Cleaning out my fridge after Hurricane Irma got me thinking about two things: generators, and how fridges are like coaching staffs.

You buy a new fridge. You stock it with groceries. That fridge works great and you eat what looks good. You replace the items you eat.

And sometimes, those groceries nobody in your family wanted or remembered to eat will spoil and go to waste. Maybe you had planned to eat them, or thought your spouse or kids would. Stuff happens.

It doesn’t necessarily mean that the idea was bad at the time of purchase. We’ve all thought about making cauliflower rice at some point in an effort to be healthier, only to let it sit for a few weeks and go bad.

So you toss it out. You wipe down the shelf where it left some juice behind.

But what happens if you don’t notice the items rotting in the fridge?

Or what if you overvalue loyalty and stability so much that you’re in month eight of fridge ownership, have never, ever thrown out an item gone bad, and the only way items leave your fridge is if they get eaten? What if all the stale, moldy, rotten items are allowed to stay?

After a while, you will run out of shelf space. The items who have outlasted their expiration date are still there, piling up.

And worse yet, the moldy groceries begin to infect the remaining good items in the fridge. The whole fridge is at risk of becoming contaminated.

That’s gross. And whomever you’re serving your food to is not going to want it. Especially if they were aware that the issue existed the last time you hosted dinner. And their butts won’t be in the seats at your dinner table again until they’re sure the issue is fixed.

So what do you do? You grab the two or three items you’re sure aren’t contaminated, put them in a cooler so they don’t spoil, throw out everything that is questionable, and give the fridge a good bleaching.