Is this chicken safe to cook and eat?

Cafe Society
1

Hey everyone,

First off, I’m sorry if this is in the wrong place–I’m not sure if here or IMHO is a better place, since I’m kinda asking for advice.

So I bought some chicken a few weeks ago, and stuck it in the fridge. I semi-forgot that I had it (okay, completely forgot I had it :smack: ).

This morning, when I was trying to decide what to cook for breakfast, I found it, and thought “Oh…yeah. That.” Its sell-by date is listed as September 30th. Since today is October 12th, will transferring it to the freezer and cooking it later be all right? I just wanna make sure anyone who eats it isn’t gonna run into any, ah, issues.

(Yes. I am a college student, why do you ask?)

2

Hell no.

3

Again i quote DeNiro “If there is any doubt, there is no doubt”. Toss it.

4

And there’s less than no doubt for chicken you bought a few weeks ago.

5

How does it look/feel/smell?

6

I wouldn’t eat it. Surprised it hasn’t stunk up the entire fridge…

7

Hell no.

If you’re going to freeze something, you freeze it the day you buy it.

8

Probably about as safe as trying to cook and eat this one…

9

Me too. I highly recommend not breaking the seal on the package if you haven’t yet.

10

Given proper cooking equipment and care not too swallow bones, your only problem will be violent illness after cooking and eating the chicken.

11

Yup. Remember this rule: When in doubt, toss it out.

12

I’m fortunate, insofar as I live one block from a supermarket, but I really try not to buy raw meat more than a day before I plan on cooking it.

13

Funny how these sorts of questions only ever take one of two forms:

I left some meat unrefrigerated for 15 seconds while I sent a text. It’s going to kill me if I cook it, right?

or

I left meat out in the sun for umptybillion weeks and now it’s blue and furry and talking to me. I’m good to cook it, right?

14

Chicken is teeming with deadly poisons to begin with, so I’m told, and it turns bad notoriously quickly. I once bought a huge package of chicken wings, the next day I unwrapped, washed and trimmed them, put them in a tupperware container, drove 15 minutes to the boyfriend’s house and put them in the refrigerator. An hour later, ready to cook, took off the lid, and we were nearly knocked off our feet by the smell. So throw that chicken out, it hasn’t improved as time passed by.

15

Wrong question. If this has been in the fridge for “a few weeks”, the only question should be “do I throw it out now or wait until garbage collection day?” Chicken has a short shelf life when raw. Even refrigerated, a few days is about max.

16

In most of these “is it okay?” threads, I think people are being paranoid.
In this case? ! Hell no! Throw that out!

17

I would wait for garbage day.
You could also knit it an outfit and wait to see if it becomes sentient, I guess.

18

If it’s been vaccuum packed it will have a longer shelf life than if it was cut and wrapped by the store butcher, but I can’t imagine that even vac pak chicken two weeks past its best before date is still ok to eat.

19

My personal favorite was the person who wanted to know if the bottled water he opened the day before was still OK.

20

I’m very sensitive to things that might make me sick (probably too much so) and I just recently asked the butcher at my supermarket how long chicken would keep. He told me not to keep it longer than 5 days. So yeah, that clucker’s history. Toss it!

When thinking about things like this I always remember the quote from Linus in “Peanuts”: “I have no desire to be racked up by a bad cheesecake.”