Expiration Date

I bought orange juice in November. I was sick; thought some juice would make me feel better. For some reason, however, I never opened the juice. I never unscrewed the cap, and more importantly, I never popped the inner seal.

This past week I decided to clean out the contents of the refrigerator. As I tossed aside forgotten leftovers and a half rotten bag of spinach, I came across the OJ, tucked in the very back of the fridge next to a tin of maple syrup.

The stamp on the carton read Nov 29 10. Curious, I shook the carton and then opened it up. I poured myself a glass and took a whiff. Orangey. The juice was the color of its parent fruit, without any sign of mold or rot. I drank three glasses of it as I finished the rest of my work. The next day, because I saw no problem with it, I finished the rest of the carton.

My little experiment's results didn't surprise me. I tend to be lax with expiration dates. Unlike the well meaning friend who once tried to dash the pills out of my hand once she saw the Tylenol had expired, I think of the tiny numbers as more of a suggestion than a rule.

This attitude was definitely something I learned as a child. In his copy of "Dad's Own Cookbook", my father found a chart of how long food can last when properly stored. He made a photocopy of it and it hung on our refrigerator as a guideline. The book, which I now have in my own kitchen, has this to say about hot dogs for example:
- opened package: one week
- unopened package: two weeks
- in a freezer and wrapped: 1-2 months

WebMD offers similarly practical advice in this feature article, as well as a guide to interpreting the difference between things like "sell by," and "best if used by" labels.*

On my lunch break at work while trying to get updates about the weather I stumbled on an article on Boston.com's home page about exactly this issue.

The article raised an interesting point - regardless of whether  individuals choose to take a risks on an "expired" product or not, is it ethical (or legal) for schools or prisons to use foods which are past their dates.

Ah, So. The rub. I don't mind eating yogurt that's a week past its due date after I spot check it. What's more, after looking at it and smelling it, if I saw nothing wrong with it I would even give it to my own mother! But the question remains: would I want it dispensed sight unseen in a school? In a hospital? In a prison?

 There is so much food wasted in this country every single day.  In college I waited tables in the dining room of an Assisted Living Home for a while. At the end of the shift, I watched as entire pots of soup, plates of steak, steamed veggies were thrown into the dumpster. I begged the chef to let me take the wasted food at the end of the day to a local Soup Kitchen. "I'll do it myself," I said. "I'll come in on my nights off to pick it up as well." I imagined recruiting friends. We'd truck it over in backseats of our cars each night before the kitchen closed.

He smiled sadly at my idealism and then dismissed it. "We can't," he said. "The food wasn't kept on warmers. It can begin growing bacteria as it cools. As a chef, I simply couldn't allow people to eat that food. If they got sick..." He trailed off leaving me to my disappointment. It was one of my first lessons in the complexity of Hunger as one of those Big World Issues. Some people have more food than they need. Others have none. But sharing might be dangerous, so throw all the pot roast away.

So what about food BEFORE it is cooked? Do we have to throw that away too? Based on the voluntary dates that have been chosen arbitrarily in some cases and conservatively in almost all cases? what about milk in sealed bottles? Meat in its plastic sheath packing? What about canned goods, frozen foods, and rice in closed boxes?

Personally, I am not scandalized by the idea that prisons, schools, or even hospitals use food past the labeled "date," as long as the decisions to use the foods remain informed. Kitchen staff should have a knowledge of basic food safety and access to guidelines about the life expectancy of properly stored foods. They should be empowered by their direct supervisors to question stock based on what it looks like or smells like when they open it. The way anyone would do when cooking for themselves or a family member.

Also in college, under the tutelage of some Freegan friends I learned to harvest foods from dumpsters just after the local super market tossed away the day's produce. To this day, I don't see this as being much different from my Farmers Market strategy.** One of my favorite things to do then was to stake out the  Dunkin Donuts on Rt 9 near Spirit Haus.They didn't put trash in with their donuts. Just bagged up the donuts and tossed them away at 11pm. Sometimes they would just hand them off, all bagged up like that. The donuts had reached their "expiration time," and could no longer be sold to customers.

But they were still good. Believe me.

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*At this point I'd like to smugly point out that WebMD says that food which is frozen is "safe indefinitely," which I tried to explain to a roommate recently when he wanted me to toss three perfectly good boxes of veggie burgers.
** The trick is to show up at Haymarket just as things are shutting down. When I've timed it right, I was able to  buy bags and bags of fruits for a mere fraction of the price they fetched all day.

Old Timey New Fangled Gastro Disaster Plans

Last night my friend Mike M. invited me and Jen, who is staying with me for the holidays to go see The Can Kickers play in Allston.

"I love music with a washboard," I exclaimed to Jen who, typically, was not as excited about punk rooted Appalachian jam bands as I am. In just a few hours we found ourselves crammed into a house party with about fifty other people, hopping up and down to the folk based, punk tinged, drum backed sound of the band. I danced small in the front row. I ran into two former students of mine in the impossibly tight crowd, and made friends with a girl who let me stand in front of her because "you're so short, you should go up close!"
"It's a perk," Jen commented to Mike.
"I don't take up a lot of space," I explained to our newest friends, "but I do bring two normal sized people with me wherever I go."
After the set, we inched our way out the door through the clouds of smoke and between bottles Two Buck Chuck being passed from hand to hand.

