Shop ‘Til You Drop (Don’t)

Posted on December 6, 2014 by dcarmack

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If you are like me, there is hardly a day all year that you would go shopping all day long. Every year, though, there is usually one day, during the Jesus’ Birthday Season that I will spend a day trying to get it all done at once. A day like that can really throw your normal eating schedule into a storm.

If you plan your shopping day out, there really isn’t any reason that your diet has to take a day off. Spending a day at the mall is only different from spending a day at work in that you will be tempted by all of the fast-food and snack eateries that surround you during your shopping day. Avoiding ad hoc or impulse eating is the entire goal of your meal plan for the day.

First, you need to eat breakfast, some kind of breakfast, or you are lost right out of the gate. The best thing for me is one piece of whole fruit, unpeeled, two eggs cooked hard and either home made Canadian Bacon or regular bacon. It’s not much food, but it is quick to make and holds me from 6 AM to noon on a regular workday. I drink coffee with breakfast, but water or tea would work just as well.. No sugar in anything but the fruit.

Lunch will be harder to plan for, like it always is. At work I heat up leftovers from a previous day’s dinner and that is not an option when out and about. Nothing at the mall qualifies as ‘non-processed’ foods. If I am really ambitious I can bring along a container of muesli to snack on, and a flask of water to wash it down, but that’s more to carry, and I will be honest, I wouldn’t do that. All I have a good chance of avoiding at lunch is sugar and industrially produced bread. No buns, no sweetened drinks. If I have a fast food taco I can eat the fillings and leave the shells, a double cheeseburger with all the fixings is a hamburger salad if you don’t eat the bun. These are just ideas, of course, and it’s only one meal. Give doing it different some thought, try it out.

Avoiding drinks on the road is pretty hard to do, too. You will get thirsty, you won’t have a canteen of water on you. If you are dedicated you might buy a big bottle of water, pay too much for it, and contribute to the plastics industry. We have to make choices, and all things considered, those crimes are less immediate than buying a big Coke from a fountain. There are drinking fountains at the mall, but who knows where? Maybe there is one by the bathroom. It’s probably going to be bottled water, in the best-case scenario.

If you go buy a coffee stand you are going to want some. All I can say is, don’t get anything fancy, you don’t want any whipped cream or flavored syrups, really. The coffee smells good, not the sweeteners. I like a mocha as much as the next guy, I love my starbucks anything, but I really just want a cup of what smells so good, and drinking it black or with cream only is enough to satisfy that craving. I swear.

So, anyway, use your holiday shopping spree as a chance to practice your ‘life on the road’ routine. If you have any better ideas, because you actually live the pure life on the road, please leave your advice in the comments for all of us!

Happy Holidays!

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Waste Away

Posted on December 5, 2014 by dcarmack

The number one food that we throw out is citrus. We have been storing it wrong. We put lemons and limes in the crisper drawer in the refrigerator, where they turn brown and leathery in very short order.

According to this site, we should store our citrus in the fridge, but in a bowl, loosely and not in a container that will concentrate the gasses that citrus gives off. Also, our citrus should not be stored with other vegetables, because it causes them to spoil more quickly. We are seeing that also. So storing our citrus wrong is leading to accelerated spoilage on all of our fresh vegetables. Since we are trying to convert our diet over to primarily fresh foods, increases spoilage in that area leads to added expense right where we don’t need it.

Just thought I would pass this on to you, if you find yourself in the same boat.

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What Price Decency?

Posted on December 4, 2014 by dcarmack

Today’s post is inspired by the movie embedded above. Five minutes spent on a tour with a Perdue Factory Farmer is all it takes to strengthen my resolve to not eat factory meats.

This week I purchased a naturally raised hog from a farm in the Topeka area of Kansas. I also purchase chickens from this farm that are raised in the way that nature intended. My chickens arrive frozen, dressed and sealed in a vacuum bag. They are not as large as the factory birds, which is not a bad thing. I may spend anywhere from seven to ten dollars on each chicken.

