Shelf Life

This morning my wife pulled a new carton of strawberries from the refrigerator and opened it. She stood stark still, hands on hips, looking at the plump berries. Something is never right when a woman has both hands on her hips. Men learn that lesson the hard way!

They looked OK, except for a strange green alien that’d taken up residence. Mold. It happens, especially on things with a short shelf life. I think I heard the carton speak, “Gotcha again!” She musta heard it, too. She fed the garbage disposal strawberries for breakfast.

She muttered something unintelligible under her breath and then said, “I’m never buying any more fruit that’s 2 for 1. I’m always suspect when things are marked down. There’s no such thing as a bargain; there’s always a reason things are cheap!” Nothing a man says in these situations will benefit him. I just grunted.

But she had a point. There’s a reason for everything. The other night I was munching on some Pop ‘Ems, those tiny, powdered sugar donuts by Entenmanns’s. The milk ran out, saving me from eating the entire bag. I read the section of “Nutrition Facts,” which is an oxymoron (only morons would waste time in such useless endeavors). Their chemical compositions have little nutritional value…who with half a brain cell would believe such bunk?

The “Ingredients” section was ghastly. A chemist with a microscope is required to read and understand such small print. The bag contained no shelf-life date, which is not unusual, since the first ingredient was enriched bleached wheat flour. Clorox for dessert anyone? Such flour never dies…as far as I know these donuts might have been 50 years old. Even vermin won’t touch the stuff…it has no food value. That’s probably why rats are used in lab experiments in place of humans. They’re smarter!

There’re reasons for long shelf lives. Sooner or later some rube who can’t read will wander by, attracted by the virginal white donuts, and scarf ‘em up. Since they never perish, they’ll last into the next millennium.

Not all things with long shelf life are necessarily bad. FM 96.9 Jacksonville plays 93 minutes of uninterrupted classic rock music. We’d be poorer without the long shelf life of REM, Rolling Stones, Elvis and BB King. O Kings, live forever!

Do you suppose that these donuts could have radioactive half-lives? Uranium 238 has a half-life of 4.5 billion years! Carbon 14 has a half-life of 5,230 years. It’s used for dating archeological data. But Carbon 15 has a half-life of 2.5 seconds, about the same as my attention span. I once heard a landfill was excavated. Among the exhumation were hot dogs. Thanks to nitrite infusions, they’d remained in their original state for decades. Could hot dogs actually be radioactive isotopes?

Back to my wife’s comment about bargains. It reminded me of a story that’s popular among real estate circles. It’s had a pretty long shelf life itself, applicable in many diverse situations. I’ll pass it on.

Manny, a fish monger, bought a boatload of sardines for 10 cents a pound. He soon sold them to Abe for 20 cents a pound. Abe found Nat, who was looking for a bargain, and sold them to him for 30 cents a pound. Nat knew Hosmer was a bargain hound, so he sold the sardines to him for 40 cents a pound. Hosmer found Benny who owned a restaurant and sold him the same sardines for 50 cents a pound. Benny made plenty of money selling the sardines at retail to customers, except his customers got sick.

So the “bargain” came unwound. Benny, Hosmer, Nat and Abe demanded that Manny reimburse them for selling sardines with such a short shelf life. Manny, clearly schooled in the art of deception, said, “Boys, didn’t you know? Them sardines were for tradin’, not for eatin’.” Not a bad analogy for the financial messes we find ourselves in these days.

Well, you get the message. Like Mason once said to Dixon, “We’ve gotta draw the line somewhere.” I’ll conclude with this thought: Before you brag about your 2 for 1 bargain, remember my wife’s advice…”there’s always a reason things are cheap!” Caveat emptor, y’all.


Bud Hearn
July 15, 2010