Food relics

Over time, vanilla yogurt makes a good glue.

I discovered this when wiping out my refrigerator yesterday.  As I tried unsuccessfully to pull out the bottom-most glass shelf, I remembered that a few months back, an unnamed family member had returned a half-eaten pot of yogurt to the refrigerator, which had then been knocked over and spilled, trickling down three shelves and, ultimately, cementing one of them in place.

As I applied warm water (to see if this glue is water soluble), I thought about people who don’t keep Pesach and what happens in THEIR refrigerators and freezers.  While I won’t say where I witnessed these things, I will say that I’ve either seen or heard of 25-year-old lamb chops being recovered from a basement freezer only after a storm knocked out power for days.  I’ve seen a human hip bone (the result of replacement surgery) in a ziplock bag in the freezer, being reserved to make an ornamental head of a walking stick.  I’ve seen a spice cabinet plagued by pantry pests laying their eggs in the threads of jars of dried oregano, neglected and nearly white from age.  And I’ve seen a rare Indonesian chili sauce on a refrigerator door, four years after its expiry date.  (Hoping to throw away this bottle of largely desiccated sauce, I helpfully located a “replacement” bottle of the stuff in a cupboard, only to find that it was two years past expiration.)

So to those who say Jews are nutty to do such a thorough cleaning job every year, I say, “What’s the alternative?”

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