The other day, I broke out a bag of tortilla chips so that I could enjoy some leftover guacamole. Unfortunately, when I glanced in the bag, I was greeted with a most unwelcome sight: the full-size, dippable chips were gone, leaving behind a bleak layer of crumbs and chip fragments. Pieces that size are not big enough for dipping. You have to grab about ten at a time to get the essence of eating an actual chip, and there's no way of gracefully dipping them unless you submerge your fingers in the dip – an offense that's surely on par with double-dipping.
I'm always torn in situations like this, and I find myself having to make a tough decision. Part of me insists on finishing the bag. After all, it's still food, and I grew up with a mother who constantly decried wasting food by reminding me of all the starving kids in Africa. However, the other part of me knows that even those kids in Africa would look at the near-empty bag and say, "eh – not worth it."
It's especially frustrating when I know there's an unopened bag sitting in the pantry, filled with fresh, whole chips that lure me like a siren, ready to be dipped and enjoyed with reckless abandon. Why do I have to suffer the indignity of shoving handfuls of broken chips in my mouth or, to be even classier, pouring them down my throat directly from the bag?
This keep-or-toss dilemma is certainly not limited to just tortilla chips. It also applies to jarred condiments such as peanut butter or jelly. You always get to a point at which the jar is practically empty, but there's still just enough left clinging to the sides. You wind up scraping and digging, accumulating bit by bit, as if it were a precious commodity worth millions. Meanwhile, there's a back-up jar in the pantry that you can just dip your spoon in and scoop out heaps from with no effort.
Worse are the condiments that come in squeeze containers, such as ketchup (or catsup for people who insist on spelling it in a way that makes no sense whatsoever). For a while, you can squeeze stuff out in long streams. But as you reach the end of the container, it always comes out in short bursts, spraying blotches all over your food so that it resembles a crime scene. Why risk the explosion, which inevitably splatters ketchup on your clothes, confirming you as suspect number one?
Non-food items are also up for debate at times. Soap dispensers are particularly bothersome. The tube inside is never long enough to get all the soap out. Instead, you wind up with a small pool at the bottom. You keep pushing the pump over and over, willing the soap to jump up into the tube so you can get just one small drop, which is barely enough to create lather. Of course, you could always take the pump off and pour the remaining soap out, but that kind of defeats the purpose of having a pump in the first place.
Toothpaste is probably the worst offender. Trying to get the last drops of toothpaste involves a complex system of rolling, pushing, squeezing, twisting, turning, and – occasionally – crying. The easy solution is to just throw the near-empty tube away and break open a new tube that will give you all the toothpaste you need with barely a squeeze. But think of all those starving kids in Africa.
As for the tortilla chips, I wound up rooting through the bag to find the biggest chips that were left and getting as much guacamole as I could on each one – which was pretty much nothing. Then, so as not to waste food, I wound up eating approximately five pounds of chip shards. My mother would be so proud. My doctor... probably not as much.
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