Bread.

 

The smell itself had a powdery sweet reek that seemed to suggest mold – but I wasn’t sure.  It was Monday, and the fresh start of a new work week seemed like a good time to clean out the cabinet.

So I steeled myself.  As I peered into it’s dark recesses of the break room cupboard, two or three possibilities caught my eye: a nondescript, unmarked tin of something, a box of bran cereal, and a half-eaten loaf of bread.  I chose the bread.

The plastic bag was neatly twist tied, and the printing on the bag helpfully obscured the contents inside.  So I reached up and grabbed it to get a better look.  Perhaps this was the source, perhaps not...

The inch of bread crust visible through the bag was fairly innocuous.  It looked bread-ish enough.  Still, I was suspicious.  So I opened the bag to see what was inside.

To my surprise, it was not green, spotted or otherwise obviously moldy.  I was initially concerned that it didn’t look quite right, but the color of the bread was uniform – not brown bread, not white bread – just sort of tan. 

I had an immediate decision to make here: is this the normal state of the bread in question?  Without direct experience with this brand, I resorted to reading the label to see what I might be dealing with.  Hmmm….multigrain.  That’s distinctly unhelpful. 

I say to myself: “Multigrain bread can be a variety of colors – it can range from coarse brown to barely tan.”  Without any other options left to me, I decide to take a little whiff. 

That first bout of retching was very nearly unproductive.  It was more of a cough/spit thing than actual throwing up.  So I stood up from the trash can and took a deep breath to steady myself.  Wrong move.

Of course, the bag was open.  And the air was full of spores and nast.  So I caught my breath, and that did me in for real.  No more of this playing around…we mean business.  Full vomit.  Malt-O-meal, coming right up.

Now, if you’ve never tried to close a bread bag with a twist tie immediately after two waves of nausea, let me just mention that it can’t be done.  Plus I had to hold the bag up closer to my face than I was really comfortable with.  It wasn’t really working for me. 

So instead I decided to throw up again.  In retrospect, I don’t know if that was the best choice…but it seemed appropriate at the time.

With three bouts of nausea under my belt, I felt it was best in the end to just throw the whole bag of un-bread away and tie the garbage bag shut.  When I tried to untie it later, I found that I’d pulled the knot so tight that I couldn’t undo it.  Adrenaline is like that, I guess.

In the future, I think I won’t actually attempt to see if the thing I’m throwing away is the actual culprit…I’ll just start chucking ( no pun intended ) things and see if the smell starts to go away.