If there’s one thing that bothers the crap out of me – and I’m
sure we all know by now that there's more than one thing that bothers the crap
out of me – it’s people being wasteful. I particularly hate it when people
waste food. This, btw, is why I’m getting fat.
It’s not the starving children in China I’m worried about.
China is actually experiencing a pretty alarming childhood obesity problem,
second in severity only to our own. Hilariously, the People’s Liberation Army
is now too fat to fit into its own tanks, according
to the Wall Street Journal.
My mother never guilt-tripped me about the starving children
in Africa, because I’d read Calvin & Hobbes and I would have offered to
send them my leftovers in the mail. Instead, if I didn’t want to finish my food
– which happened a lot, because my mother’s idea of cooking was opening two
cans and lighting a cigarette – my mother would go along with it, but then the
next time I got hungry she’d say, “I want you to go to your room and think
about all that food you wasted the last time I fed you.” Then she’d refuse to
feed me until she was satisfied that I’d thought hard enough about the
terrible, terrible sin of wasting food.
It didn’t make her a better cook, but it gave me a complex.
Now I can’t stand wasting food. I’ve been known to eat until I make myself sick
rather than leave any food on my plate in a restaurant, and I will eat the same
leftovers every day for a week and then freeze them so I can eat them for
another week at a later date, if that’s what it takes not to waste them. I’ve
recently started feeding my kitchen waste to the marmot that lives in the woods
on my property, in a sort of compromise with my own neuroses. I’ve spoken with
the marmot’s doctor and we’ve agreed that he could stand to put on some weight.
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| This is not the marmot, this is his sexy cousin. Image by user Clayoquot on Wikipedia. |
All of this is relevant because I like to have parties, and
the people who come to these parties like to bring unreasonable amounts of food
and booze. On one memorable occasion I asked people over to build a fire in the
fire pit and make smores and ended up with six fucking bags of marshmallows.
SIX. I fed a bunch of them to Fatty because he loves them and also he plays
with them for like half an hour first, which I figure burns off enough calories
to balance things out. That’s not animal abuse, right?
Other food items that have been brought over and left in my
house include a gallon freaking tub of ice cream from Aldi’s, and more recently
– last weekend, for my birthday party – one and a half cheesecakes, two-thirds
of a tres leche cake, and two giant-sized bottles of wine plus one normal-sized
bottle of wine. In my weaker moments, I wonder if my friends are trying to get
me to eat myself to death.
Now you might say, “Why not just save the bottles of wine,
irrationally irate blogger?” And I would, Gentle Reader, if not for the fact
that my friends opened BOTH giant bottles of wine and drank a glass from each
of them. For the past four days, I’ve been staring at these mostly-full bottles
of wine in my kitchen and thinking to myself, “Why would you do that? Why not
just open the one giant bottle of wine? Why let both of them go to waste?”
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| WHY WOULD YOU DO THIS? WHY??? |
Naturally I’m not going to drink two giant bottles of wine
by myself – I’m not an alcoholic, and I don’t even like wine – so they have
gone off. I just tasted one to make sure. Luckily, it turns out you can freeze cheesecake, but I can’t personally eat two-thirds
of a tres leche cake, because I’m already getting fat from all the other things I forced myself to eat. But I’m still struggling to
come to terms with the fact that I’m just going to have to THROW OUT two-thirds
of a cake and two liters of wine. THERE ARE SOBER CHILDREN IN AFRICA, FOR FUCK’S
SAKE.
