Keeping Time

Late-August of 2008: photograph taken from a balcony 6 stories above shows a man pushing a cart of produce—cherries, cantaloupe, plums—down a street in Tripoli, Lebanon. The photo was exhumed from a forgotten CD in my uncle’s home, amongst dozens of other over-saturated, early-2000’s scenes of grape leaves, tabbouli, and an eleven-year old me pulled over on the side of the road, picking apples fresh from an orchard.

Late-October of 2025; the USDA official government website reads “The Radical Left Democrats shutdown the government. This government website will be updated periodically during the funding lapse for mission critical functions. President Trump has made it clear he wants to keep the government open and support those who feed, fuel, and clothe the American people.” Thirty days into the second longest government shutdown in U.S. history.

This same USDA tells us that leftover pizza has a life span of three to four days refrigerated. An opened package of hot dogs can survive one week refrigerated or one month frozen. If canned, meat can last up to five years.
But food used to be a tree in Lebanon, and I would smell its bark on my walk to my room. No barcode etched into its flesh. No date prompting us to eat. We knew how soon to finish food because we were all sitting together, and war makes us cherish the time we gather around this table as if it were our last.

Canned food emerged as military-grade equipment to withstand the duration of war under Napoleon— “an army marches on its stomach”—he famously coined, offering 12,000 francs to anyone who could come up with a food preservation system that would sustain the French troops. Decades after the invention of the can, the opener that we know today did not appear until 1926, when Charles Arthur Bunker filed for the patent of his stand-alone, rotary-wheel opener.

Around the same time, the League of Nations placed Lebanon under French military mandate; dictating amongst 19 other articles that “French and Arabic shall be the official languages of Syria and Lebanon.”

Ham’s life span varies by the ten different forms the USDA has outlined; if it is fresh, uncured, and uncooked you may refrigerate it for three to five days. But if it is canned, labeled “keep refrigerated”, and unopened, it can last in the fridge for six to nine months.

An average of six to nine months pass between each visit home, depending on the political situation. 9000 kilometers to reach apricots that go bad in two days time. The tree, Prunus armeniaca, takes five to eight years to produce fruit.

Our neighbor has a sweet habit of dropping a basket down from his balcony unannounced, each day filled with something new from the land—cherries, figs, apricots, and walnuts (along with the hammer to crack them open).

Canning fruit in a factory takes an average of an hour. The preserved fruit itself lasts up to two years.

Some U.S–style supermarkets have popped up, and they have started spraying pesticides instead of using ladybugs as natural pest control. But for the most part we still see the labor of our fruit; sometimes we find our neighbor scaling his apricot tree and we still order our groceries by shouting down from the balcony.

Early November of 2025, USDA’s official website reads, “Senate Democrats have voted 14 times against reopening the government. This compromises not only SNAP, but farm programs, food inspection, animal and plant disease protection, rural development, and protecting federal lands. Senate Democrats are withholding services to American people in exchange for healthcare for illegals, gender mutilation, and other unknown ‘leverage’ points.”

38 days into the longest government shutdown in U.S. history.
143 days since I have had an apricot.
730 days until my canned corn expires.

Man pushing cart of fresh produce; cantaloupe, cherries, plums. Tripoli, Lebanon