Every once in a while, when I don’t feel like cooking from scratch, I’ll pick up a prepared entree from the grocery store and cook it up. I’m talking about pre-made hamburger patties with chopped spinach and bleu cheese in the mix, chicken breasts rubbed with spices, etc.
My wife raised the concern that the store prepares these entrees using older meat, and spices them up to cover any hint that they’re not necessarily fresh. Are there any Dopers with grocery store experience who can address this question? Am I buying food that’s close to turning?
(BTW, just to head off a likely side discussion: I know I can buy fully fresh ingredients and prepare them myself. I often do; just not always).
It’s been a long time, but the grocery store I worked in used fresh meat for the prepared (but not cooked) burgers, chicken, etc. that were sold at the meat counter.
The stuff that was sold at the deli counter already cooked, like meatloaves, noodle dishes, prepared salads, quiches, etc. were usually made from meats that were pulled off the shelves at closing time on the last (or next to last) day of sale, then cooked the next morning and the good parts of ‘imperfect’ (bruised, blemished) vegetables. So, nothing that had spoiled, just foods that could not be sold ‘as is’.
When we had a grocery we would use meat that was on its last day or a day past. But it still had to be good. No discoloration, no smell. The meat is still good, and it was better than marking it down or throwing it away. But it had to pass the test.
Most people judge a store by the quality of its perishables, so it is in no one’s interest to knowingly sell bad meat. (though I know some try to)
Plus, especially with big chains, if a store gets busted for something like this, the corporate office will come down on those involved even harder than the government.
The store I work in is very careful about the age of its foods.
The kitchen uses fresh meats and vegetables for all their stuff. IIRC, state law allows a week for the sell-by date on our prepared entrees; we use four days and check the case every day. We get mozzarella and a few other cheeses dated by the manufacturer, and pass those on to the fresh-salad area a few days before the sell-by. We keep a calendar of sell-by dates for our cheeses so we can check that too.
We used freshly ground hamburger for our “specialty burgers” like bleu cheese, etc, when I worked in the meat dept. Nothing old.
I once worked at a grocery store where we had a new guy take over as meat manager. He wanted me to rinse off old, smelly fish from the fresh fish case and freeze them in styrofoam packages. I went to the store manager on that one, and he pulled them. The new guy was gone in about a month, but I don’t know if that incident had anything to do with it.
A few years back there was a news program (20/20 or 60 minutes type) that did an expose on repackaging meat with later dates. One snippet I recall was they would imprint something on the styrofoam and then found it later, same meat, different date. This may have been around the time of the Food Lion problems.
This sort of expose probably fueled a million different rumors.