When I was growing up, parents and teachers thought it was more important for kids to learn respect for authority than how to diagram sentences and work algebra problems.
That’s one reason I throw things in the refrigerator away if the expiration date on them has passed. Anything with yesterday’s date is tossed based on my fears that it could be toxic.
Even if it has today’s date, I discard it because it probably went bad right at midnight when the day started. I respect the authority of these people who stamp expiration dates on food products.
Regina and I don’t see eye to eye on this. Expiration dates are edicts to me but just suggestions to her. A report in a national publication indicates she might be right.
Some experts on food safety who were quoted in that story said sniffing food that is close to an expiration date is probably just as effective in maintaining safety as complying with the date marked on the product.
So she smells things that are outdated or about to be and decides whether to keep them, and I still dispose of any food in the pantry or refrigerator that some authority said went bad on a certain date.
None of this was a problem in my younger days before expiration dates on bottles, cans, boxes and cartons of food became part of our culture.
Mr. Sims, who had a big dairy farm in nearby Shongaloo, left eggs, milk and butter on our front steps twice a week. We usually had stuff left over from his previous deliveries and never worried about whether any of it had spoiled.
In fact, I don’t remember ever thinking that something I was eating or about to eat might be tainted even though food safety standards were probably a little lax at the time.
Nearly all of us took a lunch to school in those days. My mother was a great cook but not very creative at packing lunches. I usually had peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Some days, she sent bologna or potted meat on white bread with mayonnaise.
Those sandwiches and the cold pork chops and leftover fried chicken that other kids took stayed on the bus a good while with no refrigeration and were stacked in a storage closet until lunch time.
We would get whiffs of the intermingled scents of all those different foods all morning, especially on warm days, but I don’t recall anybody ever getting sick after having a sack lunch.
The lunches my mother sent with me to school could have been classified as fine dining compared to the meals she put together for me and my dad when we went fishing.
He liked sardines right out of the can with saltine crackers, and I always got a can of Vienna sausage and some light bread. The sardines would never have passed the smell test that Regina uses to identify food that has gone bad.
If we ran out of the ice water that my mother sent with us in old pickle jars, my dad would cup his hands and drink out of the mill pond. I did it too, and we both survived.
We also survived big Sunday meals at my grandmother’s house when everything we had at noon was left on the cabinet or stove and served again for supper. In those days, the noon meal was dinner and the evening meal was supper.
She usually served platters of fried chicken, mashed potatoes, white gravy, biscuits, purple hull peas, fried okra, fresh tomatoes and other vegetables.
It was never put in the refrigerator—or the icebox as she called it—and was just as good when it was warmed up for supper as it had been at dinner.
So maybe I should pay less attention to these expiration dates that concern me so much. Most of them are blurred, dim, too tiny to read or printed over some darker things, and you can’t make out what the dates are anyway.
Still, somebody in a federal government office or some other position of authority decided to put expiration dates on food, and it’s hard to ignore that kind of officialdom.
I just can’t take the risk of bad food doing me in now since I used up all my luck on potted meat and Vienna sausage.
REPRINTED FROM THE NATCHITOCHES TIMES