I can’t believe I’m even asking this… but… my roommate is just plain crazy. I think.
Our fridge is on its way out. It is colder than the ambient temperature, but only just. Certainly not the 40 or 45 degrees necessary to store meat safely in a refrigerator.
So. She bought a huge hunk of beef not quite two weeks ago. It has stayed in the fridge. It’s like a big roast-thingie from which steaks etc. can be cut. I am not a frequent beef eater (the real guards keep chasing me away & won’t let me wear their hats! ho ho) so it’s been awhile since I looked at the thing. Last night, I thought I’d have a steak so I pulled it out and Lo! It was actually green. Not fuzzy, true enough, but very green. Also it stank to high heaven.
Long story short, my roommate, (who in point of fact has almost no sense of smell) insisted on keeping part of it. She cut off the outer 1/3 of it, the greenest part, and kept the inner part which still of course smells like “don’t eat me!”
I know you can do that with cheese. And I know she spent quite a bit of money on that roast. But for the love of Og, Dog, or the FSM, please tell her that it is NOT OKAY to eat that meat!!!
Though, it should be mentioned that some Irish butchers often claim that certain cuts of beef aren’t aged properly until they “have a beard”. The beard being mold.
They’re aged at around 35-37 degrees, or thereabouts.
Side issue here: check the fan on the fridge’s compressor coil. I had a fridge once that was doing that. I found a dessicated mouse caught in the fan blades. I pulled it out and the fridge started working fine again.
No, I did not take that as an opportunity to try mouse jerky.
Just thought I should add this:
If your roommate is going to buy large sections of beef like this in the future, She should break it down into smaller pieces, wrapped in butcher paper. Then, she should freeze what she isn’t going to use in the next week or so.
Seems to me that when she eats it she’ll get the education on food safety she presently lacks. Either that or you’'ll learn the diffreence between slightly tinged color & truly spoiled. Either way, Ignorance is Fought.
I’ve known two people who had no sense of smell, and it turns out that both of them had brain tumors. I know that sounds scary, but I’m just saying it could be the sign of a real problem. Especially since this person is seriously considering eating visibly rotten meat.
Frankly, I would not eat anything stored in that refrigerator that I would not eat stored in a cupboard.
By the way, if the circulator fan in the freezer compartment has failed, that can lead to premature icing of the coils, and reduce/block flow of cold air to the refrigerator compartment.
Some people just don’t smell very well. Two of my BIL’s are perfectly healthy, they just don’t have a good sense of smell/taste (hey, my eyes don’t work right, why not the nose?). I have known one of them to eat bread from a moldy loaf (hopefully a different part of the loaf) without even noticing.
