I put some leftovers in my common room fridge a few weeks back. Last weekend, I threw out a tupperware full of moldy food. It wasn’t that bad, I could have cleaned it out if I had the patience and stomach to do so and gone on with the rest of my life. Moore describes 13 ways of conceptualizing waste, but the three that fit this waste item best in my opinion are hazard, filth, and abject. As a hazard, this item poses a health risk to myself if I eat it, and if it spills, potentially contaminates an entire floor’s worth of food. If I try to clean out the box, then I run the risk of leaving even a grain of moldy rice in an already overflowing and foul-smelling common room sink. Thinking about this object as abject, I threw out the still functional Tupperware because no matter how many times I wash it out, its still going to be tainted by the mold, I’m not eating out of that thing, I’m not gonna be the Mold Girl. However, I think the most accurate way to conceptualize my reaction would be filth. The thing looked gross, food isn’t supposed to be a fuzzy shape of pale blue, and I knew that opening the box had a fifty/fifty chance of me puking at the smell if there was one. This wasn’t a logical reaction, I could have put on a mask put in a bare minimum of elbow grease and not thrown out a perfectly good Tupperware, but I’m not messing with decomposed food slime if I can help it.