Skewed condiment logic: Visit grocery store of choice. Buy jar of condiment, organic if you prefer. Use condiment religiously and creatively, inspiring your friends and astonishing your enemies with new creations involving pesto-salsa fusion. Repeat until only about 1/3 of jar’s contents remain. Following irrational primordial instinct, exile jar into deep nether regions of refrigerator where even the most adventurous of spelunkers fear to tread. Buy new jar of said condiment because the contents of the old one just don’t look so fresh anymore. But by no means discard old condiment jar, because who knows, maybe you will need it someday... say, when the new condiment jar is about 2/3 used up. And plus, it’s just kind of gross to scoop the Ghost of Condiments Past out of the jar, because inevitably things have progressed from “that not-so-fresh feeling” to “was fur actually listed on the ingredient label?”, and who wants to deal with the olfactory and other sensory ramifications of this unsanctioned foray into alternative protein sources?
So you close the door, because out of sight, out of mind. And then one day, when your otherwise-much-sloppiness-allowing conscience mysteriously can’t go on another day with the knowledge of the cavalry of emaciated and forlorn condiment containers huddling for warmth in the back of the fridge, you clean it out, with the window open so that the techno music from the bar across the street drowns out your screams for mercy.
Why, people, why, do I not just throw it out before it gets so disgusting?
(You may not believe this, but this meditation on the joys of Creeping Condiment came relatively unprovoked. I just checked, and there is really nothing all that scary in there, probably because the fridge, reaching barely the height of my knee, is much too small for anything of note to be going on inside.)
Wednesday, April 20, 2005
Chalk this up to original sin
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5 comments:
I once had a room mate who grew mold in a can of coke he left in his room...mold in coke!
I still have jam that I never opened from college. That was 3 years ago. I got it from my dentist for Christmas in 2001. I kept it there, in my college fridge, and brought it home to my parents with me that summer. It stayed in the fridge and no one ate it because it was mine, I guess. I brought it with me to my subleted apartment 1 1/2 years later. After 5 months there I moved to another apartment, where the jam sits in my fridge now. Still unopened. And probably looking like something out of the Mosaic Era. I can't believe how disgusting I am, but really I can. I just ignore it and now it's become a part of me. My traveling jam.
Jaime, I too have seen mold growing in some unsightly places...but man, coke mold STINKS. And I have this thing where I can't help but take a whiff when I KNOW that somethign is goign to smell really raunchy. Some sort of latent sadism, I guess.
Jana, I find your traveling jam sort of funky and zen. Also I think the Mosaic Era is wonderful. If the jam has been unopened the whole time, though, it might be fine!
i'm afraid to look at what is in the back of my fridge on the bottom shelf. i also don't put my hand back there. i'm afraid i might lose a finger.
I think I mentioned before that I like cooking - and jam-making... Here's the point I'm trying to make:
People actually invented jam to conserve fruit so that they could eat it in the winter. Usually, you don't have to store jam in the fridge unless it has been opened (Remember, they didn't have fridges in the old days, and they still ate strawberry jam with their scones in March, right? It's the sugar that conserves it!). I think you should go ahead and try your jam tomorrow. Or you go with the Zen theory and continue letting it be a part of your "chi"...?
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