Simple rules to live by, preferably without getting salmonella.
Category One: Prepared Food
This includes any food that has been cooked, e.g., hamburgers, casseroles, linguini with clam sauce, egg rolls, cassoulet, fish tacos. You get the picture.
You say, what if the food is prepared, like a salad, but is not actually cooked? Excellent question. In that case, thefood does NOT count as prepared unless it contains one of these ingredients: fish, meat (including chicken, and also including any oddball part of an animal you might care to eat, like a foot, liver, or testicle), eggs, or dairy products.
Rule:
You must eat prepared food within one week of its being cooked, or if cooked and promptly frozen, after being thawed. (If you want to know what “promptly” means, you have to consult “Daddy’s Guide to Freezing Food” (forthcoming)). Simple.
Exceptions:
- Prepared food containing fish: Eat within one day, because it starts to smell bad. Better yet, don’t eat it leftover. Fishy food tastes bad enough the first day. Special rule for sushi: don’t eat it.
- Prepared food containing mayo: Eat within one half day, and make sure it does not get too warm. (If it is summer, you can take it to a picnic in SF, but not in Sacramento.) Better yet, act Jewish and substitute mustard.
- Prepared food with a beard, or which smells funny: If prepared food fails one of the tests for non-preparedfood below, it fails.
Category Two: Fruits and Vegetables
We lump these two types of food together to avoid pointless haggling over whether things like tomatoes are fruits or vegetables. It doesn’t matter for this purpose, or for that matter, for any other. As you know if you read the first category carefully, this category includes fruits and vegetables that are prepared but not cooked, so long as they don’t have any of the taboo ingredients.
If you are not sure whether what you have in front of you is a fruit/vegetable, consult “Daddy’s Guide to IdentifyingFood Groups” (pending).
Rules:
- Unfortunately for children, most fruits and vegetables don’t really go bad; they just start to taste bad. For example, apples get mealy; bananas become ever more banana-y. They also begin to look unattractive (bananas are a good example of this–if you like your bananas pretty banana-y, they aren’t really good until they look bad). For this reason, there is no hard and fast deadline, like “eat within one week”.
- So, you have to examine the foodstuff. If it has a moldy beard, oozing sores, discolored soft spots, make sure you aren’t looking at your leg. If not, the fruit or vegetable is probably bad. If it smells bad, same, unless it is afood that is supposed to smell bad, like papaya.
- Otherwise, eat up.
There are no exceptions for fruits and vegetables.
Category Three: Meat (as defined above), Fish, Eggs, Dairy
By now you know what these are. If not, go back and read the first part.
Rules:
- Meat: Cook within one days of buying (assuming refrigeration), or the same day you defrost. Preview of “Daddy’s Guide to Freezing Food”: don’t re-freeze thawed meat.
- Fish: Cook within one day after buying or the same day you defrost.
- Eggs: Eggs last for an indefinite period, if refrigerated. Treat like fruits/vegetables. Unless you keep them for a really really long time. Then throw them out.
- Dairy: In addition to the usual beard and smell test, watch for clotting. Not good. Sour is the most likely smell issue. Attractive blue mold is common but not desirable.
- Beard, smell, etc. apply to all these.
Category Four: Packaged Prepared Food
To qualify, this has to come from a factory, not from Whole Foods.
Rule:
- If not opened, use the printed sell-by date. If there is no sell-by date shown, consider whether this may have come from your own or your dad’s kitchen, in which case it is considered regular prepared food (see above).
- Once opened, treat like regular prepared food (see Category One above).
Special Exceptions to the Above Rules
- I have broken all the above rules at one time or another, and did not get food poisoning (as far as I know). So you can cheat, but if you do so, you are on your own. Do NOT ask me whether a particular form of cheating is ok–if I were to answer, it wouldn’t be cheating any more.
- One form of cheating that is pretty widely accepted is cutting off the moldy or otherwise offending part. This is an art form that can only be mastered by constant experimentation and learning, so don’t ask me about it. You are on your own.
You now have, for free, the sum total of my learning, gained through 57 years of eating food of dubious origin.
DADDY'S GUIDE 