Something you need to know about me is how deeply horrified I am by the thought of wasting food. Letting food go to waste deeply pains me, but not so much for altruistic reasons. Intellectually, I know food waste is terrible for the environment and that we as a society throw out literal tons of perfectly good food that can feed hungry people when the right infrastructure exists to collect and distribute it. Emotionally, though, watching a dining partner waste food feels like a) someone is slapping food out of my own hand and b) they are taking a plate full of change and small bills and just scraping it into the trash can. I can hear the jingle of quarters and dimes and see that wad of mashed potato-smeared Washingtons right now. It's not exactly rational, but that's me. Cheapskate with weird food issues. Put that on my tombstone.
I don't know why I feel this way, except that it may be influenced by growing up in my grandmother's house, where her formative eating habits were probably colored by the Depression and her position as the 2nd youngest of 6 kids. Whatever the reason, I am Team Clean Plate. Food has to be really awful or presented in truly excessive quantities for me to tap out. I have hurt myself in the interest of finishing an amount of food that wasn't quite enough to justify asking for a to-go box. I have eaten pasta that was so gummy and undercooked the linguine noodles would barely bend enough to rest in the bowl, because the restaurant was expensive and there wasn't enough time to send the dish back. I have eaten donuts out of a dumpster (which is a separate story unto itself) because they were there and, well, somebody had to eat them.
This obsessive attitude towards food waste as described thus far is really only a problem if I think it's a problem. It's a sort of weird little mental space I occupy vis a vis mealtime, but it doesn't affect other people. Here's where Andy would beg to differ, and honestly he's not entirely wrong (even just typing that pained me). My aversion to food waste extends to things I will keep in the pantry or refrigerator, or try to force him to eat, long past what most humans would consider a reasonable expiration date.
If Andy were telling his side of the story (which he's not), he'd probably bring up the time I used way too much cayenne pepper in a pot of vegetarian chili but we ate it all anyway. I'd interject and remind him of all the digestive benefits of capsaicin. He'd probably mention the time I didn't stop him from swigging milk from a carton that had allegedly expired the day before and he was convinced that because it smelled a little funny he was going to die. I'd point out the obvious outcome, which is that he was totally fine and is, in fact, still alive. There have been debatably edible efforts at repurposing leftovers. Pieces of bread with that little bit of fuzz scraped off. Spices we purchased in Utah that somehow survived three moves and found their way into our Nashville pantry. All this is to say, Andy is well aware of my tendencies, it's a recurring source of mild tension, and his armor is way up when it comes to expiration dates.
We made the mistake of buying a Mormon End Times size box of Nature Valley granola bars at Costco about two years ago. At the time, we had plenty of pantry space and Andy was going on super long bike rides where he needed to carry carby snacks. Turns out, those shits are loaded with sugar and are actually just crumbly shards of disappointment, so neither of us was eating them. Fast forward to last month, when I was putting away groceries and had a Come to Marie Kondo moment and realized these granola bars did not spark joy and needed to go. I checked the expiration, which was already fading to a pinprick 6 months behind us in the rearview mirror.
I had the brilliant and, for once, altruistic thought that I would bag up the granola bars and keep them in my car so I could hand them out to some of the legions of homeless people who hang out holding signs at just about every highway offramp in Nashville. Andy thought that was straight up ignorant because I was giving our literal garbage to these economically disadvantaged people. I felt vindicated the day I handed one out to a guy who thanked me profusely and acted like I presented him a Michelin starred steak dinner on a silver platter. As it happens, though, I've only had that one opportunity so far, and I'm still driving around with this bag. I either catch the green light or I'm sitting in a line of traffic far back from the person standing on the corner, and I don't want to actually chuck a granola bar at them as I'm driving by. That would be ignorant.
That makes me a decent person, right? Making a plan to prevent food waste by giving totally decent food to someone in need, and endeavoring to respect that person's dignity by not throwing it at them from the window of my car? That's what I thought, at least. But it turns out this plan brought me dangerously close to doing the most dick thing humanly possible.
The other day, I was driving Andy's car. I caught the red light one car back from the corner of the highway offramp. A guy I see every day was looking especially weathered on this hot, sunny day and I started to roll down my window to motion him over. As the window was descending, I reached for my bag of granola bars. The second I realized it wasn't there, I rolled the window back up, stared straight ahead and white knuckled the steering wheel. Nothing to see here. I hated myself so much in that moment. I was a fraction of a second from looking a homeless man dead in the face and having to tell him, "Yes, good sir, I was going to give you some of my household GARBAGE, but do forgive me, I seem to have left it IN MY OTHER CAR!"
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