9/15/99
It started with the carrots. I realized that the food I bought was the food I ate, so if I only bought healthy food, I'd only eat healthy food. This didn't stop me from loading up on boxes of macaroni and cheese or a five quart tub of ice cream, but I did decide to buy some carrots.
Practically speaking, carrots are barely healthy. The vegetables that you're supposed to eat are the green ones that taste like lawn clippings. Carrots are nothing but starch, just orange potatoes with a smidge of vitamin A. But they're officially vegetables, and I could throw one in the lunch bag every day.
I bought a one pound bag, and they went pretty quickly. After a week or so, empty bag, so I had to buy more carrots. I got the two pound bag, which was slightly cheaper per pound. After two weeks or so, bigger empty bag. I decided to upgrade, and go for the five pounder. This was a monster bag, something you carry fence stakes in. You could feed Night of the Lepus rabbits with this bag. I wasn't prepared to go right into this tuber binge, so I put them in the freezer for a few days.
This commentary has a moral. Several, actually. Moral #1: DO NOT PUT CARROTS IN THE FREEZER. This probably also applies to other vegetables, but I can speak from personal experience on the carrots.
After a few days, I took the carrots out of the freezer. Standard frost all through the bag. I put them in the fridge to thaw, throwing a frozen one in my lunch bag. At lunch, I opened the bag and found the horrible truth. There's a lot of water in carrots, and when you freeze them it all gets frozen. When you unfreeze them, that water, which was safely confined in the carrots before, goes running out all brown and nasty. It looked like it had been pulled out of a clogged sink.
That part of the lunch was the trash can free throw. I thought little of it, went home that afternoon, and laughingly opened my fridge. Carrot water city. Five pounds minus one carrot's worth of dirty brown water leaking out of the bag, dripping down the bottom shelves, and further cursing the five items I normally have in there. Without hesitation I took the nasty wet carrot bag and heaved it in the trash.
Moral #2: IF YOU HEAVE A NASTY WET CARROT BAG IN THE TRASH, MAKE SURE THE GARBAGE BAG DOESN'T HAVE A LITTLE HOLE IN IT.
Five pounds of crap tops off a garbage bag pretty well, so I tied up the bag, left it in the kitchen for garbage day, and thought nothing of it. When I came back, it was a carrot water breakout. A big puddle had snuck out of the bag, and onto my linoleum. I was perfectly content to let the water run its course and flow down to Bayonne, but the damn stuff evaporated and left sticky carrot rot on my linoleum. And that's one of those occasions when you have to break down and scrub your floor.
The second life destroyer was the bananas. I do the same carrot thing each time I buy them. I buy a big bunch, several hands' worth. But I can't bring them to lunch, because the commute turns them into Rocky Balboa five minutes from the end of a movie. So they sit on my kitchen table until I decide to eat one outside of the lunch context. That only happens once or twice a week, and bananas naturally liquefy within a week or so, so I eat two bananas and watch the rest wither.
Partially brown bananas are like partially spoiled milk. Some genetic memory we all have of the Great Depression makes us hold onto borderline edible foods until they're undeniably over the bend, at which point we throw them out with great vigor. With bananas, it comes when the bananas are completely brown, the peels are splitting by themselves, and there're fruit fly colonies. So in the garbage they went, splat.
Left to my own devices, I'm a very good recycler. There cans and glass bottles, obvious recyclable items. But there's also plastic bottles, like milk jugs and two liter soda bottles, that can be recycled. As well as cardboard. That stuff goes in separate containers, and the rest is garbage. And the rest is very little: food that fell on the floor, plastic wrap, large quantities of improperly frozen vegetables. So I can go weeks without filling a garbage can to the point of the forced changing. Add that to the flip lid that my can has, and inside the bin is an ecosystem with a life span longer than most sitcom runs.
Moral #3: TAKE YOUR GARBAGE OUT. REGULARLY.
