Guest Post Author Bio: The following are some thoughts along the lines of “Financial Pet Peeves”.  101 Centavos blogs about practical freedom, an unequal mix of personal finance, gardening, investing, career advice, cooking and yard sales.

Instead of just one pet peeve, I suppose I have a menagerie of peeves, a whole peevery.  Top of the list though, has just got to be throwing food away.

It’s not that big a deal, really.  It’s not much money, it doesn’t break the bank.  We could afford to double our food budget, and toss all kinds of food in the trash.

In all truthiness, I’m being a little whiny (or peevish).  We do do a pretty good job of recycling leftovers into new dishes.  White rice gets the fried rice treatment.  Chicken breasts into chicken salad or soup, and leftover vegetables into frittatas.

But that’s the whole point of having a peeve, isn’t it. Some niggly little thing that just totally sends trips into the barking mad zone.

Uncovering a forgotten plastic container in the back of the fridge, popping the stay-fresh lid and getting a waft of putridness. Could be leftover stew vegetables, in their cruddy jellied sauce, or a limp head of romaine lettuce, or ancient sauces and condiments in the side door .  But usually it’s the milk.

One look at the crust around the top the jug, confirmed by a look at the expiration date and and a tentative sniff at the open top (just to make sure), and that vein in the forehead starts pulsing, eyes squint and ….. Curses!!!

“ALL RIGHT!” goes the refrain “What’s the point of buying milk for cereal if it sits in the fridge making curds???!!”   “Why don’t we just TEAR those dollar bills up, and save us the trouble!”…..

I can just see twenty years or so down the road, and our kids sitting across from the therapist, with stuff like, yeah, and my dad just would just go nuts about the damn milk, and I didn’t even like milk anymore.

It doesn’t have to be rational. All I see is the better part of two bucks just swirling away down the drain. Never mind that I’ll blow that much at the snack machine, and probably more often that we find spoiled milk.

That’s not the point, is it?  Forget about starving kids in Biafra for a minute (a smart-ass rejoinder to Mom one evening, when prompted to clean my plate: “Oh yeah? Can we send it to them?  …… It didn’t end well).  It’s the idea of needless waste, like leaving your car idling while running into the store, or throwing away some implement or tool without trying to fix it first.  No out of control frugality or penny pinching.  Just waste.