When you hear a number like that, ten dollars for a frozen chicken, you are tempted just as I am to think, “That’s expensive”. That reaction is from comparing real chicken to factory chicken only using the yardstick of dollars. Dollars are not really a good gauge of value, though. The market for chicken is tilted in the favor of the factory chicken because your tax dollars are keeping the price of artificial chicken feed and antibiotics for livestock at unnaturally low levels. Feeding corn and soy, along with ground up dead chickens and chicks to raise your food, gives you these same chemicals. Corn and soy contain Omega 6 and are a large part of why in the US we eat about ten times more Omega 6 essential oil than we should. Ideally, we would all have an Omega 6 to Omega 3 ratio of 1:1. Yours is about 10:1 if you eat factory meats, processed foods, sweetened drinks. Omega 6 is an inflammatory in your body, Omega 3 promotes your body to make good cholesterol and is good for you heart. Getting Omega 3 from animals that graze on grasses is how nature intends you get your Omega 3. Buying natural eggs, natural chicken, naturally raised beef and pork are the best ways to reform your essential oil balance. Doing it will cost more dollars every week at the grocer, or wherever you get your meat. Not doing it will lead you to high cholesterol, high blood pressure, heart disease.

When I look at the video of chickens raised with only one thing in mind, maximizing profit, I realize that the only thing I can do to make it not worth Perdue’s trouble to torture all of those animals for their whole lives is to not buy their product. Not buying their product will make them reform their production methods. Nothing else short of government intervention will do that job. Government is not going to intervene, it is going the exact opposite way.

The meat from a factory farm is dangerous to your health because it is not fed natural foods, it is fed sub-therapeutic doses of antibiotics which are passed on to you, because they are raised in filthy conditions that sometimes the meat is contaminated in the processing plants. Natural meats are good for you because you need the essential oil that only comes from animals eating grasses, they contain no antibiotics, the chances that their bowel will contain dangerous pathogens is very small, so the meat will not be contaminated. In my mind, these facts make the meats that I buy even more valuable to me than what I pay for them.

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Throw It Out World

Posted on December 3, 2014 by dcarmack

Did you ever wonder how much food got thrown away back in the day when you had to grow it yourself? If you had to toil away in your summer garden to make sure that you had enough food to last through the winter, I would bet that you never prepared more at a meal than you could eat, and that everything that wasn’t used was put to some other good use. Those days are long gone, and so is the knowledge that those ancient families had about how to store their foods without refrigeration.

It turns out that in the US we throw away enough food in a single day to completely fill the Rose Bowl Stadium. Half of all of that food is wasted in homes across the country, and the lion’s share of that food is perishable vegetables. Food waste tipped the scale at 35 million tons in 2012, the most recent year for which estimates are available. If you buy three tomatoes, chances are you will throw one of them away. If it were not for the refrigerator, we would throw away even more food. One of the advantages of processed foods is that they never really spoil, no matter how badly you treat them. Most of the mysterious chemicals listed on bagged and boxed foods is to make them ‘shelf stable’ meaning “lifeless and perpetual”.

A big part of getting off of the processed food suicide train is to learn how to obtain, store, preserve and prepare real foods without all of those chemical crutches. After all, when you eat foods with preservatives in them, you are eating preservatives. Recall that none of the ingredients in your foods have been through anything like a drug-trial to make sure that any adverse reactions to the ingredients are carefully documented. Whether or not your processed foods are safe for YOU to eat is your business, and your problem.

Therefore, it is important to me that I purchase higher-cost real foods for my dinner table. These foods are alive and will spoil if not treated properly or used in a timely fashion. It is up to me to find the best ways. Yay! I have access to the internet, and it turns out that our government is actually doing things to help me not waste so much food, for instance, This.

They compile statistics, like this…

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or this…

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Here is a site where you can teach yourself how to not waste so much food. It saves you time and money, and saves the world energy. These are all things that I would like to see more of in my world. It’s a really handy resource site, please go back and click that link! Bookmark it!

Most of the steps boil down to “pay attention to each step in the food purchasing process”–from your trip to the store and what to buy, to how to process vegetables when you get them home, to how best to store or preserve them. It’s best to do these things when veggies are plentiful and you can process a whole bunch at a time, but if you need to do little batches the fact that it’s not the most efficient way should not stop you from keeping food instead of tossing it. Here is a link to how to store foods, in an alphabetical list! It doesn’t get much easier than this to educate yourself on how to save your family valuable time or money! They also recommend tracking how much food you buy and how much that you throw away. It is a lot like tracking your money with a budget and an expense tracker, so that you can see where you are wasting money. If you don’t want to waste so much you really need to find out what you are wasting first.

