As the title of my blog points out, I am a known food-rescuer. I eat way-black bananas, I don't really believe in expiration dates, and I rarely throw out food (of note, I treat most medications the same way [I recently took some tylenol from 2010!] and I also hardly ever have an upset stomach). It has been interesting being married to a man who doesn't really like leftovers, but who has, in the spirit of married compromise (especially because more leftovers means less cooking for/by me), humored me in eating things that, as a single person, he would not have touched. Here is a recent
Time magazine article by Joel Stein, who I love as a writer, which hilariously (as usual) puts into words what I strongly feel.
'Til Mold Do Us Part, by Joel Stein
You make a lot of compromises in a marriage, such as being married.
We permit behavior from our spouses that we wouldn't tolerate from
anyone else, such as throwing out our food. Doing this just one time to a
co-worker causes a barrage of Post-it notes more vitriolic than
anything Tupac would have stuck inside Biggie's fridge. Like "To the
thief who ate half of my tuna sandwich: I have mouth herpes. Now you do
too. I'm anonymously e-mailing your wife to warn her about your mouth
herpes. And your tuna breath."
But when my lovely wife Cassandra
dumps all the food that's past its expiration date, I just take it. I
use the balsamic vinegar I keep in the back of the pantry quickly and
stealthily, before she sees the use-by date on it, which is 2010. I feel
certain, though, that vinegar can't go bad, since vinegar is something
else that's already gone bad. The worst thing that could happen to
vinegar is that it would be more vinegary.
I've been emboldened,
however, by a new National Resources Defense Council (NRDC) and Harvard
Law School study that recommends eliminating sell-by dates on food
because they're so misleading. The dates were created by local and state
organizations in the 1970s merely to help people know when the products
are freshest--not safest--and even that is basically a guess. In fact,
they never say expiration, instead using words such as use by, best
before, sell by, enjoy by and, in the case of kale and quinoa, won't be
trendy after. This confusion is one of the reasons the average American
family of four tosses $1,560 of edible food annually. It's also part of
why we waste 10 times as much food as Southeast Asians. And that's
despite the fact that they mostly eat with chopsticks while we mostly
eat with our hands.
Dana Gunders, a staff scientist at the NRDC
who worked on the study, told me that 15% to 25% of the food we buy
isn't consumed, which means that by tweaking our behavior slightly,
Americans could be 15% to 25% more obese. Alternatively, we could save a
lot of water and energy. Food poisoning, she said, comes from
contamination, not spoilage. Sure, in the 1970s people may have needed
some help figuring out if food turned, but we use a lot less drugs now.
Gunders
suggested I try to win over Cassandra slowly, first by keeping yogurt
for an extra couple of days and then by explaining that eggs are good a
month after their date and tortilla chips (which can be refreshed in the
oven) for years. I asked Gunders what the last item she tossed was, and
she said it was a jar of pasta sauce that she scraped the mold off of
only to find a thicker layer of mold underneath it. This was the kind of
talk I would pay a woman $1.75 a minute for.
For advice on
talking to Cassandra, I called my dad to find out how he failed to
persuade two wives, my sister and every guest he's ever had to eat food
in his house without multiple-party inspection. I have
reconstructed--one aluminum-foil-wrapped slice at a time--multiple
complete pizzas from my dad's refrigerator, along with half my sister's
bat mitzvah cake when she was already in college.
Before I could find out his methods of nonpersuasion, my dad got
excited that this new study might finally uncover the corruption of both
the food and pharmaceutical industries. He said he's never gotten sick
from food in his own home and that during the Vietnam War, the Army gave
him perfectly effective aspirin that was left over from the Korean War.
He suggested I call cereal companies and ask them their scientific
process for arriving at their dates, which he doubted existed. Then he
changed his mind. "You're touching the third rail, pal," he said.
"You've got to be careful about how strong you make this argument."
Never before did I realize just how little real journalism I do.
Kellogg's
did not return my e-mail, and General Mills, afraid of giving away
"competitive information," would say only that its "better if used by"
dates are "based on sensory evaluations" by "product developers and
expert tasters," which, admittedly, would seem a lot less suspicious
without all those quotation marks. Still, I think I've got a good chance
of winning some kind of journalism award.
Finally, I told
Cassandra about the study, and to my great disappointment, she agreed.
"O.K.," she said, "Now that I know eggs are good a month after, I'll
keep them." I felt an emptiness you get when a boxing match has been
canceled and you also don't get to go on and on to your wife about your
superior logic, ability to set economic priorities and love of our
planet.
Then, a few days later, Cassandra said she wanted me to
smell something to see if it had gone bad, since those sell-by dates
were not to be trusted. It was buttermilk, a food that always smells
bad. I kissed her and thanked her. She cared enough to fight after all.
