MARK MY WORD: ATTACK THOSE FRIGHTFUL FRIDGES, OBLITERATE THOSE ODORS

When cleaning out the refrigerator, hand grenades are the best option.

Is your fridge a frightful sight? Is the odor enough to make you faint?

If you answered yes to these questions, you need to clean out your refrigerator, or at least don a gas mask.

Being Americans, we can't just clean out our refrigerators. We have to have an official day to do it.

That day is Wednesday -- the official Whirlpool Clean Out Your Refrigerator Day.

Those of you who don't have Whirlpools aren't obligated to obliterate those science projects that are taking shape on your leftover meat loaf.

But Whirlpool advises people not to be caught with unidentified shriveled objects in their icebox.

It's nice when corporate America takes such an interest in what's inside our refrigerators.

There's even a hotline number for people to call for advice about cleaning out the refrigerator.

For those who need it, the number is 1-888-Clean-Out.

You won't get the Pentagon. What you will get is a friendly refrigerator specialist, who will tell you exactly how to get out those stubborn odors that have given your fridge all the fragrance of a landfill.

I called one of these specialists. She told me there are five ways to get out odors.

It starts, she explained, with washing out the refrigerator with baking soda.

Really? All these years, I thought all you had to do was stick an open box of baking soda in the fridge.

What is the point in scrubbing it down when you are going to immediately restock the shelves with all that stale food?

If routine scrubbing doesn't work, the specialist recommends spreading activated charcoal on a cookie sheet and leaving it in the fridge for a couple of days.

This is the fish-tank charcoal, not the grill kind. You can use the barbecue kind, but only if you plan to incinerate your moldy meat, sending deadly smoke throughout your neighborhood.

The specialist told me that you also can put freshly ground coffee in a cereal bowl and leave it in the fridge.

Your icebox then will smell like a coffee shop. You won't even have to make coffee in the morning. Just reaching for the milk will give you a jolt.

If all else fails, the specialist advised, you should remove everything from the icebox and put crumpled up newspapers inside. Sprinkle water on the newspapers and close the door. The newspapers will soak up the odors as long as you previously didn't use it to line the bird cage.

It also might soak up the news, and leave you with frozen headlines. As a journalist, I don't like day-old news.

The refrigerator specialist, I learned, isn't the expert. If the specialist is stumped for an answer, she can call on the refrigerator expert.

The expert is a woman, I was informed. No surprise there. Men know how to make messes. We don't know how to clean them up.

This expert must practically live in the fridge. She knows what's growing on your refrigerator shelves and how to kill it.

Personally, I think hand grenades are the best option. However, it does have one drawback. It might take out some of your kid's artwork on the front of the refrigerator.

One woman, who handles refrigerator hotline calls, said people have found everything in their icebox from gym shoes to a forgotten frog that never made it to school to be dissected.

One lady called the hotline to report that her refrigerator was full of mold. She said she knew that mold was used in making penicillin. She wanted to know if there was a company that would buy her mold.

Unfortunately, for her, the Food and Drug Administration doesn't permit pharmaceutical companies to use refrigerator mold even if it comes from your grandmother's meat loaf.

The government doesn't want to see people turning into science projects.

The FDA should have thought of that years ago. Some people are already slime.

~Mark Bliss is a staff writer for the Southeast Missourian.