would neither eat nor give to someone else is history.

I'm surprised at how good it feels to look in there now.

Comments

[sunnydale47.livejournal.com]

Oh, this post and the comments make me feel so much better! I'm not alone!

I'm constitutionally unable to throw anything out that might be useful at some point. A third of a bottle of dressing? I'll save a quarter inch in the bottom of the bottle ("Salad dressing won't go bad, it has vinegar in it"). A few tablespoons of leftover casserole ("I can make another casserole and mix this into it"). Ancient cheese ("Still no mold on it", forgetting that some mold is the same color as the cheese). A $6 watermelon that was forgotten (=cough=).

I check dates of perishables in the store and get the freshest ones, even if there's only a two-day difference ... and then I find them in the back of the fridge months later. (Sometimes months > 12, but I'm sticking to "months"!) If they don't look colorful and smell okay, I usually eat it anyway. It's amazing I'm still alive.

If it's more than two or three years old I'll usually throw it out without opening it. Unless it was already opened years ago. Then I usually can't resist the urge to peek in and see the interesting new life forms. I just wish I would remember to hold my breath first.

I blame this all on my mother. She grew up during the depression at an impressionable age (the crash was two weeks before her 14th birthday), and was a fanatic about saving scraps of food. So she often had moldy bits of this and that in the back of the fridge.

Except when my brother had to do the moldy bread experiment for school. No matter what he and my mom did, they could not get the bread to grow mold. My mother couldn't believe it, considering how readily everything else did!

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

I'm with you on eating it anyway - it's amazing I'm still alive, too. I firmly believe that some things don't go bad and that a lot of things don't go bad as fast as the date-stamps imply they will. I'll eat stuff a lot of folks would throw away. I won't serve it to someone else, of course, but I'll happily chow down.

Except with milk. I've had one bad experience, and that was enough.