So, back on Friday, we hosted an American-style Thanksgiving dinner. Six people, but food for about 12 and leftovers on an epic scale.

(You never want to run out of food when hosting, and especially not when hosting Thanksgiving.)

And, being, usually, Old School proponents of not wasting perfectly good comestibles — this, in a country that throws away an astonishing amount of food — into the fridge it went.

Several pounds of turkey stripped off the bird’s carcass. More than a pint (but less than a quart) of giblet-based gravy. A couple of pounds of mashed potatoes. At least a pound of stuffing. A pound of cranberry sauce. A dozen dinner rolls. Half a plate of brownies. Half a pumpkin pie.

All of it duly wrapped in foil (it’s airtight, right?) and forced into crevices of the refrigerator … and there to pose questions and dilemmas as the time of the preparation of said food became increasingly an historical event.

When does consuming the remnants of a feast become just a plain ol’ bad idea?

It would be just amusing if it weren’t, you know, a potential health risk.

Too, some of this stuff is pretty heavy and caloric, and by eating it the next day … and the next day … and the next day … are we turning a one-day tribute to consumption into an ongoing gorging?

And we know things don’t last forever just because they are at 50 degrees Fahrenheit. At some point, leftovers become a potential source of illness.

Guidance from outside sources, People Who Know About These Things, seems mostly useless. Because they inevitably err on the side of caution.

Don’t want to be an expert who says, “Sure, your turkey should be fine, four days later” … when that expert knows full well that the variables of the storage situation, as well as the preparation before it, are unknowable and vary wildly from one situation to another.

One man’s reheated dinner is another’s invitation to violent illness.

So, today, Day 5 in the career of most of the Thanksgiving meal, we pretty much finished off the whole of it … without any regrets on the nausea side — though we should perhaps regret that episode of dipping salty turkey breast into congealed gravy (marvelous, as it was) by way of dinner last night.

The brownies always were going to disappear, and the pie also was quickly addressed.

The mound of turkey somehow was leveled, gone into microwave meals with cranberry sauce or included in little lunch sandwiches made with the dinner rolls. The stuffing was inhaled in one late-night salt-craving session and, tonight, even the mashed spuds, not quite separated into water and potato, made an appearance with some salmon.

And, at the moment, we have yet to succumb to illness.

But, it must be admitted, any sense of “not wasting” has been rather washed out by the growing sense of “this could be dangerous”.

Like, “Hmm, still tastes fine …”

Or so we hope is the case, in the coming hours.

Tomorrow, we go back to eating things prepped this week, not last. Thank goodness.