Has anyone notice that the expiration date on foods has started running out of control? Earl and I went grocery shopping a week and a half ago. We picked up the usual fare; bread, milk, orange juice, etc. It’s been 10 days and everything is still good. This seems rather unnatural to me. For example, I’m looked at our bread wrapper and it still has four days left in it, making it good for a full two weeks before it goes bad. I don’t trust this. It just doesn’t seem right. As I make my sandwich I’m constantly inspecting the crust and non-crust part (is that just called ‘bread’?), looking for the tell-tale signs of mold. There’s none to be found. I think this bread was engineered to last longer than a piece of wax fruit.
I have to admit that I have a bit of a phobia about food going bad. I can’t stand to clean out the refrigerator. Leftover gravy makes me weasy. I panic when we have bananas in the house. On the rare occasion that we buy them, I end up eating bananas like nobody’s business, overdosing on potassium in cosmic proportions lest the bananas turn brown. I mean, I seriously stress over the bananas turning brown, waking up in the middle of the night to get high on another hit of banana.
I remember the first time I saw mold. I was nine years old. I had grabbed a plain donut out of a box of donuts from the P&C, having devoured Grandma Country’s homemade donuts earlier in the week. I didn’t even glance at the donut, I just shoved part of it in my mouth during Scooby Doo on a Saturday morning. It tasted kind of odd. I turned it over and there were little pieces of green fuzz on the donut. I shrieked, startled the cat and hurled the donut into the fireplace. My father burned it the next day when he built our occasional Sunday fire. No one knew the donut was in the fireplace except me, and I watched that mold burn. Mwah ha ha ha ha ha ha.
To this day I won’t buy a box of donuts from the grocery store and I don’t trust any “sell by” dates stamped on packaging. I subtract one day from the “sell by” date and chuck it out.
I’d rather make multiple trips to the market instead of risking another fuzzy donut.