Waste Not Want Not

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Preaching To The Converted

Posted on December 2, 2014 by dcarmack

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One of the hardest things to do, as a dad, mom, grandpa, or grandma, is to silently watch as your kids and grandkids make mistakes. Making mistakes and learning the hard way is sometimes the only way that lessons can truly make the impact that is life-changing. Sometimes our preaching and coaching falls on deaf ears until we get our audience at just the right moment. Myself, I smoked cigarettes until my Dad told me he had emphysema.  That was the right moment in my life to finally get me to the point that I knew that there was no better time to quit than immediately.

Now I have a twenty something that is staying at the house. He has been living ‘on his own’ in the US Navy now for almost six years. When he left home we were living the life that everyone else in our circle was living. I drank a twelve pack of Coke per week, at least, and drank a case of beer every week, too. We ate the average diet that included everything that I preach against these days. There was plenty of processed foods, sweet foods, starchy foods in our menu.

He is home for about a month, just before he is to get out of the Navy. He has been living on fast food, junk food–the typical diet for the single man. At my house he is eating candy, cakes, drinking energy drinks. Nothing I say can stop him from acting like that. I tell him all that sugar will get to him and he laughs the laugh of the invincible. He says he would probably keel over if he went a day without a Monster to get him through his busy life. Where do they get the idea that one has to have an artificial stimulant because their schedule is packed? People throughout history have maintained busy lives, and much more physical lives without the benefit of drinks that were just recently invented. The message is in the media, of course, and maybe from friends and colleagues.

As I watch him eat, play, sleep, I wonder how does a person teach someone at this stage in life how to feed him or herself properly? I know that he has a kitchen in his house in Hawaii, but I would be willing to bet that it never gets used, except for the microwave to heat up left over junk foods. I remember when I was single in my twenties, I cooked for just myself on a regular basis, and I ate out infrequently. I drank a lot of beer, smoked a lot of cigarettes, but I really didn’t eat nearly as unhealthy a diet as today’s kids do. It is hard to cook for one, but I would always cook for four and eat that same meal four times, until it was all gone. There was no need to cook every day, that way.

Amazingly, my son does not come from a family that eats out, or eats junk his whole life. The life he is living is not the life that he saw growing up. He is truly a product of convenience trumping all. The food he is eating is not better or better tasting than what I know that he knows how to cook, it is just easier. Maybe if he were to find a partner in life it would get better for the pair of them, but who knows? If his girlfriend is trained to convenience like he is then it may be many many years before they get to the point that they are worried that they are getting heavier, no matter what they eat.

So the answer is that I just don’t know how I can warn him about the poisons in his diet. Other than to tell him that sugar is an addictive substance, I don’t really know how to explain to him what an addiction is. He does not recoil automatically from something just because it is harmful and addictive. When your babies are babies you can tell them something dangerous is ‘hot’. That is enough to keep them away. Once they are men they have to find out what is hot for themselves and our warnings can serve as signposts for what to try next, instead.

On the up-side, there is a good chance that, because he has only been eating like a food-science-lab rat, living entirely on processed foods full of lab-created ingredients, for the last six years, that he hasn’t really done that much damage yet to his heart or liver. Maybe he doesn’t have that much adipose fat in his torso, at least it’s not yet too visible. I know that kids that eat like he does are obese by the time they are in middle school and the damage can be quick to come on, so maybe he is not in as bad shape as he will be in a few more years of the kind of abuse I have been witnessing for the last week.

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Don’t Clean Your Plate

Posted on December 1, 2014 by dcarmack

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If you eat out in the US, you should probably start training yourself immediately to ignore Mom’s advice from days of old to ‘clean your plate’. If you eat everything they bring you, not only will you be uncomfortable for hours after having overeaten, you will be risking your future health.

Every year the Center for Science in the Public Interest gives out awards for the most unhealthy meals found in chain restaurant menus from around the nation. You can read the details here. They warn us about meals at the Cheesecake Factory that clock in at 2500 calories. That would be more calories than a person should eat in a day and does not include the calories in a sweet drink or the ‘appetizer’ you may eat while you wait for your meal to arrive. I doubt that very many people actually eat all of one of these meals at a single sitting. I frequently get an entree and then take about half of it home for lunch the following day. I do get the appetizer, though, and sometimes a sweet Coke, and maybe a dessert to share with my sweetie after dinner. I may get 2000 calories from a restaurant meal, more often than not.

