Food Rots

It is a running joke about how I do not take good care of plants.  I actually love plants, but am not good at taking care of things that don't remind me to take care of them.  I basically watched a plant die in my office because I would think, Oh, I need to water that! and then get distracted and not remember until the next day.  After a few weeks of that goes by, the plant give up and passes into its next existence.

That is the same reason I do not have an aquarium.  Fish are passive aggressive.  They just go belly up rather than telling you to feed them.  Roxy has no such qualms.  She always lets me know in no uncertain terms what her expectations are: food, clean water, cuddles, walks and treats.  If I forget, she will stand on me until I remember, eventually sticking her nose in my ear if I do not respond fast enough.

So along those lines, the last couple weeks I've been focusing on eating comfort food.  Mac 'n' cheese, (frozen Stouffer's TOTALLY hit the spot!) icecream, brownies, Chick-Fil-A breakfast biscuits, even once a doughnut from Dunkin Donuts... you get the picture.

This morning, I woke up and thought, "Hey, I'm ready to eat healthy again!" I opened the fridge door to get out the ingredients for a green shake.

Then I realized the yogurt had expired, the blueberries had a white fuzzy coating, I was no longer sure how long I'd owned the coconut water, and the bananas on the counter scared me a bit.  I think a new ecosystem was forming.

Those who know me, know nothing aggravates me more than waste, especially wasted food.  I am the leftovers QUEEN.  So I spent a couple moments irritated with myself for buying food I basically watched rot.

I spent a couple minutes conducting an inventory of food I thought might still be edible.  Pretty much just the apples and the spinach, which seem to last forEVER in that fridge.

It isn't even the money spent and wasted that got under my skin.  It is that in the US we waste something like 40% of our food produced -either it goes bad in the grocery store or bad in our homes.  I cut down significantly on my meat consumption once I realized that about 40% of the animals we kill for food get thrown away through this kind of waste.  I'm not anti-meat, but that just seems disrespectful.

So, I begin and then again begin.  I am blessed to live in a part of the world where we have a positively decadent number of choices of food at the grocery store, and blessed to have an income sufficient to eat as well, as often and as much as I like.  I am past my self-irritation.  It is done and all I can do is resolve to do better in the future.

Which really, is all we can do about anything.