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

[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.