I admire your fortitude in accepting that food that makes the dog vomit, but that she will not refuse to re-eat is not necessarily inedible. I admire it in much the same way that I might admire the impeccable French accent of someone claiming to be Napoleon, for example.
Bacon never expires … it only pines for the fjords.
Your arteries are ok with custard, but not bacon? I’d have a serious talk with them.
Arguably, that food is doubly edible.
It’s a sliding scale, to be sure. If she keeps it down but farts copiously, I wouldn’t serve it to company, for instance.
Oh no, they were wincing from the custard (which wasn’t that toxic… the recipe called for half-and-half and the closest I had was nonfat milk), and they were afraid the bacon would finish the job 
I used to get sick now and again with stomach ailments, like many people do from time to time.
Then one day I watched a report on a news show about food safety/spoilage and how common mild food poisoning is, and how its symptoms are often mistakenly attributed to a contagious illness. The report included a food safety expert doing bacteria counts on refrigerated food stored past the recommended amount of time. The results were startling. Cooked pasta stored for 7 days in the refrigerator had unsafe levels of bacteria, for example.
Now, I follow guidelines like these from the FDA, and I can’t remember the last time I got sick to my stomach.
If a food item is past the “use by” date, I throw it out. No exceptions.
My mantra with respect to food is: “When in doubt, throw it out.”
No old food item is worth getting sick, and you can’t always tell that food is spoiled just going by the smell.
I’d have to be starving before I ate a “grayish” slab of bacon. :eek:
Last two times I made French toast, I fried up some bacon first and re-used the same pan.
Old bacon never expires, it just slowly FDAs away.
All meat, even shot up with formaldehyde (corpses in coffins), will rot eventually if exposed to aerobic bacteria.
Bacon is no exception. If it smells vinegary, chuck that pig in the trash.
Your digestive system will thank you. Trust me.
If you can’t eat a whole pound before the expiration date, freeze it in usable portions. I freeze a pound separated into two portions. When I’m ready to cook, I just fry the frozen bacon slowly, until it can be separated.
Funky bacon is gross!
ooo, that sounds really good. I wonder If I’ve still got that sandwhich bread in the freezer.
Thanks!
I agree. I wish people would stop saying that food safety can be judged by appearance or smell - they simply are not reliable indicators, as some of the things that can make food stinky are harmless and some of the things that can make food harmful are not stinky.
As the OP started by saying
I got to wondering what happens to the rest of the bacon in the US?
I recently visited Florida and all you could get was streaky bacon, in the UK we have back, middle, streaky and possibly other varieties. What happens to the rest of the bacon in the US and the rest of the pig?
Those germ hunters on morning television shows and the like are a crock of shit. They find bacteria everywhere and yet for some reason no one is getting very sick. Now they are trying to blame an occasional tummy ache on it? If your immune system is so weak that these daily exposures are making you sick you either need to expose your system more to get it to adapt or live in a bubble. I’m of the opinion that there is such a thing as too sanitary.
If I’m not mistaken, we call back bacon “Canadian bacon.” (And we’re naturally suspicious of it for that reason :D;)). Seriously, though, it’s a niche product here. The only mass-market role for it that I know of is in the McDonald’s Egg McMuffin.
I don’t know what we do with that part of the pig. Presumably we’re not sending it to Canada. Perhaps we just eat it cooked as pork loin, rather than cured?
It wasn’t a morning TV show. It was either Dateline or 60 Minutes, FWIW.
Anyway, I’m well aware that bacteria is everywhere. However, there’s a difference between the typical bacteria you find on people’s hands, doorknobs, etc. and the bacteria present due to food spoilage. And the whole point of the show is that people get sick all the time; they just blame it on an illness instead of recurring mild food poisoning from eating spoiled food. As I said, I haven’t had a stomach ailment in years, and I rarely get sick. (I haven’t taken a sick day in well over a year.) I attribute this partly to throwing out old food, and not taking a chance with things like eating bacon a month past its “use by” date.
Dateline, 60 minutes and the like are really no different from the morning news programs. Occasionally 60 minutes goes old-style and does an in depth investigation, but most of their stuff is the usual alarmist crap. I’ll bet they never even bothered to interview dumpster divers for at least some counter point. No, they likely only interviewed alarmist doctors that think sterility is king. There are plenty that don’t agree.
You may attribute your lack of tummy aches to throwing away perfectly good food, but that doesn’t make it fact. Certainly, the fact that you haven’t taken a sick day due to a cold or flu is entirely unrelated. I have never in my life had food poisoning, and I break every hypochondriac rule in the book. So I counter you anecdote with mine. Yay for anecdotes!
Isn’t that odd, though? I mean, given that streaky bacon is the cheapest and probably unhealthiest kind? Oh hell, now I want bacon.
Tangent: doing a Saturday job as a schoolgirl in the 1970s, I sold various cheeses, pâtés, and types of bacon. One customer confused me by asking for “Irish Wiltshire”. Ahem, with respect, sir, WTF? :dubious:
Thanks for the reply. So it seems that streaky is all you can get in the US in general then.
As Celyn pointed out, this seems odd to those of us in the UK as streaky is generally considered bad for you on the whole.