Common Food Abuses

[Baraka_Guru]

Every so often I think of the abuses some people thrust onto perfectly good food, but I only thought of making a thread about it now.

This morning I opened up a tin of Tim Hortons "fine ground" coffee. It's a 13 oz. can (the better part of a pound). I looked at all that coffee and thought, "Oh, man...that's a lot of coffee. Too bad it's already ground."

You see, I normally grind my coffee and use it the same day, if not the next day. I try to use my beans within two weeks. The can of Timmy's was a gift from a student that my SO received (she doesn't drink coffee), and so that's the only reason why we have it.

I declare pre-ground coffee as a severe case of food abuse. You can't do much to store it long-term. Freezing it will still have its problems, and it will go stale. If you can vacuum-seal it, it might work, but that isn't quite convenient. Refrigerating it is right out. It's the worst thing you can do to coffee. Room temperature? Same thing as freezing it: it will go stale in a few days. I'll drink it anyway; coffee is coffee. I'm just wondering whether I'm going to freeze it or not.

Below, is a short list of food abuses I have witnessed in my life:

• Pre-ground coffee (it's like cracking an egg, or slicing an apple...once you do it....)
• Ketchup on eggs (if you don't like the taste of eggs, don't eat them)
• Commercial fruit juice with sugar added (um...fruit has plenty of its own sugar, and they taste pretty good; it's often difficult to find fruit juice with no sugar added)
• Cooking a steak past medium-well (well done is for hamburgers)
• Adding anything to flavour green tea (there must be a god displeased by this somewhere....)
• Using salt and/or butter/margarine as the primary flavouring added to vegetables (do you have any idea how many herbs and spices are on this planet?)
• Boiling vegetables (um, hello? steam power? hot grills? baking? roasting?)

What abuses have you witnessed?