At 5am I had the most annoying encounter with 5 bottles of expired cough syrup ranging with dates from December 2006 to October 2010. Furious I made do with the Strepsil with a soft outer coating that was stuck lonely to the bottom of our medicine box.
So when I woke up this morning, with a sore throat and sniffly nose I immediately yelled for my mum. Her response to my complaint about the syrup, “it’s fine if it’s clear”, only added to my misery. I needed food and fast. My mum rattled off a menu, which this morning seemed high on eggs: scrambled, fried, boiled and poached. Immediately I was suspicious that the eggs in the fridge were on a deadline too. This is not paranoia on my part. It is my mum’s attitude (“when I was a child we didn’t have expiry dates, we just smelled it and if it smelled ok we ate it”) that has given me this anxiety about expiry dates.
In our house there are some tell tail signs that food is about to go off. Eggs only on the breakfast menu sends alarm bells ringing, dinners with random ingredients chucked together is a usually a sign that the fridge has been cleared out and a pot of soup will sometimes coincide with an empty vegetable bin.
There are some short-term gains to this strategy, she never throws food out but she has spoiled Christmas dinner for me forever. One Christmas she declared that we would eat the turkey on Christmas Eve, European style. That turkey tasted strange and later she confessed that it had smelled a little high and had to cooked urgently, even if it was only Christmas Eve that day. I simply cannot eat turkey ever again.
God knows what I ate as I child before I had the understood of importance of expiry dates. Clearly for my mum expiry dates are not written in stone if written at all.
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