Calories aren’t everything, though. As I explained in a previous post, if a person wants to evaluate everything through the calorie lens, then some very healthful foods can look unhealthy. Fresh fruits and vegetables all contain lots of calories, and if you prepare them with a fat like butter they don’t become any less healthy, but they take on more calories.

All Calories Are Not Equal. Eating 3000 calories in a single meal is probably going to have lots of bad for you ingredients in it. The worst thing about the big Cheesecake Factory dinner, in my opinion, would not be the volume of food or the number of calories, but the quantity of unidentified artificial ingredients that it is sure to use. Any dinner at the Cheesecake Factory is bound to be just like opening a box or bag of processed food at home and eating that. Corporate America is not about anything but profit, and the big restaurant chains can’t return ‘value’ to their investors if they use actual foods, so they cut every corner that they can to do that.

I don’t eat at chain restaurants very often. When I do though, I don’t try to clean my plate, and take home everything that is more than I would normally eat, or I throw it away. The damage to the planet is far less significant than the damage to my health and wellness of trying to eat it all.

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Rear View Mirror

Posted on November 28, 2014 by dcarmack

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Ok, so you ate Thanksgiving dinner and everything else you could get your hands on yesterday. Great. Yesterday was a sin-free day for me, too. I ate junk food on the highway during a three hour drive down there and I had a Coke and junk food on the drive home.

I ate a very healthy Thanksgiving dinner of ham, turkey, mashed potatoes, stuffing, green bean casserole, and sweet potato casserole. I had two pieces of pumpkin pie. I didn’t drink anything with dinner and except for the Coke I had a Starbucks Latte drink and about five cups of coffee. Two of the cups of coffee where flavored with ‘sugar-free’ hazelnut coffee creamer.

That’s not bad at all, much better than I thought it would be. The only part that I feel bad about is the junk food on the way home. That happened to me because I ate dinner at noon and then didn’t eat anything but Pumpkin pie before we hit the road for home at eleven thirty.

Letting yourself be ‘one of the guys’ at a big family gathering is way better than being on a one-man crusade. Just realizing that diet and eating right are multiple day activities that require vigilance, not saint-like behavior is not only the best way to change your diet, but also the best way to sell your diet to loved ones. Setting at the holiday table with food-lust in your eyes, or preaching from your lofty ‘I’m the only one eating right’ perch is unconvincing in the extreme. How it works for me is family want to know why I look so good. How did I lose so much weight, when I’m obviously not on a diet.

When they ask, then I can tell them about no bagged or boxed foods–no artificial ingredients–no added sweeteners. I tell them about my blog here, I tell them about sugar addiction, I tell them everything they are ready to hear, but I don’t preach or try and sell anything. I let my weight loss and stress free Thanksgiving dinner do the selling.

You should try Christmas and New Year’s dinners not worrying about your one holiday meal. Enjoy everything that family lovingly brings to the community table but be ready to answer lots of questions about why you look and feel so much younger than your years.

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Food Politics

Posted on November 26, 2014 by dcarmack

There is a truth that a lot of people don’t talk about when they are talking about Democrats and Republicans–you can’t tell them apart by what they do or where they live. You can’t tell them apart by what they eat, either. I work in a union workplace and our union workforce is just about as evenly split between Democrats and Republicans as the neighborhoods we work in. The union supports Democrats in elections, of course, but the people in it go their own way at the ballot box. We have work in common.

Republicans tend to support businesses in legal matters, they don’t want regulations on pay or vacations because it would cost businesses either business or money. They tend to support businesses also when it comes to food issues. They are the main reason that food companies don’t have to put the percentage of daily allowance that sugar represents in foods on the nutrition label. They are the reason, primarily, that pizza is a perfectly good lunch food for kids, even if they eat that and only that at every lunch meal. They are the primary reason that our food system will not be curbed in it’s excesses, probably, in my lifetime.

The paradox is that people who vote Republican also eat the same foods that the rest of us do. They are fat like us and getting fatter because there is no reason for food companies to not put sugar in every bite of food we eat. It is cheap and tasty and addictive. I am quite sure that if tobacco companies could put nicotine in baby formula they would love to do it–for business reasons, to get the kids hooked on nicotine for life at an early age. They don’t because in a previous generation lots of laws got passed that were good for the people, and not good for business.

