On the rare occasions that I allow someone to freely roam about my house, I always try to impress upon them that anything they might decide to consume is almost certainly past its expiration date. They always make a sour face and attempt to wave me off, and that is when I sit them down, grab their shoulders, and look them straight in the eye.

"While you are in my apartment, if you put anything in your mouth without being very sure of its purchase date, chances are pretty good that you will end up in the emergency room."

My inability to keep up with expiration dates, freshness dates, purchase-before dates, and good until dates astounds me. It seems that I do everything that I can. I buy food in small quantities, even though all food seems to packaged with large families in mind. (Seriously, do you think that I personally need EIGHT bratwursts? Even if I wanted to personally eat all eight of those things before they expired, do you really think that I should?) Whenever I open something like a jar of pasta sauce, I write the date that I opened it on the jar lid. Occassionally, I've conducted small purges where I throw away the expired things I find. None of it matters. It's only a matter of time before we're right back where we started.

A few days ago Christa was making bread when she asked me if I had any baking powder. I said sure, found the baking powder in the pantry, and checked the expiration date.

February, 1998

"Well, honey, the good news is that I have baking powder. The bad news is that it expired when you were in college."

While I didn't check before throwing it away, I'm quite certain that there was exactly one tablespoon of baking powder missing from the can. That can has been with me through three moves. I could have thrown it away at any time, but instead, I packed it up, moved it to the new place, unpacked it, and reshelved it.

Suffice to say, I don't bake things.

In case you're wondering, I managed to find another can of baking powder in the pantry, and this one didn't even have a date on it. Christa tried it.

The bread turned out fantastic.