I have a friend with a bread delivery route. On a typical stop at a super market, he will bring in fresh dated bread, re-stock the shelves, and remove outdated items. The store gets credit for the unsold bread, and he absorbs the loss (good deal for the market).
My question involves the meat section in a super market. There is no way in hell that the store is going to sell all the meat they put out daily. What happens to the unsold stuff? Does their supplier, like the bread man, come and collect it, or, is it trashed?
You probably don’t want to know!!!:eek:
Seriously, I think I saw something on 20/20 or Dateline about repackaging old meat, but I don’t remember the details so I’ll wait and see if someone else here can fill us in.
I’m honestly amazed that more people don’t get sick from meat in the country though, whether it’s from the grocery store or restaurants. About 4 years ago I was doing a methods & standards time study for one of my consulting clients who was a major wholesale food provider for area restaurants. Over the course of 4 months I was in the kitchens of about 150 different restaurants in south eastern Wisconsin! I’m still shocked at what I saw in about 25% of them. Unbelievable!
Many markets I have been to put a discount sticker on meat that reaches its sell-by date. If the sell-by date is 12/17, then on 12/17 you get it for $2 off (or whatever) . I’ll wager very little meat gets disposed of at a loss, by any means.
They are normally discounted the last 2 days or so and sold.
Well, we’ve had a billion or so years to evolve immune systems, and only benefited from mechanical refrigeration for the last hundred or so.
That’s just me speculating, though. Feel free to take it with a grain of salt.
Very little meat is tossed in most supermarkets. They move it out in several ways:
- as it nears the sell-by date, it goes on sale.
- when it reaches the sell-by date, many stores have informal arrangements with a local volume user (restaurants, school hot-lunch programs, nursing homes, etc.) and will call them and offer it a heavily-discounted prices.
- many stores have internal delis; meat that has reached its sell-by date can be used to make deli items. Once it’s cooked, it will last several more days.
Meat products are first discounted up to the code date, then discarded into plastic barrels designated for renderers, along with the trim (pieces ‘trimmed’ off to make your steak or roast look nice in the package) and any fat removed during in-store processing. Trucks come and retrieve the barrels every few days. They’re affectionately called ‘honey trucks’ and a few other sobriquets not fit for print. Don’t get behind one on the highway in July, says I…
t-bon raises a valid point; some chains may indeed have these informal agreements. Larger chains *usually don’t, due to liability issues.
Maybe. Of course, that doesn’t mean we should be careless. I saw several restaurants that kept raw chicken on the floor in the kitchen for hours. I saw people using the same knife to cut watermelon for the salad bar that they had used to cut said chicken, without so much as a rinse off! One of the places had a little girl die of E-coli because of that!!! I saw people smoke with long ash hanging from their cigarette as they prepared food! BLECH!
Then I saw kitchens where the staff wore rubber gloves all the time, hairnets, even face masks, and everything was clean as could be, with fresh utensils for every kind of food cutting, and nothing stored on the floor on on benches.
A billions of evolution or not, I’ll take the clean kitchen any day for my food to be prepared in!
pkbites, as one who has also experienced restaurants ‘behind the scenes’, I sadly concur. There are truly excellent operations out there, but they seem to be a bit scarcer these days. I dine out rarely. I’d love to, but I know better. One can only dodge those intestinal bullets so many times…
In the case of perishable goods on ‘sale-or-return’ supply, actual physical return of the unsold items is often replaced by what would be described as an ‘honour’ system (if such thing as honour actually existed in the arena of large corporate buying department) - credit is claimed for unsold items that have already been destroyed, because they are perishable. That the supplier has to trust the retailer to be honest about the volume of such credit is built into the terms, either in writing or simply as a de facto aspect of the operation of the supply process.
Old meat can also be wiped with vinegar and then ground into mince and then be put out for another couple of days. All the more reason to go to a full service butcher and ask for mince ground from individual steaks.
I most often shop at a Woolworths supermarket, on my way home from work. Their routine of discounting meat obviously relates to delivery days. On Tuesdays they have chicken products discounted, Wednesdays its processed stuff - sausages, risolles, hamburger patties, Thursdays lamb and beef roasts, Friday marinated chicken, ribs, pork roasts. Usually they are half price or less and have to be used within 2 days. Last Friday they had whole marinated Thai Green Curry split chickens for $1.99.
Over the last few months, having caught on to the routine, I buy the discounted stuff 90% of the time.
I may be lucky because they are open late every night and I drop in after work. Whenever I have left work earlier and dropped in, say before 5pm, there have been fewer discounts.
I have a friend whose family owns a small grocery store (an endangered speiceis here in the US in tha age of Mega Marts.) When their meat hits its expiration date, they just take it home and eat it themselves!
Doesn’t matter.
As long as it goes above 70% centigrade for about 10 minutes, it kills everything. You could wipe your arse with a chicken and then eat it afterwards - as long as it goes above 70% centrigrade for 10 minutes, you’ll be ok.
Obviously keeping boxes of chicken on the floor for too long is not recommended but it has no particular health implications (in terms of bacteria) as long as it’s cooked after.
The only bug that is good at surviving high temperatures is cholera. But if cholera was around, everyone would have it. And that’s more of a river disease than a chicken disease anyway.
'scuse me! you could wipe your arse with a chicken and then eat it afterwards and I’ll be OK? :rolleyes:
I don’t bloody think so my friend, my arse after a dump is swarming with God knows how many little nasty buggers (germs that is :eek: ) that to consume these said buggers would do my system no good at all even when chicken was cooked.
Dead bacteria can’t hurt you. All fresh meat is covered with bacteria, you kill it by cooking it.
You could eat a whole cake made out of dead bacteria and it might taste a little - zingy - but it won’t do you any harm.
The point of Jojo’s post was that cooking kills all the germs. That’s not to say I’d be willing to eat chicken after you or anybody else has wiped their arse with it, but that’s purely because of the ick factor. As long as it had been cooked properly, it wouldn’t make me sick.
Now that being said, what would really concern me out of the things mentioned in pkbites’s post is the use of knives that had been used to cut raw meat to then cut food that doesn’t get cooked. I’m careful almost to the point of paranoia about keeping meat separate from things that I eat raw in my kitchen and even in my shopping cart at the grocery store. Because, quite frankly, as cool as it was learning all about E. coli and salmonella at school, I’d prefer not to experience them firsthand if I can avoid it.
I missed the 70 degrees thing… :smack: :smack:
I’ll get my coat
This is untrue in that it is incomplete; live bacteria are only part of the picture - some bacteria produce heat-resistant toxins.