Food might just be an area of actual bipartisan cooperation between you and your opposite party neighbors. Maybe food is the area of our lives where we can agree that the market is not going to correct the problems that the profit motive is inserting into our food supply system. Profit is killing bees, killing people, heating up the planet, causing foods grown close to home to be raised and then shipped half way around the planet to satisfy that thirst for profit. Money is a poor indicator of value.

If a consensus could be formed among us as to what the proper role of government is in our food crisis, in our health crisis, in our world crisis of wasted energy, we could actually come together as a society and force the market to price in external costs like damage to bees, or excessive water usage. It might be time for us to get together and decide what those proper roles will be. Groups are forming in other areas of the nation to press OUR concerns, Left and Right, for the state of affairs in food. In this last election a non-profit group in Florida, Food Policy Action was instrumental in unseating an incumbent Republican whose main talking points in the campaign were food-related. Here is an article about the Food Policy Action efforts.

To bolster the case for giving food policy greater attention during political campaigns, Food Policy Action recently commissioned a poll in which it reportedly found that “voters care deeply about policy-related messages on nutrition assistance.” But the group has its work cut out for it when it comes to persuading the national parties: While Republicans appear committed to cutting food stamps, Democrats have by and large stayed away from the issue of hunger altogether. Graham has avoided hitting Southerland over his attempts to cut food stamps, and earlier this year President Obama signed bipartisan legislation that included substantial cuts to food stamps in certain states.

The political reality is that neither party will care about food issues or food policy until it is pretty obvious that we do. Food is an issue that we all should care deeply about. School lunches are an area that we all should care deeply about. Food safety is something that cuts across party lines and we can talk rationally about no matter who we voted for for President. It is different than climate change debates, because the evidence is undeniable, it is effecting us, right now.

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Home Made

Posted on November 25, 2014 by dcarmack

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There are lots of things that you might be used to buying in a box, bag or bottle for the big Thanksgiving meal. There may be a lot of things you don’t yet realize are really easy to make from scratch instead.

Making your own stuffing is probably one of the easiest things to do. Essentially, you dry out bread slices, or old rolls or any old bread you were almost about to throw away. Crush them with a rolling pin or in your food processor. Sauté some celery and onion, maybe some other vegetables, season with sage (it’s the stuffing spice) and garlic, salt and pepper. Two eggs to make it sticky, mix all that up and you have stuffing. Nice thing is this stuffing will only have the artificial ingredients in it that are in the bread you use. Not bad. Here is an actual recipe link.

Cranberry sauce is another thing that is so easy to make you will wonder why you haven’t always made your own. It’s really a cranberry jelly, because you make it just like you would a jelly. Remember that because there is no other reason that you don’t make all of your own jellies year round. Basically for this one you just put cranberries, water and sugar in a sauce pan. Boil it for about ten minutes, and let it cool. I’m not kidding, that is all there is to this one. Here is a recipe you can read, if you need one.

People actually buy canned ‘candied yams’ and heat them up as sweet potatoes. Actually making your own sweet potatoes is just as easy, plus it has the advantage of tasting five times better and you know just what is in it. Bake your sweet potatoes and peel them. Make a fragrant spiced syrup, using cinnamon and cloves, put the syrup on the chunked up potatoes, bake them to dry the sauce on. Done. Here is a recipe.

Don’t buy gravy in a pouch. Please. It is about the easiest thing in the world to make, and you can make it the day before Thanksgiving, just to make it even easier. Melt butter, sauté some onions, add flour and cook it a bit to brown it. The browner the flour gets, the more flour it takes to make thick gravy. Add chicken stock (or turkey if you have some) and stir until it just boils, at which time the sauce will thicken like magic. Let it cool, pour it in a mason jar and put it in the fridge. Before dinner warm it up, put your turkey drippings in it. It’s the best gravy you’ve had since Grandma’s–no imitation anything. Look at this recipe.

I bet you think it’s easier to make biscuits out of a biscuit roll than to make them from scratch. You are wrong. Add heavy cream to self rising flour. Cut the biscuits out using a glass. Bake them. Impress your friends. Here is the recipe proving it. I have made these in a dutch oven at the lake while tent camping.

Here is a great collection of other non-processed food recipes for your Thanksgiving feast. The media is completely filled with these great ideas for getting back in touch with the people who came before us. We don’t need to be eating foods only because they are convenient. They are full of mystery science lab creations. We can do it ourselves, and it’s really not that hard to do.

