To Boldly Eat What No Man Has Eaten Before

There are a lot of leftovers in my fridge currently. Most of them are recent, but there are a few older items that I noticed as I was sealing the newer ones in some variety of airtight containers and seeking shelf space for them.

I realized that these were all things that I was excited about having a larger portion of. The prospect of reliving the meal I’d enjoyed the next day had made me happy. But, then life swept me up and I found myself looking at the same entrée a few days after I had intended to reheat and eat it.

When this happens, I stare at these items with guilt weighing on my shoulders. I can’t seem to bring myself to eat the newer leftovers while the older ones still sit in reserve, waiting. Yet, I know that these foods may very well be past their prime.

This guilt at wasting food is precisely why I have developed a system for testing possibly expired food. I base this model of investigation loosely upon the scientific method. Very loosely.

Before I get into that, though, you have to realize a few guidelines. First of all, expiration dates on packaged foods are unreliable. Whenever you have a major corporation assigning a numerical value to the freshness of something, you can be sure that they erred on the side of caution. They shaved at least two or three days off the life of that cheese, just to make sure they wouldn’t get sued for food poisoning. This means lunchmeat gets at least a week before any tests need be conducted and milk gets three days past the labeled expiration date.

Also, Chinese take out gets a two weeks. I know they say they don’t use MSG anymore, but come on. In fact, the seedier looking the Chinese restaurant you got the food from, the longer it is likely to remain edible. I do believe I crossed the month threshold before with a box of chicken fried rice. I can’t remember too clearly as the few days surrounding that particular adventure are fuzzy in my memory for some reason.

With those guidelines set, you can begin your food investigation. It all starts with the smell test. If you smell something beside onions immediately opening your refrigerator, find what the smell is generating from and toss it. In fact, if you smell onions when you don’t have any onions in your fridge, follow this same guideline.

Then, of course, you need to conduct a more up close and personal smell test. Take the individual item and take a nice deep whiff, all through your nose. If you don’t wake up on your kitchen floor, it’s safe to move on to the lick test. There are two parts to this. Begin with just the tip of the tongue. If that doesn’t feel like you just touched it to a nine volt battery, move on to stage two which involved getting more than one taste region of your tongue on the food at once. I like to call it, sealing the envelope. At this point, whether or not the food is rancid should become clear. Go ahead and heat that sucker up.

However, this is where I must issue a strict warning. Be sure to clear your schedule for the next several hours. There are all kinds of sneaky bacteria that can still go undetected even through the extensive battery of tests I've designed above. If you must go somewhere, be sure you are in the vicinity of an accessible bathroom where you will feel comfortable spending a great deal of time should the need arise. I usually bring reading material. If an emergency situation should arise, take notes of what you ate and how many days old it was. Keeping a journal is useful. Then you’ll know for next time. These precautions could do wonders future of food expiration research as we know it. That’s how it’s done people. Trial and error. But, should you forget to write this handy information down, at least you’ll be building a tolerance.

I’d like to consider myself a pioneer in this field. I’ve eaten all kinds of things my wife has advised me not to or refused to eat herself. The trick is eating it while she’s out of the house or hiding it in the back of the fridge so she doesn’t detect it before you can get to it. Of course, be careful with this technique. If you forget you hid that pizza behind the beer, you could end up with a disaster on your hands. Again, the journal comes in handy here.

Before concluding this post, I became hungry. So, I heated up the chicken fingers from the other night and the left over bacon I’d cooked my wife for her Mother’s Day breakfast in bed. I even combined the two into a chicken/bacon sandwich and dipped them in the left over ranch dressing. Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to observe and evaluate my digestive process.