Have Leftovers Gone Bad?
On a cool spring day, you find yourself with a hankering for beef stew. There are many ways to eat this desired meal. You could go to the grocery store, purchase the ingredients, and assemble them at home. You could outsource all of that labor and simply order the dish at a restaurant. Or, like an increasing number of Americans, you could take the pre-portioned ingredients out of a meal-kit box and follow the printed instructions.
Some of the resulting plates will be better than others. Discerning palates might be able to tell them all apart, but that is hardly the most effective technique. The real differences appear in the hours and days after the meal—in the remaining stalks of celery moldering in the back of a vegetable crisper, or the pile of cardboard boxes waiting to be recycled, or the scraps of stew being repurposed. With apologies to the French politician and gastronome Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, you are what you
