I've never met an expiration date I didn't like.

This morning I rose very early to finish homework I was too tired to do last night.  I saw responses about the message I sent out about the claim of one-unit credit for attending one hour of a teach-in. (As I suspected, it's not true, and it's the kind of mis-information that could shut us down as an institution.  I'll think twice before I let student "activists" into my classroom again, but I'll stress this with my students as an example of questioning what we hear.)  I now have 1142 unread messages.  Yes, I worked a little bit on my collage for the eleventh anniversary of the Club T-M.  But most of my time was really spent doing my teacher's homework.  I typed up their phone messages and credited them, and then I created a problem-solving exercise to get them figuring out how to get ALL students to do their assignments, specifically the one about the interview on music.  I responded to late papers, most of which were carelessly done.

Then when I was ready to go back to bed just to nap for an hour, I saw the headline on today's newspaper:  "America wasting masses of food/Misleading 'use by' dates mean we toss good items."  This came an the perfect moment because I was just about to discard the food in cans I'd originally given to Luz, the woman who helps me clean (which means that she does it all).  I felt bad about putting recyclable cans in the garbage, so I was thinking of emptying the cans, rinsing them out, and putting the expired food in the compost.  Another reason this headline is timely is that my ESL 140 class is writing an essay on the newsworthy reports and sensationalist reporting distracts us from.  I think this information on food waste is very important.


The report estimated the value of food tossed away at $165 billion a year, and the methane released from the good food that is thrown into landfills is a major environmental problems.  There are so many other facts in this report.  But if I include the link, it may be available only to SF Chronicle subscribers.  Still, here it is:

http://www.sfgate.com/science/article/Masses-of-food-wasted-use-by-dates-mislead-4825974.php

 The article is by Carolyn Lochhead.