Lies Your Gastroenterologist Told You

You've been lied to. All of your life, you've been told one thing, while the opposite is actually true. Your parents? White lies spouting out of their mouths like fake snow falling on a Hollywood sidewalk. Your friends? The ultimate fibbers. Your doctor? Mendacious as all the rest. The Surgeon General? President of the FDA? Liar, liar, patent-pending pills on fire. I am here to tell you the truth. And it is this:

There is no expiration date.

To some, food is good until it is not. You'll crack an egg and cook it sunny-side up and rejoice in the broken yolk as if spurred on by some Heliotropic pagan festival, but only until EXP 2/07. On February 8th, the cardboard henhouse gets tossed in the trash. And all of those unborn baby chickens die a second death.

But this does not have to be the way. Don't you know how many adult hens were brutally harrassed, living in excrement-stained confinement, a meager 10 centimeters of wiggle-room, to produce those eggs? Those eggs are tough. Ounce for ounce, they have more staying power than you do, my friend. Given the average weight of an egg is 56 grams, and an egg allegedly expires after four to five weeks, a 160 lb. man (72,574.78 grams) with the same lifespan as an egg would live to be 540 years old. But here's the thing--They can go even longer! Those white-, brown- and speckled-shell beauties keep on keepin' on like Sting on a tantric binge.

But my message to you doesn't solely concern eggs. My message goes deeper, is more purely satisfying than a simple Scramble or Fried. If messages were eggs, mine would be that most everlasting and tender of all preparations: The Poached. So read my words, allow them passage. Offer me a credence-filled ear. And listen again: There is no expiration date.

Don't believe me? I have evidence. I took leave of my apartment for twelve days over the winter holiday. Two days before my departure, I cooked some spaghetti, browned some ground turkey, heated a bit of Prego, tossed it all together and called it a meal. It was quite good. So I stored the leftovers in a Gladware plastic container, and left it in the fridge. The next night, I cooked brown rice in a roommate's rice cooker, boiled a bag of pre-prepared Indian food bought from a nearby market (a spicy, tomato-based mixture of shredded eggplant, onion and ginger -- post forthcoming), split the bag and let the heated goodness pour out over my fresh rice. I ladled it into my mouth on a pan-friend onion paratha, a sort of thin, flaky flatbread. A fine dinner, too fine to have but once. So I stored the remains next to my turkey pasta. Then I flew home to Michigan.

Cue film montage of twelve calendar pages flipping, dissolving into one another, until the final page flips, December 31st. I return. I spend a fine New Years celebrating with my ladyfriend companion. The next night, I open the fridge, looking for good eats, the first supper of 2008.

"How about this Indian food?" I ask her.
"That's two weeks old!" she answers.
"But it looks okay."
"No way."
"But..."
"No."

So, the following evening, with she of the frivolous taste-buds eating elsewhere, I took out again the Indian food first consumed a fortnight ago. The rice appeared stable, if a bit stiff. The red saucy eggplant portion, though, gave me pause. The sides had congealed, becoming orange. A plasticine film covered the middle. I stood in the middle of my kitchen, looking at this dish, smelling it, peering closely. It had been so good. I wanted to know that taste again. I prodded, delicately, into the aged mass, hoping for an answer within, somewhere next to the still-green peas and chunks of potato. My roommate said: "You know, the microwave will probably kill any bacteria that may be in there." And though I doubted her claim, facetious as it was, the eternal food-optimist inside my esophagus latched onto that faintest of hopes: safety-by-way-of-radioactive-short-waves. I forked the rice into a bowl, then the eggplant on top. Three separate sessions of 90 seconds on HIGH. I swirled the two components together, heating it one last time. I used a new fork, thinking the old food like uncooked chicken, and not wanting to contaminate the newly sanitized, microwaved version. And then I took my first bite. And a second. And a third. It was a tasty dish.

The next night, I found my old bin of turkey pasta. Heated it up in the micro. Buttered a fresh slice of potato bread to eat on the side. Another fine meal.

And so I came to my previously mentioned conclusion. There are no expiration dates. Only expired desires. So take another glance at that week-old meatloaf. Look anew at your forgotten farm-raised tilapia in a citrus-scallion medley. And those eggs? Feel free to get your Jules Verne on, and eighty days later, scramble away.

But more than anything, do not throw away, but eat. Eat long, eat late, eat beyond the tiny date stamped on your plastic or paper bins holding what was once considered fragile, a taste to be sucked up with haste, as if fleeting and ephemeral. Do not label old food "leftovers," but instead, "lastforevers." That tin of peaches, marinating in syrup and its own juices for eight months? Imagine the flavor saturation! The floating scum of green fuzz needs merely to be scraped away, tossed aside like the undesired stowaway it is. What new tastes might be found in such undiscovered country as that which we can now explore: Bottom-Right Shelf, Behind the Pickles, Screwtop Sealed Shut with the Glue of Ages?