Expiration Dates at the Food Bank

           

            I was in the line-up to get a number at the food bank on Wednesday, May 18th when a woman stepped in line behind me and started making small talk. I noticed that she had something semi-liquid and golden brown on her lower lip. I didn’t know for sure if I should mention it to her because it might have been some internal problem, but I told her anyway, “You’ve got something on your mouth.” She wiped it off and said, “Oh! Peanut butter!”

            A tall young man behind her, in black, with a face full of piercings was talking to an older man and describing a landscape. At first I thought he was speaking about ecology but then it sounded like archaeology until I realized that he was describing a video game that was perhaps of his own design.

            I got number 19 and went home.

            Someone had left a box of fabric at the food bank. It consisted of several large pieces of cloth with the same pattern. They were giving it away to whoever wanted it. A lot of people looked, but I didn’t notice any takers. The pattern was kind of ugly and large, with dark shades of red and orange mixed with black.

            Since the numbers they’d called were from 16 to 20, the wait was slightly longer for me once I was inside. Bruce asked woman who’d been behind me if she was number 19, but I got up and walked towards him. He said “Hello Mister Nineteen!” Then he said “Hey Nineteen … Steely Dan? Not a Steely Dan fan?” I said that I know the band but not the song. He told me that it was one of their biggest songs. I looked it up later and listened to it. It definitely sounds like a Steely Dan song, but I’d never heard it before. It doesn’t stand out as anything more than self –derivative.

            On the top of the first shelf there was nothing extremely interesting, so I just took some more of that spray on olive oil. I figure I can use it when I run out of canola oil. One level down there was a choice between butter cookies and Triscuits, so I took the flavoured horse feed. I took a box of those “Chock Full o’ Nuts” coffee pods. I’ve discovered that inside is just real ground coffee, so I can open them up and pour the contents into my French Press.

From the second shelf I still didn’t want any pasta, rice or sauce but I noticed that there was only one can of sauce anyway. At the bottom there was a choice between fruit juice gummy treats with some corn syrup in them and some relatively healthy looking candy bars called “Feast”. I took the bars, but later when I ate one I got that fuzzy feeling in my head that I get when I eat anything that’s artificially sweetened. I read the ingredients, but didn’t see any artificial sweeteners that I was familiar with on the list. I thought that maybe I’d been mistaken, so I ate another one and got the same feeling. I looked at the ingredients again and found two names that I didn’t recognize. I looked up “inulin” and found that it’s usually extracted from chicory and though it can be used to replace sugar, it’s only ten percent as sweet. Then I searched “stevia” and bingo! It’s 150 times sweeter than sugar and so I’m sure that’s what gave me the headache.

On top of the third shelf I selected one of Campbell’s gourmet butternut squash soups. I noticed when I got home though that the division of Campbell’s that made the soup was called “Gardennay”, while another Campbell’s gourmet butternut squash soup that I’d previously picked up, with identical ingredients, had the name “Every Day Gourmet” but up in the corner of the box it said, “formerly Gardennay”. This led me to check the best-before dates on both boxes. The Every Day Gourmet soup expires this fall, whereas the Gardennay expired a year and a half ago.

Another soup I took was a package of dehydrated vegetables from a Polish company named Kucharek. It still had a price tag of $2.09 from the Polka European Delicatessen in Scarborough.

I also took a can of chunky chilli.

At the bottom there were more of those Nature’s Child squeezable containers of applesauce. After I said I liked those, Bruce gave me four of them.

On top of the last shelf, in packaging that made them look more like potato chips than breakfast food, were bags of Cheerios Plus Honey Almond cereal. I took one of those.

The young woman who was replacing Sue that day in distributing the refrigerated food offered me some flavoured zero fat yogourt, but I knew automatically that it would have to be artificially sweetened, so I turned it down. I also passed on a Blue Menu quinoa chicken frozen dinner, as I already had one exactly like it in the freezer at home, and not a lot of room to store any extras. I did though take a bag of homemade fruit flavoured granola. There was no meat or substantial dairy this time around. In the bread section I got a loaf of raisin bread and then three not very crisp apples from the vegetable lady.

            Backtracking a few minutes, Bruce had asked me if I wanted microwave oatmeal, but I told him I didn’t have a microwave anymore. I had gotten one when my daughter had been old enough to be left on her own but still too young to use the stove. Coincidentally mine broke down shortly after Astrid moved out but I didn’t feel any particular need to replace it. Bruce said he’d gotten a microwave to heat things up too, but he doesn’t think they are safe. I don’t think there’s any evidence that microwaves are unsafe if they haven’t been damaged, but there was no time to argue that point. He added that he prefers to cook the old fashioned way. The young woman in the cold section across the aisle, having only heard part of the conversation, asked Bruce, “Did you just say that microwaves are old fashioned?”