Too many of my meals are prepared using ingredients which are on their last legs, or are actually 'crippled'. For some strange reason, there's a cycle that we adopt far too often, whereby 'stock rotation' means most of the time, something is eaten just before it's due to go in the bin. I rather suspect this pattern is followed in many UK households.
On a shopping trip, I may well buy some vegetables, and fruit. Yet later on, instead of using the prime produce to prepare the evening meal, I will use up the remaining stuff I bought the week before, which is just on its 'sell by' date, or 'best before' date. Today, I looked at some onions. The three large onions I bought on Saturday have another week to go, on the 'best before' reckoning. In the basket was another set of three onions in netting, with a best before date of 2nd August. So, as logic would dictate, I select these for chopping up. One had started to grow, and upon commencement of the peeling, I also discovered some greenness and softness that led to my decision to bin it. I used the remaining two, which were okay. So, the end result was that I used three onions which supposedly had another day's life, although one had in fact died. The 'best before' date was thus misleading, and there should have been a different tag, along the lines of "Best a Long Time Before" so that I could have avoided the 1/3 loss level. Anyway, I chopped and cooked the other two satisfactorily.
The real concern, though, was not the lost onion, but the whole approach to food usage, and the 'Best Before' system. I looked at other stuff I had, and clocked apples, yoghurts, celery, mushrooms, bacon, chicken, cheese, basil, juice, and eggs. In almost every case, I am likely to be eating very soon something which is soon to 'die', or else (like the eggs) bin the item because it's either past its best before date, or unable to actually reach its supposed best before date. The other possibility is that I have bought more stuff which renders the older (out of date or not) stock useless, as it would never be consumed in the quantity still available before first going off, or massively affecting the ability to eat in time the newer stock. If you are following all of this, I take my hat off to you.
I need to review the shopping habits I adopt. The balance of convenience, buying at a good price, and having a choice of foods available all contribute to what's in my pantry at any one time - the best comment upon which is in fact "too much". So, I eat the old and withered spring onions rather than throw them away, leaving the newly purchased ones to age and/or go off just a little bit more before it's their turn for the chop. The only real exception to this whole process is - bread. The single reason for the exception is that bread becomes "not-yet-made-but-still-good-enough-for Toast". We therefore weigh up the state of any loaf, deciding whether it merits a second phase of life irrespective of any date on it (although the tape/tag is usually lost before the consumption of any more than half of the loaf). So, we are at liberty to start a fresh loaf, demoting any remnants to the okay-for-toast category, or straight to the bin. But we do not adopt this approach for other types of food.
Instead, we continually eat everything in the wrong order, as dictated by conventions and dates, and a complication forced upon us by the supermarkets which fool us into thinking it might be a good idea to 'buy one, get one free', and all the other so called offers which screw up the natural order of things.
So, I urge you to rebel. Next time you go to prepare food, and there is a choice between using something old and something only just purchased, go for the fresher item - and enjoy it all the more. You'll eat better, and fairly quickly, I suspect we'll all buy less and eat earlier.
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