Yeah, but is it Safe?
A few years ago I remember reading (or maybe I heard someone talking about it) about a woman giving a lecture on stuff that’s “OK” or not. One of her examples involved thinking about your saliva, how it feels pretty good when you swish it around your mouth, it’s natural and ought to be there, but once you remove the saliva to a cup, it’s suddenly gross and you don’t want to have anything to do with it. All you did was move a teaspoon of liquid from your mouth to a cup and it became yucky and somehow unsanitary.
I’m reminded of this by a small pitcher of milk that is now in our fridge. Plagioclase’s mother has difficulty lifting gallon milk jugs, so I put some milk in a pitcher for her breakfast. This morning she didn’t use all of the milk, so I put the pitcher in the fridge.
Is the milk in the pitcher still acceptable? What if I added some milk from the jug which has been open in the fridge for 4 days, the jug which originally filled her pitcher?
Frankly, I don’t have my own answer for this. Part of me wants to throw out the leftover milk because it was on the table. Another part of me says “It was on the table for all of 5 minutes; it was out of refrigeration longer when I brought it home from the store.” A third part (which tends to agree with the second) says that milk is getting too expensive to just wash down the sink. However, the first part is really really strong, almost a half part!
But not quite half. Frugality wins today.
