3 posts tagged “food”

Courtesy of Free Range Studios, the people who produced the Story of Stuff (also highly recommended), it's Grocery Store Wars:

The crazed genius who brings us indexed, has a new manifesto about careers on ChangeThis.com. In pictures, naturally:

http://www.changethis.com/43.06.IndexingCareer

Hugh MacLeod has a pretty good one there, too, on how to be creative.

And Michael Pollan, who is well-known for writing about food-related issues, has just posted An Eater's Manifesto there, too, that starts with this advice: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants."

Other interesting stuff there, too. That said, I'm a bit skittish about manifestos. I'm more of an essay type, myself -- leave yourself a little wiggle room in the certainty department, y'know?

I went home to visit the family a few weeks ago (I was using frequent flier miles for a free ticket, so the first week of November was as close as I could come to any major holiday), and while I was there, was determined to make myself useful. I did a few puttering-around-the-house tasks for my mom, but the real triumph was the Steal Decluttering I did when she wasn't looking.

Helping cluttery people get rid of their stuff is one of the nicest things you can do -- if they are happy about it, and aren't wishing you would leave them and their stuff the hell alone. It's a fine line, but if they're up for it, getting rid of clutter makes them feel more free, liberated, and happy.

And now it's true confession time.

I believe that everyone has an Achilles heel when it comes to clutter. For me, it's books and paper. I don't like dirt or dust, but if I were living alone, every horizontal surface in my house would be covered with papers, notebooks, junk mail, magazines, books, and newspapers. I am a reader and a writer, and I have a high tolerance for print-related clutter.

My mother's Achilles heel is, regrettably, food. She can't throw away food, even food she knows in her heart she will never eat. Even food that the poor wouldn't want. Even food that might actually be hazardous if consumed.

Fortunately, she's able to get over that inability when it comes to produce, leftovers, and other visibly perishable food. The ick factor triumphs, I guess.

Unfortunately, she just keeps buying new stuff, and the old accumulates, until every cupboard, pantry, fridge and freezer space has become a booby trap: when the unwary open them, food falls out on their heads. (In the case of canned goods, this can be alarming and potential dangerous. Being pelted by Fun Size candy bars is less harrowing.)

So I was on a mission: clear out some of the oldest stuff to minimize the dangers of food avalanches and botulism.

First, a minor foray into the candy cupboard while Mom was at the grocery store. (Cue the Mission Impossible music.) I hadn't asked her permission, so I didn't want to take out so much stuff that she'd notice. I had to settle for getting rid of most of the Valentine's day candy I could find, and a few Easter things. She had so much Easter candy (unopened bags of chocolate mini easter eggs, jelly beans, a moldy-looking chocolate cross) that I couldn't get rid of it all or she would have noticed, so I settled for throwing out the opened stuff.

I probably threw out about 5 to 8 pounds of candy, and it didn't really make much of a dent. But I was emboldened to try again when Mom was off to Thursday night choir practice.

This time, my target was the refrigerator. No half measures this time, I was going to be thorough. It took almost two hours. When it was over, I had filled somewhere between six and eight plastic grocery sacks full of food -- all inedible -- and threw it in the trash. (Thank God Mom has a large trash bin.)

Some highlights:

• A meat drawer full of lunch meat and hot dogs dated 2005, all unopened. I was spooked by the fact that much of it hadn't even changed color that much.
• String cheese from March 2007, which I had accidentally tried to eat a few days earlier (partly prompting the whole enterprise). Blech.
• Several unopened bags of nuts and chocolate morsels from 1995.
• Many half-empty jars of relish and condiments of indeterminate age. If they smelled or looked funny, or if they were shoved behind stuff dated 2006 or earlier, I tossed them.
• One petrified potato, dark gray and the size of a golf ball, that clattered when I dropped it on the floor.
• Four cans of Bud Light, which were the old style of can that has not been sold in this country in probably twelve years.
• Cheese and sausage from a gift package, dated 2003.
• A jar of something or other (jam?) dated 1986. That was the oldest thing I found.

After all this, waiting for Mom to get back, I got scared. I hadn't asked Mom's permission or told her I was planning to do this (because she would not have let me do it!). I called my sweetie, a social worker by training, who said, "Well, she'll be okay unless she's a psychological hoarder."

"I think she IS a psychological hoarder! What do I do?"

"Well, she could get really upset. But I think what you can do is remember that no matter how she reacts, you are still a good person and a good daughter."

Okay.

Mom comes home. Deep breath.

"Mom-I-cleaned-out-the-fridge-and-threw-out-the-stuff-that-was-past-date." Whew. "I tried to put everything else back on the shelf where it was, so hopefully you can still find everything."

Mom gets a spooked look on her face. "Okay," she says. She does not look in the refrigerator that night.

In the morning, she seemed to be at least marginally okay with my intrusion, but she doesn't talk about it. We go run some errands, and I help her out with some things she actually asked me to do. She thanks me extra-profusely for those things, which I take to mean, "I can't admit how much work it was to clean out the fridge, but I'll make up for it by showing extra gratitude for this other stuff." The rest of the visit goes peacefully and uneventfully, and I depart Saturday afternoon.

A week later she was telling her brother about everything I did around the house, including the cleaning out of the fridge, so I think if she can talk about it, then everything's okay.

I'm hoping to make my next visit in the spring or summer, when I can tackle the upright freezer in her garage. It has been duct-taped shut for the past four or five years (the door doesn't seal correctly) and probably contains one solid block of ice with various items suspended in it like mastodons and Neanderthals in a glacier. I'm hoping to enlist Dear Sis in my plot.