Eating On The Edge

Paul's recent pseudo-blog thread about food prices going up made me think harder about one of my current life hacks: buying food from 'salvage' stores. Also the health food store near me occasionally puts things like dairy products on sale when they are near expiring. Saving 50-75% on organic certified is nothing to sneeze at. I'm thankful for places like this since I've seen so much in our economic system where businesses will dump questionable products just to help prop up the price of remaining goods.

I'm also glad we still have a market for foods that do have expirations at all as profiteers continue to employ food "scientists" to create more "ultra"-processed/pasteurized, shelf stable "foods" with ever decreasing actual nutritional value.

But moving away from the nutritional abundance the wider society experienced in the 20th century calls for certain life skills that were more or less lost to the culture of refrigerants, supermarkets, and "safety" processing: detecting bad food with your senses.

A couple months ago I bought a pint of chocolate milk. It was organic, had the new coded milk buzzword on it (A2H2?), looking like a good excuse to sneak a little cane sugar treat while on the go. Only thing was it was like a month expired. But it is on the shelf at this store, and I sure know how spoiled milk smells and tastes, no mistaking that. When I was getting raw dairy, I would drink it for a day or two after it developed a slight unappealing aroma/taste, never noticed any ill effects.

So I drank it not really thinking too much about it because it was delicious. Then I had the stomach doing knots, feeling nauseous thing going on a little later. I'd had a bunch of other, more conspicuous 'junk' food as I was in the middle of a trip, so cut out sketchy stuff for a day and felt better. Next day took another few swigs of the milk, again tasting delicious, and again ending up with a gut biome attempting to secede from the tyrannical rule of the rest of my body. It was then I did a double take on the label and noted the "ultra-pasteurized" 'warning' on it.

I know the chocolate and sugar would distract from any off taste, but I've put moderately sour half n half in my coffee with maple syrup and cocoa mix and it ruins the normal enjoyment of it. My senses are fine tuned to such input, but my brain doesn't understand the confounding factors being introduced by a corrupt, profit-before-humans system.

When I read up on it I found out that ultra-pasteurization also destroys a great deal more of the nutrients that even regular pasteurization does. But the realization that it removes the signal present in milk that lets a consumer detect that the product is turning toxic is harrowing. Likely this is excused at a bureaucratic level by insisting any product used after the given date is a known risk, but what if a computer glitch or hack puts the wrong date on a batch of products, how many people would be poisoned before warnings could be widely issued? For the bureaucrats I guess this is just a case of breaking eggs to make omelets, but to anyone who relies on their senses to dictate their diet/health habits, this is turning a perfectly safe environment into a game of russian roulette.

So that is my question for this thread. I think most of us realize "expiration" dates are a marketing ploy to gain legal protections and stabilize ongoing demand for products by oversimplifying the hazards involved. But there are numerous situations where one would not be so willing to discard what is likely to be good food, whether it is a widespread social crisis or a simple homesteader making do with what is on hand. Is there a good, concise reference for learning how to distinguish good food vs. slightly off but still nutritious vs. toxic vs. poisonous?

In my own experiences, and I have lived to the age of 76, I have looked for the obvious.  I check for damage to the container, odor, texture, color, etc. Is the container as full as it is supposed to be? Is the food of a nature that I should be more suspicious of? Yes, my method is not foolproof, but it seems to have served me sufficiently.

I do have an added benefit food testing wise.  My wife has Trigeminal Neuralgia.  She is ultra sensitive to odors. If she says an odor is off, I don’t question her.