How old is that food I'm eating?

[greensinestro]

I've seen my share of stories on redating food and/or adulturating food. The other day, I took my kids to Chuck E Cheese's for a birthday party. The pizza was OK, but the cake had a cornbread texture to it. It was rough and did not taste fresh or moist, like it has been sitting around for a few days before they finally decided to serve it.

I told my father about that, and he told me about the time he went to a bakery down the street to buy my grandmother a birthday cake. He over the phone had ordered a chocolate cake with chocolate icing. They told him that was no problem, and it would be ready later on in the day. He bought it, then took it home to discover this was a white cake, not chocolate, and that they had frosted this cake with chocolate over already vanilla frosting! In other words, they found a slick way to get rid of this cake that had been sitting around a few days, and instead of money being wasted, they covered it up and made a profit on it.

These incidents remind me of the stories of grocery stores the redate their meat and other perishable foods. I don't like wasting food either, but if it's spoiled, I throw it out instead of deciding to become sick.

[BusBus]

Kinda reminds me of a visit that I made to my local Safeway a little while back. I went there one night to pick up a couple of things (it was probably somewhere around 9pm). I was checking out the packaged baked goods and noticed that they were all dated as being packed the next day! Cookies from the future

[Shironu-Akaineko]

I admit, we will date cookies and other hard confections for the next day when we're about to close. That's when they're all wrapped up snuggly in their boxes and we can't place them on the tables because, yes, it's too late.

Another thing we do is date a certain bread for 3 days, instead of for 1 day. The thing is, if we date it for 1 day (wrapped the 3rd, good till the 4th) Customers won't buy it. All our other breads are good for 3 days, just this one bread (who really honestly does NOT go rotten magically the next day).

The only way to sell it is to put it at the same date as the other breads. We had NO complaints of sudden bread rot.

Heck, we pick up all the leftover bread and replace it ANYWAY with fresh bread the next day!

When the supervisor of this bread company called, I told him we followed policy except for that and the reason why...he was okay with it!