The Food Auction

Does everyone else do this?

There’s a moment at the end of every getaway with friends that has become a dreaded, cherished tradition. After the floors have been swept and the beds have been stripped, we begin the onerous task of cleaning out the fridge, dragging half-eaten salads and poorly-wrapped chicken wings out of the fridge and onto the counter for the food auction.

The house we always go to belongs to a friend’s family. Over the years, we have become much more considerate house guests, ruining less property and leaving only untold quantities of capers and breadcrumbs in our wake. It took years to hone our methods for food purchasing and budgeting on vacations. But after a decade of almost-annual weekend trips away, we have settled on a method that works for us: add up the receipts; divide that amount by the number of people present; subtract that amount from money spent by the individual; figure out who owes money to whom.

It has taken me years to wrap my head around the way this works and thankfully, I’m not the one responsible for its calculations. Despite our best efforts to eat all the food we buy and leave no trace of our presence in the house, save some unopened beers in the fridge and a few bottles of wine as thanks, there is always food left over. Hence, the food auction.

It’s less an auction and more a sad garage sale. Loath to throw away perfectly good food and unable to leave the food at the house, what remains must be divided up. I’ve lucked out in the past: a bottle of wine, unopened; three fingers of rye and a couple of oranges; two bunches of shiny, organic and plump green onions. Other times, my resistance to the food auction has resulted in a sweaty hunk of cheese tucked into my bag against my will, discovered later halfway through the ride home, rifling through my bag looking for gum and wondering why it smells.

No one wants to waste food and to throw away leftovers or leave perfectly good and unopened bags of rice or jars of salsa feels silly. Part of the covenant we enter on a weekend like this is that all the food in the house is ours — we all spent a little too much money to buy it, and should therefore get our money’s worth. The food auction holds us accountable — for our excess, perhaps, but also so that we don’t leave a bigger mess that someone else will have to clean up.

This year, the food auction went without a hitch. Less an auction and more a quiet sorting thru, I came home with leftover pork tucked in an empty cocktail sauce container, a bottle of wine, and an onion, packed into a reusable shopping bag I had brought in part for this very reason. It’s always good to be prepared.

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