Old Cheese

As a kid I, as I am sure you all did, would keep mental notes about the "safety factor" concerning the food in your friend’s refrigerators. Like my friend Hallboy’s parents house, nothing was to be trusted. The milk was notorious for always having a sour smell and opaque jars were off limits. To give you an idea at the volume, one summer when we were 15-16 his parents went out of town for the week. The first thing we did was go through the fridge and toss 2 large garbage bags of old food. Now these are clean people but their fridge was a graveyard. I did discover the reason behind the constant bad milk one day. On the weekend D-Dad would get up, eat cereal and read the paper. Milk sat on the table until the last one eating would finally put it away. That’s 2 hours at room temperature every day, no wonder it would go south in 3 days.

So this weekend I forgot about on such fridge while at my Sister Squarah’s birthday dinner. It was at Beef’s (father) house and he was also known to have ancient food lurking about. This is the guy that when you were hungry at lunch time would try to talk you into eating some left over steak, rice, potatoes that were all in a ziplock bag at the back of the fridge. And you could have sworn that you saw it there 2 weeks prior. Then there was the ½ jar of spaghetti sauce with an inch of mold on it. “its fine, that just means it is fermented and has more flavor”. And you would think that the dry food would be safe, no dice. There were boxes of Cheerios from 10 years ago, opened and stale. Anyways, I was hungry (surprise surprise) and dinner was 45 minutes out so I looked in the fridge, string cheese! “Perfect” I thought “just a small snack so I don’t fill up”. I grabbed it and proceeded to unstring it. I noticed that it wasn’t really performing its trademarked “string effect” but gave it no thought. So I took a bite and was really surprised that mozzarella cheese could taste so incredibly sour and it also dissolved quite quickly. This triggered the old warning system and I dug in the trash for the wrapper to try to find a date, illegible! I reached took the other one out the fridge and read the date “Nov. 2002”. That’s a “eat by” not a “born on” date folks. After some research at the supermarket I noticed that the shelf life of string cheese is 3-4 months. It didn’t cause any stomach issues down the road probably due to the copious amounts of preservatives.

I was telling this tale to the step-sis and she had done the same thing 2 weeks before. Her mom said “don’t eat those, their bad” and step sis said “then throw them away”. But alas, they remained. I also left the other old cheese stick for the next unsuspecting soul and I have no regrets.