Last week’s chicken too dry to finish off. A carrot so old it flops like a garden hose. Yoghurt – with a carton of mouldy blueberries – three weeks past its use.
You might see trash; I see entree, dinner and dessert. There’s no such thing as food too old to eat.
But those of us who open our hearts to the leftovers of the earth also expose ourselves to a world of pain. Everywhere I go, people throw away box after box of food and not one of them ever thinks to offer it to me.
I’ve learned to leave work early on fridge-cleaning days. The office kitchen regularly accumulates a cornucopia of funky-smelling week-old meals in plastic containers that will never be eaten. I once made the mistake of staying back while our cleaner carried out the monthly purge. That whole night, my ears rang with the sound of leftover curry slopping into the bin.
A welcoming attitude to rotting remnants costs me more than just the torment of seeing good food go to waste – the 14-hour-old McDonald’s burger I rescued from the front of my university accommodation was not worth my neighbours’ sneers, nor the subsequent 14-hour stomach ache. But it keeps a truckload of scraps out of landfill and saves me hundreds of dollars in food I would otherwise have to buy.
What does it cost you to let others finish your bowl of chips at the pub? What do you gain by binning the soggy fruit salad?
Asking those questions tends to make me a social exile and perhaps this whole diatribe betrays a food saviour complex on my part. But I invite critics to join those observing Lent this month and mull Jesus’ example: welcome the outcasts. Praise those who would eat the scraps from another’s table.
Too stale for you? Fair enough. But know there are those of us who would stomach it happily and ask for seconds.
