I usually have an assortment of condiment packets in my vehicle leftover from fast food drive-through visits that might have occurred within the last month or even the last year. I don’t eat fast food often, but I do appreciate neatly packaged flavor pods, and I like that the (often) teens working the drive-through window don’t tend to consider corporate earnings and so regularly toss you more than you can use.
The flavor packet in question might be mild or hot taco sauce, mayo, bbq sauce, or ketchup, depending on the fare. Right now there’s even an Arby’s Spicy Three Pepper Sauce I didn’t get to when I finished off a couple of Beef ’N Cheddars about two months ago. These sauces will sit there until newer sauces replace them, and the cycle will continue until I someday crash my truck and the medics arrive to find me covered in blood and exploded packets of what could be mistaken for blood.
Other than the added benefit of dying in a car wreck among an explosion of flavor, every once in a while you hear about someone who gets caught in a winter storm that is so bad it takes rescuers days to find them. The news will report that the person survived on only a few packets of ketchup or taco sauce and some snow, so I know I’m not alone in hoarding these freebies. Never mind that you can survive for days, even weeks without food. It’s a far more compelling story to say that a person was kept alive through the efforts of a heroic 5 calorie ketchup packet than that they just lamely sat around for days eating unflavored snow.
And so it’s not unusual for my vehicle to contain more condiments in the winter months than during the less inclement seasons, though I don’t believe this to be a conscious decision on my part. Rather, it is a manifestation of my dream to not only survive for several days stranded in a terrible blizzard, but to actually gain weight during the ordeal through condiment consumption alone.
Should I survive, I foresee many positive outcomes of this misadventure, including sponsorship deals with free tacos for life, recounting my ordeal on a variety of talk show appearances, and perhaps a documentary special, not unlike that mountain climbing guy who had to cut off his own arm to survive after getting stuck. I could be that kind of hero.
I’m not alone in my family in this endeavor either. Growing up, my mom would save packets of all kinds for financial reasons. Each extra packet was like a little investment in the family’s strained finances, the thinking being that every individually packaged squirt of taco sauce or ketchup was one less squirt from the primary ketchup savings account. Still, fast food was not something we did more than a few times a year since it was such an investment (there were 5 kids).
But my mom wouldn’t limit herself to fast food freebies. Around our kitchen were single-serve sugar packets, salt and pepper packets, and a never diminishing assortment of the finest single-serve jams and jellies that money did not buy. Where exactly it all came from, I have no idea, but mom had her ways.
I distinctly remember once eating at a buffet. This likely occurred on a Sunday, after we’d all been to church and cleaned our plate of the previous week’s sins. My parents would have naturally purchased 5 buffets for 7 of us, hoping that no one noticed some of the children were sharing. Not satisfied with plate thrift alone, before leaving my mom wrapped a breaded chicken breast in a napkin and dropped it in her purse for later, along with some butter and rolls. She would also have taken a handful of napkins, which could double as Kleenex or toilet paper in a pinch (paper towels were a luxury we never had).
Through these wise investments, my parents were one day able to at least partially assist most of us (well, the later two kids anyway) with college, or at least with a crappy car, and sometimes both (in all honesty, my parents have been extraordinarily generous to all of us, to their church, and to countless others, especially once they actually had some money).
Today, for this and other reasons, my siblings and I have varying relationships with food and thrift. At least one of us rejected thrift entirely, eating out often and spending money as quickly as it was earned, and often years in advance of that. On the other hand, I rarely eat out, but when I do I eat everything on my plate and everything on your plate as well, if you’ll let me, and I always take a few napkins for the road. You never know when you’re going to run out of toilet paper.
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