Spiritual Forum

Expiration Dates are Meaningless

We hate to break it to you, but expiration dates really don’t mean much. Sure, Cheez-Its will go stale and milk will go bad a certain number of weeks after packaging, but supermarket meat departments, where they do their own labeling, are generally left up to their own devices (30 states don’t regulate date labeling at all). This means that if an item is set to expire and it still looks okay, supermarkets are allowed to put a new label on, pushing the expiration date back by days or even more than a week. We suggest checking to see when the food first hit the shelf, if possible, or buying meat from a trusted butcher.

Read more [..]

(side note: FoodCity takes the already crawling-off-the-shelf meat, soaks it in hot sauce, repack it and sells it as: BBQ meat for your BBQ party, enjoy! no way of telling or tasting (for that matter) that the meat is just a little bit off, just a little bit green, and just a little bit smelly and slimy, and winks back at you when you poke it,  but hey, it was a good deal, just $1.99 a lbs...)

And if this doesn`t disturb you enough, read on just what they actually feed to us:

Mold, Salmonella, bacterias and other toxins in food IS OKAY!

It is just called: reconditioning! Fancy that(?)

Food companies are in the business to make money. They don’t like to waste food. So when the food they produce isn’t perfect or is mislabeled, or even contaminated, they try to transform it so they can sell it. This practice is called reconditioning. Food Poisoning Law blog [..]

In order to save money, some corporations will repackage older food into new packaging and resell it. One public school lunch supplier tried this with moldy apple sauce re-canned and was reprimanded to never try that “stunt” again.

The FDA was contacted by Snokist Growers of Yakima, Washington. This is just one group trying to ensure “reworking” food is not a normal practice.

“I was appalled that there were actually human beings that were OK with this,” said Kantha Shelke, a food scientist and spokeswoman for the Institute of Food Technologists. “This is a case of unsafe food. They are trying to salvage that to make a buck.”

Shockingly, Jay Cole, former federal inspector who works with the FDA Group, says, “Any food can be reconditioned.”

Perhaps pieces of pasta will be re-ground into semolina.

Mislabeled blueberry ice cream mixed with chocolate to avoid waste.

Insect parts discovered in cocoa beans.

Live bugs “left behind” in dried fruits packages.

Or salmonella bacteria found in hydrolyzed vegetable protein (HVP) which is a flavor enhancer used in gravy mix, snack foods, dairy products, spices and soups (just to name a few).

“This is how people do their business,” says Shelke.

The FDA allowed food producers like Basic Food Flavors, Inc (BFF) to recondition their recalled items in 2010 by heat-treating their products to remove salmonella. BFF then reprocessed the food and distributed them for sale to the public.

The FDA justifies this unsafe practice by stating that it reduces water and saves money. Yet this occurs at the expense of public safety and health.

If the processes approved by the FDA were redering food safe for consumption, there would be less of an issue.

The Snokist officials found that the process the FDA permitted as safe for the reconditioning of the applesauce rendered the food sterile and effectively worthless as a nutritional substance by a common toxin produced by the mold in the apple sauce.

                                                   Yummmmmmmmmmmmmm

The FDA stands by its thermal process even though it does not protect against mycotoxins in the food.

“Mold is not an easily reconditionable product,” says William Correll, the FDA’s acting director of compliance.

The FDA admits they expect a certain level of contaminants and toxins to enter food during the processing process because they claim a zero-tolerance policy would be too difficult to achieve.

The FDA relies on defect action levels to define how dangerous a contaminant is in the food and how much enforcement of their policies they should engage the manufacturer in. Basically, if making the food safe is too difficult, the FDA does not bother enforcing their safety policies.

Here are a few examples of allowable contaminants:

• In 8 ounces of macaroni there could be 225 insect fragments or 4.5 rodent hairs
• In 3.5 oz of canned mushrooms 20 or more maggots is ok
• In canned cranberry sauce there could be an average of 15% mold

The FDA finds these levels acceptable because there would be too much stress on food producers to adhere to a more stringent policy for food safety.

Correll plainly says, “You can’t cook the poop out of [food].”

The FDA begun the Reportable Food Registry in 2009 to handle the overwhelming notifications to human health hazards their relaxed policies produced.

The problems were hard to decipher with domestic food processing corporations, but foreign import food corporations added a cog in the wheel. These corporations generally go to greater lengths to preserve the safety of their food; more so than the FDA.

As it stands, the FDA reconditions food that we purchase in grocery stores.

There is no way to know what foods are genuine and which have been reconditioned.

Source

[...]

Unfortunately, some companies try to mix products that have higher contamination levels with a batch of the product with much lower levels. While that may make sense mathematically, that practice is illegal. The practice of reconditioning is untracked by the FDA.

So can you protect yourself and your family and avoid reconditioned food? It’s not really possible to avoid these foods if you buy and eat canned, jarred, and other processed foods. Be sure to cook all canned foods thoroughly; bring soups, sauces, and canned vegetables to the boiling point for at least 90 seconds. Try to avoid eating processed foods, or at least minimize your intake by eating more whole foods such as fresh produce. Always discard any product that has developed mold. And inform the grocery store manager if you see mold on any product for sale in the store.

Food Poisoning Law blog