When I moved out I only took the food with me that I knew the kids
and I would eat. That was a huge
relief...Ex liked to haunt the sales. He loved clearance stores, he'd buy
20 single serving bags of almonds for 5 or 10 cents each...all of them tasting
stale. He'd go crazy at Grocery Outlet buying whatever off brand item he thought
we might eat. He had a friend who was a district manager for a grocery
store chain, she would give him milk carton crates full of food that were either
past their expiration date or couldn't be sold for whatever reason.
A family of four could’ve survived the zombie apocalypse for years
on the food that was stored in our house.
As long as they were willing to eat food that tasted stale the day Ex
bought it or was missing the label or was some sort of food never heard of in
the US. After filling our house with
these stale and inedible foods he'd get mad at me for buying stuff at the
grocery store. "We have so much food already, why don't you use this
stuff up first?" Because Ex, I can't figure out what to do with
frozen escargot, stale, off brand Ritz-like crackers and mystery jelly that the
label fell off of. I tried, honestly I did. I got on that website
where you enter the items you have and it'd come up with recipes for you.
Even that site said "Sorry, no can do."
He would eat anything, literally anything.
But there was never enough condiments no matter how much I put on.
Back in my Susie Homemaker days I would make his lunch every day for him
to take to work. Every day he wanted the same thing, tuna fish sandwich.
He wanted the tuna salad mixed up and put in a different container than
the bread so the bread wouldn't get squishy. Every day he said "That
was great, maybe a bit more mayo and pickles next time?" I was
tempted to just put mayo with pickles mixed in to see if he'd notice the
absence of tuna.
If the kids didn’t finish everything on their plate he’d eat it or
put it in the fridge telling them “You can finish this later.” They never would. He would be appalled at any wasted food…the
moldy fruit, he’d find the one spot that wasn’t moldy and eat that. Same for bread and cheese. I think the condiments were the secret to his
success here. I’d refuse to eat the
cheese that he’d cut the mold off of because I could still taste the mold. He’d insist it was my imagination. He’d try to slip sandwiches into the kids’
lunches with bits of the bread pinched off to remove the mold spots. Of course the kids could taste the mold and
refused to eat it. No wonder they
decided that hot lunch was a better option.
He’d fill our refrigerator with all sorts of containers full of
leftovers so that I couldn’t find anything at all that I’d put in there. He NEVER labeled them, so every single one
was a mystery. Produce would go bad in
the back of the fridge because I couldn’t find it and would assume that it’d
been eaten. All of this would make him crazier
and his craziness escalated.
The pantry we had was so overloaded that I had a hard time finding anything. All of my attempts to organize the food containers by type, or purpose were thwarted by his "throw everything into whatever spot I can find" methodology. Things were always falling and spilling off the shelves so we usually had stuff a foot or two deep on the bottom. It was useless to find anything I needed quickly. With five people in the house who all could cook, how was I to know if that ingredient was used up or lost? Was it worth my effort to look for?
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