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It’s Just One Day

Posted on November 24, 2014 by dcarmack

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Here it comes–Thanksgiving, then Christmas and New Year’s. But each of those days is just one day. You can do anything for one day, food-wise, and it won’t really hurt you. I was going to go through a typical classic Thanksgiving dinner menu and figure out what are the worst things you can eat on that day and maybe give some suggestions on what to do differently. Then I decided not to.

Thanksgiving is a perfect day to talk about exceptional days. By an exceptional day, I mean that some days you are going to eat things that would kill you if you ate like that every day. The beauty of not eating out of boxes and bags at every meal, of not drinking sweetened liquids with every sip, is that on Thanksgiving and Christmas you can partake of that one day’s bounty and it doesn’t just add to the pile of poisons that you have eaten for the rest of the month.

However, if you are in charge of the meal–if it is at your house and guests are bringing food, too–then you can do some things to make it a better meal, nutrition-wise.

The bird, if you are going to find a turkey, can be the purest pasture-raised natural bird you can find and it will certainly be healthier eating than the industrial birds, but unless you know what you are doing, it won’t taste as good as one of those. The Butterball turkey that you can get fresh or frozen has already been pre-basted and brined. That means that it has had ‘ingredients’ injected into the breast meat and it has been soaked in salt water, so that the meat will retain moisture when you roast it and the meal will be savory and juicy when you eat. It tastes better because it’s brined. You can brine your fresh, organic, non-gmo, non antibiotic turkey, too, but you must plan ahead. I own a coleman cooler that perfectly fits my turkey, one gallon of premixed brine (just salt and water) and ice in plastic bags. It must be brined for a day for the salt to get into the breast meat, so all of that equipment is necessary. The ice keeping it cold must be zip locked because melting ice reduces the concentration of salt in the water, watering down your brine can actually take salt OUT of the meat. Not good eats. After brining, your natural bird will taste as good as the very best quality industrial bird. You can find detailed brining instructions at Morton Salt dot com.

The stuffing you eat with your turkey is also an area you can greatly improve upon. If you make your own the natural flavors will all be really natural, instead of the ‘natural’ flavors they list on your ingredients list for your Stovetop Stuffing or Pepperidge Farms stuffing mixes. Your spices will be pure, you won’t use MSG or sugar to enhance the flavor. If you use bread you actually made then your stuffing will be healthy compared to the boxed stuff, but it will still be lots of bread, but hey, “It’s just one day”.

Side dishes are going to be brought by guests at my house, so it’s a little like eating at a restaurant, just enjoy yourself. My side dishes will be fresh vegetables and fruits, cooked at home, nothing out of bags or boxes. If you make your own side dishes using that one simple guideline you will be doing your guests a favor for one day. Many of them will go right back to eating sugar and man-made science fiction ingredients the day after Thanksgiving, but for that one day they could just eat like they did when Grandma cooked the meal.

Desserts are going to be fatty and sweet, but if you create them out of real ingredients and make them yourself not using boxed or bagged mixes then you will be eating almost healthy desserts, and hey, it’s just one day. Sugar is the point in desserts and for centuries people have been eating them without getting type two diabetes at a young age doing it. Eating sugar is not a problem. Eating sugar in every bite you take day in and day out is a problem. Sugar is the kind of poison, like tobacco, that you can use infrequently and it will not hook you. Smoke a cigarette every day and you are hooked. Drink a Coke every day and you are hooked. Eat dessert and enjoy it for the treat it is meant to be–and you can give Thanks that you don’t eat like that at every meal.

The main problem with having Thanksgiving at your house is the leftovers. Leftover pies and cakes are dessert every day. Eating sugar every day or more than once a day is a potential problem, so you have to give them away. I take mine to work, where there are nine other old men that will eat up quite a huge collection of sweets in a single day. Leftovers that came out of boxes and bags are trash. Stuffings, rolls, breads are all trash unless I know where they came from. Home made can be turned into really great breadcrumbs for me. Industrial can’t be turned into anything but bird feed, pity the poor birds. Leftover vegetable dishes are valuable foods that deserve valuable refrigerator space. I will keep them until they mold and I will try to do them the honor of eating them. It helps if your guests carry some of the side dishes away, but usually Thanksgiving leaves me with a great deal of trash, eventually. But it’s just one day.

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