I’m a pretty good housekeeper. Ask anybody.
No, wait: Don’t ask my wife. She and I disagree on certain house
keeping issues, such as whether it’s OK for a house to contain dirt.
Also smells. If NASA scientists really want to know about life on
Mars, instead of sending up robots that keep finding rocks, they
need to send my wife, and have her take a whiff of the Martian
atmosphere. If there’s a single one-celled organism anywhere on
the planet, she’ll smell it. And if the other astronauts don’t stop her,
she’ll kill it with Lysol.
Which is why her approach to leftovers baffles me. I am opposed
to leftovers. I believe the only food that should be kept around is
takeout Chinese, which contains a powerful preservative chemical
called “kung pao” that enables it to remain edible for several foot
ball seasons.
All other leftover foods should be
thrown away immediately, for the same
reason you should not go to your 40th
high-school reunion. You go expecting to
see people whom you vaguely remember
as being attractive, and even though you
know they’ve aged some-Heck, even
YOU have aged some-you figure, hey,
it’s not as if you’re OLD yet! You’re
middle-aged! Like Harrison Ford!
So you go to the reunion, and suddenly
you find yourself in a room full of unrec
ognizable fossils, lurching around the dance floor to the sounds of
Herman’s Hermits, and you realize to your horror that YOU ARE
ONE OF THEM
You get the same kind of unpleasant shock with leftovers. Time
and again, in my house, when we’re cleaning up after dinner, there
will be, say, a small clump of uneaten string beans, and I’ll have it
poised over the garbage, and my wife will lunge for it like a person
rescuing a baby from a wood chipper, saying: “Those will be good
for leftovers!” She’ll carefully seal the string beans in a plastic con
tainer and put them in the refrigerator, as if she truly believes that
sometime in the near future an actual human in our household will
say: “Dang! I could really chow down on some old string beans!”
Now fast-forward about a month, when my wife, passing the
refrigerator, detects an odor molecule. So she takes out the plastic
container and discovers that EWWW the string beans have been
replaced by alien space worms with inch-long blue fur. Which of
course she hurls into the garbage, which as you may recall is exact
ly where I tried to throw them a month earlier. This is what hap
pens to, I would estimate, 100 percent of our non-Chinese-takeout
Dave Barry is a humor columnist who is published in 500 newspapers in the U.S. and abroad. He
won the 1988 Pulitzer prize for Commentary and has published 24 humorous books.
When he isn’t making millions laugh with his humor, he plays in a literary rock band called Rock
Bottom Remainders. Other band members include Stephen King, Amy Tan, Ridley Pearson, and Mitch
Albom. He and his wife, Michelle, live in Miami with their two children Rob and Sophie.
By DAVE BARRY
Knight Ridder Newspapers (KRT)
Making the world's
kitchens safer
Speaking of refrigerator odors, here is a:
PRACTICAL HOMEMAKER TIP: Always keep an open box of
baking soda in your refrigerator. That way, when people come to
your house to visit, you can say: “Would you care for some cold
baking soda?” Then they will leave.
But I digress. My point, and I know this because I’m using pow
erful point-detection software, is that people have differing views
about what constitutes good housekeeping. This is why I’m so
interested in an article that appeared recently in the New York
Times, concerning household cleanliness.
The article, brought to my attention by alert reader Bill Ulrey,
states that your kitchen-yes, YOUR kitchen-is basically a festering
swarm of potentially deadly bacteria. The most interesting part of
the article concerns a discovery by a University of Arizona micro
biology professor named Dr. Chuck Gerba, who is an expert on
household germs. I am familiar with Dr. Gerba, because some
years ago I interviewed
him on bathroom clean
liness, and he told me
that the only sure way to
kill all the bacteria on a
toilet is-I am not making
this up-to put laboratory
alcohol on the bowl and
set it on fire.
LEGAL ADVISORY:
Dr. Gerba is a trained
bathroom scientist. As a
layperson, you must
NEVER EVER set your toilet on fire, EVER. Also be advised that
it looks much cooler with the lights out.
So anyway, according to the New York Times, Dr. Gerba has
found that “people who had the cleanest-looking kitchens were
often the dirtiest. Because 'clean’ people wipe up so much, they
often end up spreading bacteria all over the place. The cleanest
kitchens, he said, were in the homes of bachelors, who never wiped
up and just put their dirty dishes in the sink.”
That’s right: You so-called “good housekeepers” with your so
called “cleaning” are in fact smearing bacteria around, while we
so-called “slobs” arei by courageous inaction, making the world’s
kitchens safer for everybody.
There’s no need to thank us. All we ask is a little respect. Also,
while you’re sniffing those leftovers, please grab us a beer.
(Dave Barry is a humor columnist for the Miami Herald. Write to
him c/o The Miami Herald, One Herald Plaza, Miami FL 33132.)
(c) 2004, Dave Barry