Foodstuff Friday: theft & mold in the workplace fridge

Do NOT steal your co-worker's lunch!

Please be advised:

Refrigerators on the 8th and 9th Floors will be cleaned

EVERY Thursday at 3 p.m. 

Refrigerators on the 6th and 7th Floors will be cleaned 

EVERY Friday at 3 p.m.

All food left in this refrigerator will be thrown out.

Your mother won't clean up for you here!

On this Foodstuff Friday we ask you remember the unfood—carbon- and/or chemical-based edibles that will, if opened, grow weary of life as they know it and express same by becoming green as tea that isn't green.

And that is far worse than a missing lunch. But a missing lunch is, like the heartbreak of psoriasis, a suffering individual and bitter.

Throw it out, my lovelies.  Be brave. The half-eaten take-out container of Mui Shui Pork with one cold pancake? That tray of cold cuts with one limp celery stalk and greenish deli turkey no one wants to toss because doing so might seem ungrateful, having been expensed by the company in honor of the monthly birthday party?

The apple, the cucumber, even the orange that eventually implodes to look like a shy teenager at a dance or grow fuzzy as an adolescent male’s beard of one week?

They are not precious. They do not belong in your Smithsonian of a work-refrigerator. They will not feed the poor in your city, your state, your country, around the globe, magically, while growing more and more distasteful on the shelves in the dark. They will do no more than disgust the designated hitter of the kitchen—the canteen crew restocking coffee supplies on each floor, the cleaning lady, the office manager. And in high school faculty lounges, well, God help us all.