Make New Food, and Trash the Old. One Is Silver and the Other's Mold.

Scratch that. Toss the new as well.

I'm sure there's no way in hell this will surprise you, but I also have a...a Thing about old food.

• If I don't know how long something has been sitting in my fridge, I toss it. No matter what. No exceptions. It could look and smell fresh, and it could be something that's not particularly dangerous to eat if it's old, but if I do not know how long it's been opened, I toss it.
• If something with no listed expiration date has been sitting in my fridge for over about four days, I toss it.
• If something with a best-by date has been sitting in my fridge past the best-by date, I toss if, even though that's not a use-by date, merely a best-by date.
• If it's got beans or rice in it, I toss it with a Quickness. Both beans and rice go dangerously bad, quickly.
• If cheese gets white spots or moldy spots, oh honey, that shit is GONE. I know a lot of people just cut off the mold, but eff that in the goat ass. I do not cut mold off of food.
• If it's milk and it has even the barest hint of being sour, down the sink it goes. My husband will drink milk that's moments away from curdling, but I have a fierce sense of smell, and I always sniff milk before using it, and I can smell when it's one hour off.

• Same with bread. Before using any bread or feeding it to my young, I first sniff it. I can smell bread mold like nobody's bidness. As mentioned, I have a keen olfactory system and am particularly sensitive to that sour, moldy smell of bread that's gone off. If it smells OK, I then check every inch of every slice, looking for furry white spots. I inspect every inch of it, front and back, corner to corner, then give it a pass or fail grade. If anything seems remotely wrong, it's in the trash and mommy can't make toast that day.

PASS!!

FAIL!!

I am just basically a really, really extremely overzealous food thrower-awayer. I waste so much food it's tragic. I feel guilty about it, not to mention it's not very good for the budget, but at the same time, the last thing I want to do is ingest salsa spotty with mold or rank mayonnaise or V8 Spicy Hot past its prime or Chicken a la Staphylococcus Aureus.

As mentioned, I know that some people will take a brick of molding cheese and cut a hunk off and call it good, which I understand isn't all that uncommon, but worse yet, some will cut off the moldy hunk of bread and eat the rest, without regard to the fact that the spores have spindly, feathery, moldy fingers that reach much farther into the soft, soft bread where you cannot see yet, and this I will not stand for. I WILL NOT STAND FOR IT! 

What is terribly amusing and unexpected is that the two foods I will use quite a long time after their sell-by date are eggs and yogurt, two foods that most people would be like, "TOSS THAT SHIT WITH A QUICKNESS!" Both actually last a very long time, weeks after their sell-by date, and I have no problem consuming some delicious Yoplait on October 19 if it has a sell-by date of October 1. Mmm Yoplait.

And eggs are good quite awhile past their sell-by date as well. We're talking a month or more. I am totally down with eating old eggs. But old bread? No thank you ma'am. Old juice? No way Jose Eber. Old something else? Shove it up your bum-bum.

So with only a few exceptions, basically I let so much food go to waste it's a tragedy. I'm sure most of it is still edible, but I can't deal. I can't deal with the idea that there are invisible mold spores that I might be consuming, whereas someone else might be all, "Oooh, free penicillin. Awesome."

What's your take? Are you a mold-cutter-offer? Do you eat moldy cheese or do you TOSS THAT SHIT SO FAST?