Y Day

Today is Y Day

This means I am doing reasonably well.

I have been following a tradition of seeing how many yogurts can make it to the date printed on the top. I think yogurts usually may feel optimistic about getting to such a date (apparently yogurt is one of the most wasted foodstuffs in the UK), but in our household we hate waste so try to see the date coming and eat at the right Yogurt Rate, or Yr.

Where Yr = y / n

and y represents the remaining pots of yogurt (always an integer) and n is the number of days until Yogurt Day (also an integer for practical purposes and because as we all know food goes bad instantly at 00:00 on the Use By Date).

Say you have 4 yogurts and you have eight days to eat them. You will need to eat them at a rate of one every two days. But what will really happen is this. You buy 4 yogurts. It is nice having 4 whole yogurts in the fridge, so you do not touch them (similar principle to fruit, really). At the point where y = n (in this case, 4) you may notice that your Yr has become 1.0 and it is important to either eat one each day or share the yogurts. Do not share. It makes the whole thing far more complicated. Usually the sharee only has one and it ruins everything. So you eat 1.0 yogurt(s) and feel happy. The next day the Yr is also 1.0, but woe of woes, you find yourself too busy to eat your allotted yogurt and it gets delayed until the following day. Yr is now tending to > 1.0. You could of course at this point employ a willing sharee but you will find that they either are not allowed your yogurts, prefer ones with cartoons or just don’t want one and you are back to 3 yogurts left and 2 days to eat them. It would be silly to eat 3 in one go just to prove a point and be done with it, so you eat 1.0. You wonder about having 1.0 for breakfast and 1.0 later the next day, but at breakfast you are in a hurry and that doesn’t happen. You also start to wonder whether yogurts really do go bad at midnight, but we must not question the Use By Date. Scientists were involved, and the good bacteria might be having second thought(s).

So you end up with a tattered Yr and too many yogurts to eat when n = 0. It is far worse with children’s yogurts. They decide they do not eat yogurt at randomly spaced intervals and can eat between 0 and 4 yogurts a day between them. Other factors to consider include whether they were on such a good offer you bought 18 anyway, how to pretend a yogurt of any given colour (white with a hint of orange, pink or grey) may or may not be related to fruit of a similar shade pictured on the top (only on the top, mind) and which is in favour that given week. It also transpires food needing a spoon also affects Yr with infants, but not consistently. As a producer of milk myself I feel for the poor cows who produce pots and pots of this dairy delicacy with no thought to themselves, only to find a certain percentage is not needed. Perhaps we could genetically modify some cows to produce just the right number of yogurts per day for each household. Should anyone ever be able to work out what that is.