Later the evening found us in Boston's South End toasting a dear friend for his birthday. We found Quinn drinking at Aquitaine but he soon hustled us one street over to Boston's newest trattoria, Coppa.
"I can't believe we went from that to this," whispered Jen as Quinn ordered us a bottle of champagne and we browsed a menu of dishes such as fried risotto balls and chicken livers.
Inside the cozy restaurant people chatted quietly. There were no amps, no smoke, and certainly no PBRs to be found.
Our waitress was attentive and thrilled to find out that our plan as a table was to eat the most exotic things we could find. We let Quinn order, in honor of his birthday.
He chose an octopus salad with onions, a pizza topped with oxtail and bone marrow, sea urchin carbonara, and calves' brains ravioli.

"Those are baby cow brains."
"Think of it as using the whole animal."
"Thank you, Pocahontas."

WARNING: If you do not like strange and exotic foods you may want to skip the descriptions that follow.

I'm no stranger to octopus or to sea urchin and Mike seemed especially excited about the brain ravioli so I reported I was game. I was nervous about the bone marrow, due to some fairly unique personal experience in the OR.

The octopus came out first, and was impressively tender for how cold it was. I'm guessing it was pre-grilled, which explains that.
Next came the brain ravioli. I was able to fake myself out by not looking at the ravioli as I cut into it. The texture was similar to cheese ravioli. It was one of the saltiest things I have ever eaten, but I wasn't a huge fan of it overall. I'd rather try to make cheese ravioli with a beef sauce than put something so rich in my stomach again.
Then came the pizza. I regarded the pizza coolly, trying to figure out which part was the marrow. As I took my first bite, my stomach shifted. It was salty, earthy tasting. Not bad. But it also managed to taste just a little too much the way human bone marrow smells.
After getting it down I sipped champagne frantically trying to keep my composure.
"Not bad, right?"
"No, not at all," I smoothed my napkin, anxiously. I had come out with an empty stomach ready for pasta or a cheeseburger. Bone marrow was anything but filling, and we had one dish left to try.
The waitress took a second round of drink orders (water for me, thanks), and set the sea urchin carbonara on the table. We divided it up and went to work.
But as soon as the pasta hit my mouth I felt that I could go no further. Something about the eggs, cheese and butter immediately disagreed with me. I politely put my fork down.

"Are you going to finish that?" Mike was looking at my plate, and I gladly handed it over to him.
I continued to sip on water as the night came to a close.

Later I returned to my apartment with Jen and with Brennan, another friend and house guest for the week. As we prepared to turn in for the night, the tiny creatures in my stomach began to fight.

Embarrassed, I got into the bathroom and proceeded to free all the animals*.
Jen and Brennan were very gracious about their sick hostess, convincing me to put on my pajamas, call out of work and go to bed.

As we were falling asleep Jen whispered, "I'm still in disbelief of tonight's events."
"You mean how we went from listening to a folk band play music in a hippie commune to eating - (I gagged a little bit thinking about what we had been eating) in the South End?"
"Yeah."
"It figures, though."
"Yeah. It figures."

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* puke my (literal) brains out

sopa de mondongo

"We got too much food," Mike explained, "come have some."
We order food in often at work, especially on the weekends. I entered the break room to find a few nurses, respite aides and housekeepers sharing a small feast of latin american origins.

"It smells delicious," I looked around the table for a familiar dish.
"Eat, eat," R., one of the respite aides implored. "Here, try this."
She lifted some broth to my mouth. It was superb. A tomato base, some spices I couldn't identify and some meat.
She ladled a bunch of the stew into a cup. I saw that it was full of white meat. Tomato and chicken soup, what a perfect boost for the middle of the day.

We chatted gamely for a while, mostly about food. As I slowed my eating down, I began to notice the texture of the chicken was smoother than normal.
"R., is this chicken? Or is it fish?"
"It's pork," answered one of the other nurses.
"No, no," a housekeeper spoke up , "beef."
"Beef? It can't be beef," I said, "it's white."
Everyone in the room began to laugh.

I consider myself a risk taker when it comes to cuisine. I am not sure when it happened. Long before my dumpster diving days in college, obviously. But when I was really young I used to require a separate dish for my salad and my pasta, and a separate fork as well. My parents used to have to beg me to try new things. "All I ask," my Dad would say, "is that you have one bite."

"Yes, Mama," said R., "it's white because it's the stomach, it's cow stomach."

Everyone waited.

"Oh yeah? Wow." I finished the cup off with a flourish.

A quick search on Google after lunch revealed several hits for Sopa de Mondongo, which has its place in several different cultures. In Nicaragua the soup apparently has "healing powers." It is apparently not the same thing as, but is similar to the Mexican dish, menudo.
R. , who is Dominican, laughed when I showed her the web sites, some of which hailed the dish for its ability to perk a person up after a night of partying. "Oh yeah, it cures hangovers," she agreed, "it really, really does."

I tried to imagine starting off my morning with a big bowl of the savory, greasy soup.
One of the other nurses groaned, " I can't believe you ate that."

I thought about the stomach inside my stomach. " I can," I said, "it was delicious."
And it was. It was even better than whale. And less endangered to boot.