The inside of a person’s fridge is more intimate, in a way, than their underwear drawer. Like the shoes they wear, it’s an unguarded window of deep personal exposure. People don’t consider the world’s judgment when they fill their fridge, still less when they fail to empty it until it’s the culinary equivalent of Britain’s Got Talent, with all the shiny, fresh, attractive produce sparkling at the front, while the multiply rejected sea-vegetable paté and slimy, rotten watercress hide their shame at the back.
Mine is a very different spectacle, a bleak desert for midnight munchers, unless you like munching on half lemons or miso paste. Snack food is such a foreign concept that my children regarded Dairylea Triangles as the sump of decadence; when my son arrived at a school that gave him a plastic card to use in the canteen, he assumed – not unreasonably – that this was the modern equivalent of a blank cheque, and by the end of term he’d spent a small fortune on pizza baguettes and Capri-Sun. Needless to say, I took quite a bit of persuading that this catalogue of decadence could possibly have anything to do with a child of mine.
The inside of my mother’s fridge was more like a laboratory – Dr Fleming’s, perhaps. In those days, nothing came in bubble packs or plastic, and the only prepared foods she tolerated were dried soup, instant mashed potato and the occasional tin, so leftovers were half-cans of baked beans, opened jars of jam and the vast slab of mousetrap cheddar, which, in those primitive days, we knew as “cheese”.
And over every one was a thin carapace, or a thick scummy layer, or a delicate gossamer tracery, of mould. When she needed the jam or beans, my mother would just scrape it off, hurl it into the bin, and serve us whatever appeared underneath.
Remarkably – or maybe not – no fatalities ensued. In fact, we are all the most robust, nothing-gets-to-me, I’ll-be-there people you could imagine. The colds, flu and superbugs that poleaxe others and that anyone might occasionally long for, just flit right by, taking their chance of a nice lie-down with them.
I suppose it has to do with starting young, easing the immune system gently into its role of internalising the enemy. Certainly that’s the principle on which I have operated with my own family, though it could be that I’m just compensating for living with a partner who dreams of having us all injected with Microban. Once I spilled a packet of walnuts all over the kitchen floor, and it was a furtive but distinct pleasure to sweep them up with the dustpan and brush and put them straight back in the bag. They were going to be cooked anyway.
But when the children were small and vulnerable, it did occur to me that perhaps I should get some expert advice. My older sister is an engineer, with an analytical scientist’s mind and the added advantage of having gone through the whole child-rearing thing some time before. Her conclusion was that it was a listeria v salmonella situation; if the food in question had anything to do with animal protein (eggs, fish, pork pies) the mould probably ought to be treated as an indication that it should be binned or, if that was intolerable, left out for the foxes. Anything else – that home-made jam, a musty chocolate biscuit accidentally separated from the herd – could probably be eaten with impunity, if you were sufficiently desperate or tight-fisted.
Where did that leave cheese, I wanted to know. Cheese is definitely of animal origin, and, as my mum’s cheddar regularly demonstrated, positively eager to grow mould. Indeed, some of the finest cheese is mouldy by design. It’s true that the Chinese, who admit to fearing cheese even in its most benign form, would probably choose to die rather than eat a celery stick with stilton, but it would still be an optional, not involuntary, death.
She told me she would think about it and it would cost me £500 an hour plus travel. So I said I would stick to the empirical method, for now. We’re all still here. Watch this space.
