Waste Not, Want Not; A Truly Great Man July 20, 2021July 19, 2021 We’ve all seen George shamed for eating an eclair out of the garbage. I’m with George. Waste not, want not. See, please: The lie of “expired” food and the disastrous truth of America’s food waste problem. I scoop red cups out of the recycling bin because (a) they currently recycle only #1 and #2 plastic out here and the red cups of song are #6; and (b) what are you, out of your mind? By which I mean, why on earth would you throw out a perfectly good cup that with a simple rinse is good as new? By far the best “recycling” is re-using. So Saturday, after editing the recycle bin, turning my attention to the trash and seeing a half-eaten deli-wrapped bacon, egg and cheddar sandwich winking at me, I did the only sensible thing and got some salt. Two bites in, Tyler came up from downstairs (it had been his), and issued a horrified, “What are you doing?!” I grinned, preparing to take my third bite. “There are ants in that!” “Oh, Andy,” Brian moaned, having followed Tyler up the stairs. I explained that I saw no ants and started to say something about all the insects we inadvertently eat (I’ve been reading Sex At Dawn, which mentions that the average American unknowingly eats one to two pounds of insect parts a year, while other humans enjoy popping live moths in their mouths and there is such a thing as urine beer) but Tyler interrupted to say he had left the uneaten part out in the sun and when he came back to it, there were ants and he threw it out. “If you’re hungry, we’ll buy you a sandwich,” Brian mocked, purposely missing the point. I was almost certain the ants had eaten their fill and moved on. Now it was my turn. But the peer pressure was too much — a crowd was beginning to form — and I dropped the sandwich back in the trash. I should have stood my ground. I’m glad Thurgood Marshall and his backers — and Louis Brandeis’s — stood their ground: . . . Not that Marshall was ever supposed to be on the Court of Appeals, any more than he was ever supposed to be a justice of the United States Supreme Court. Jim Crow’s protectors did everything in their power to keep both prizes from his grasp. To this day, the 1967 battle over Marshall’s confirmation to the Supreme Court remains one of the two most vicious in our history — the other being the 1916 fight over the nomination of Louis Brandeis, in which the opposition to the first Jewish justice included seven former heads of the American Bar Association, the president of Harvard and former U.S. Attorney General George Wickersham, who described Brandeis’s supporters as a “bunch of Hebrew uplifters.” But because there was no television — cameras were not introduced until 1987 — we engage in collective forgetting. . . . This past Sunday’s New York Times Magazine profile is so worth reading. A truly great man. (Thanks, Lev!)