Food for Thought

All of this is from my drawer at work. Everyday I fish through these to find the broken open box of staples or a loose paper clip from the empty box that long ago scattered it’s contents amongst all of the other junk in my drawer.

I’ve held onto this stuff longer than I should have, and I’m a little surprised to see how much of it I have. I’m sure at one point I figured I could use some of it to spice up something else that I was having for lunch. But in the rare instances where I even eat lunch lately, it usually ends up being a cup of noodles- and it doesn’t occur to me to go rooting through the paper clip drawer to find some condiments to liven up that already exquisite dish.

I know when I first tossed these in the drawer, part of me felt like these were going to come in handy some day. I figured if I was ever stuck at work over a prolonged period time (whether due to a snowstorm or nuclear attack), I, at least, would survive longer than my coworkers- they having died after begging in vain for just one ketchup packet- which I would have denied knowing anything about, despite my ketchup stained lips.

It seemed like a great idea at the time, but now, I’m hesitant.

As I look closer at these packets, I see there is a possible flaw in my master plan: I have no clue how long this stuff has been in the drawer. I’m not so worried about the taco sauce, since the last time I was at Taco Bell was only several months ago. And even if none of these were from that particular visit, I’m pretty sure they’re all within Taco Bell’s strict fourteen year expiration date requirement. Besides, I don’t think taco sauce ever really goes bad. It’s the other packets that I’m worried about.

To begin with, the mustard doesn’t look quite right to me. I’m no expert on this, but to my color blind eyes, these don’t match up to any of the several hundred varieties of mustard currently crammed into my refrigerator. And I notice that on several of the packets of ketchup, the ketchup is starting to eat through the foil side. This is almost never a good sign.

Out of all of these, the mayonnaise seems to be in the best shape... but who knows? I’m never completely comfortable even buying mayonnaise off the shelf in the grocery store- there’s too many things that can go wrong when something's made with raw egg yokes and it’s left sitting on an unrefrigerated shelf. Trust me. This packet is impossible to see into and it seems to be ballooning slightly. Maybe it was that way when I got it, but maybe not.

There’s some numbers at the bottoms of each of these packets, but none of these numbers make any sense to me. The mayonnaise, for instance, says “”5171106-001 4”. What the hell does that mean? Do they hope that if they find the half empty packet next to my cold, lifeless body, they can alert the public to be on the lookout for this condiment number? Why isn’t this an expiration date? Isn’t all food required to have one? Have the anti-government regulation zealots succeeded in having this job killing expiration date requirement removed from condiment packets so that the job creators can get back to their real work of focusing on the economy?

Whatever the reason, I’m left with a pile of condiments that I can’t bring myself to throw away but I’m too afraid to use. I could put them back in my drawer, but I think for now, I’ll just leave them in the break room.