How Old Is That Meat In Your Freezer?

Have you ever seen the TV show Hoarders on A & E TV?  It basically takes people with a fairly serious mental illness and trades them help from professionals if they allow cameras to film how crazy they are.  It is a somewhat disgusting show, but I watch it.  The best thing I get from watching the show is the feeling that I must get up and clean something out of my house right away and I always have some area in my house that could use some serious purging.

There are a couple of traits I have noticed over the years that many of the hoarders have in common besides the obvious trouble with throwing much of anything away.  One is that often have too many pets to remember and so when a cat goes missing amidst the piles of magazines and cabbage patch doll collections they don’t really miss it because one of the other 23 cats will keep the hoarder’s attention.

Another common trait is hoarders often have things in their freezers that have been there for decades.  Each Hoarder considers the freezer some magic box that can arrest all decay from any food put inside.  (I am not even going to discuss the contents of their refrigerators.)

If you have never worked in a commercial kitchen or taken a food safety course let me be the first to tell you that even food in the freezer has a “shelf life.”  So get up right now and go open the freezer and throw at least three things away.  Good items to start with are ice cream that is over two months old (if you have been able to keep ice cream that long, congratulations on your will power), bread or ground meet that is more than 3 months old, or here is one I hate, but bacon that is more than a month in the freezer needs to be disposed of.

I am guilty of filling my freezer full of food I have cooked too much of and then never gotten around to eating it.  It does not help that I have a child who hates leftovers; I tell her she was born in the wrong family.  I also have a freezer in the garage that tends to fill up with ice so I have to do a giant defrost and throw everything away all at once.

The TLC TV channel has a show called Extreme Couponing that practically celebrates hoarding just because these people have been able to get stuff for pennies on the dollar.  There is no way that a family will ever be able to eat 700 boxes of hamburger helper before they die of a coronary.

So I am committing to be more mindful of what I already have and try and use it before I purchase something new.  And if I find things that no one in my house is going to eat I am going to give it away while it is still good.

I’m going to the freezer now, and am thankful the garbage will be picked up in 36 hours.  What about you?