peevish mama

Today I threw out an entire case of clementine oranges.  You know those crates you’re so happy to see in the beginning of winter because they’re sweet and easy to peel and your kids will actually eat them and they cost anywhere from nine dollars to six dollars depending on the ebb and flow of their little migration from Spain? 

They had been in the fridge for months and although citrus lasts a looooong time, there are limits.  They had been reduced to desiccated little globules, the shrunken heads of some tribe of orange peoples.  I HATE to throw away food, what, with the starving children with flies in their eyes and all.  Americans waste a staggering amount of food – about a pound every day for every person -  we generate thirty million pounds of food waste per year.  Today I pitched in by pitching the clementines.  As they thunked angrily to the bottom of my trash can (uugh, yes, I should be composting but my list of excuses would require a whole other blog entry), I had a flashback to the fateful day when I bought them.  

It’s the end of winter and my kids are pretty much sick of clementines, but I shift into autopilot at the supermarket (which, coupled with my Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride cart manoeuvering is how I manage to break $200.00 in less than 15 minutes).  I reach for the clementines and pause, my arm in midair like a Stepford Wife whose controls have gone awry and I think:  I shouldn’t buy these, they look a little feeble and everyone is over them.  But in the eternal quest to find food my kids will eat, I allow myself to believe that I can get one more crate’s worth of vitamin C into them and plop them into the cart.  And now they’re mocking me from the bottom of my trash can because I’m such a sucker.  

This is why I do not belong to Costco.  Keep me the hell away from that place.  It’s a vortex for the fat and avaricious and I know myself all too well.  I will be powerless to resist the siren song of gigantic packs of berries, huge pallets of unnaturally rotund tomatoes, enormous bottles of calcium supplements and strange frozen delicacies.  My mother always wants to take me to Costco when she comes to visit and because I relented in a moment of weakness, I am now the proud owner of a tremendous box of frozen Mexican carnitas.  God help me the day I throw those away . . .

Like I said, sucker.