I came back from a weekend, and didn't have occasion to throw anything out until Monday morning. When I did, a cloud of fruit flies came out. Disturbed fruit flies turn into drunken Germans on the Autobahn, so they started doing laps around my kitchen at Ludricious Speed. Then they all disappeared. Presumably to die, although if something's left alive it's got its share of pickings from an unvacuumed rug.
Garbage for me is Wednesday and Saturday mornings. Wednesday morning comes. I forget. Saturday morning came around. Yeah right; I'm out like a light for half the morning, then Batman Beyond comes on, and by the time it's over the garbage truck is long on its way to Bayonne to dump its load on a street corner.
And so weeks went by. The fruit flies multiplied (they're fruitful) and only escaped when I threw something out. Me throwing out garbage became a relay race from the garbage to my front door to hiding at work for eight hours and hoping the escapees' life cycles would hit midnight before I came back.
One day I cut my losses and bundled the trash up Monday morning. I went as quickly as possible, and ended up with several dozen flies inside the bag. It was a white bag, so I could see them poking at the pathetic Cub Scout knot I put on it. And that bag only sat around my kitchen for a week and a half before I remembered to throw it out.
The third life destroyer was the bacon. This wasn't your traditional pork bacon but beef. I saw a cheap price for it, and had to get a pound. I was stupid enough to think I could throw it between some bread uncooked and make a sandwich. You couldn't do it with regular bacon, but this must be some pastrami stuff that tasted like bacon. No sirree Bob, just regular bacon, only it's cow instead of pig.
Any breakfast that involves more than pouring milk is too much time wasted on weekdays, so the bacon didn't see usage during traditional bacon consumption times. And not during weekend mornings either, because cooking bacon seriously destroys a pan. Unless you have a Baconwave, which I don't. If anyone wants to buy me a Baconwave, my birthday's in Jan... uh, tomorrow.
As it ended, I only cooked it when I was making hot dogs, which also burns up a pan, but do both and it's the same pan you have to clean. So each set of hot dogs I made came with a generous helping of bacon on each. I did this twice, each time cooking four hot dogs and a good quarter pound of bacon. Plenty of unknown animal parts were consumed those days.
Then I ran out of hot dog buns, and went about a month without buying more. When I finally did and went through another round of meat frying, the bacon looked funny. It was brown and gloppy and the considerable fat on it had gooified. And it smelled like a dead horse.
This must be the same thing as stale bread. With stale bread, pop it in the microwave and it's edible again. With rotting beef bacon, fry it up, all the nastiness burns away, and happy yummy bacon is left.
Moral #4. NOPE.
The bacon in the pan was scrambled egg made of mud. The little bit of red that was the sign of hope I had for the bacon became brown like everything else. I quickly yanked away the hot dogs from the pan, so they wouldn't get contaminated. The goop left in the pan fizzled like an ameoba in acid, and became a form of matter not quite solid and not quite liquid.
Rotting fat in a frying pan becomes incredibly pungent. I was hoping this was a temporary sensation, but the more heat that went to the meat, the more stink lines it gave off. After a minute, I had to breathe through my mouth to keep from gagging.
Pretty soon my entire kitchen was funked up. I went into the living room, two whole rooms away, and breathed what I thought would be a sigh of relief. Only it was funked up too. The smell had gone through my entire damn apartment. I had to go outside. I felt very bad for the people next to me, who were probably also enjoying the bacon smell.
After time on the steps, I went back in and remembered the ceiling fans. Within ten minutes they had shunted the stink outside the windows, where it migrated homeward and found Bayonne. I scrubbed the pan, washed off my hot dogs, ate without breathing through my nose just to be sure, and decided to leave bacon cooking to the professionals.
Carrots, bananas, bacon. They sound like nice foods. And under proper supervision, they can be. But don't bring them home. They could just put you in a pine box.
It's probably best to steer clear of Bayonne, also.