Hey kids, wanna learn what signs of botulism look like?
Since the sell by date wasn't for another 4 days I returned them. I was checking out at the store and I was like "i'm not sure you want to take them out of the bag" and he did and a passing manager was just like "That looks like a bomb, I'm just gonna take it to the back" and was off like a shot.
Okay but seriously, if you have a package of food like this or especially if you have a can that is bulging like this, it is literally full of poison, do not open it and absolutely positively do not eat it under any circumstances.
Any food packaging that is bulging has to be considered unsafe to eat. A lot of people who might be living on their own for the first time don't know what that looks like, and this is a really, really extreme example, but yeah if the top of a can has become slightly domed from internal pressure that's going to kill you, don't eat it.
Can someone please explain how corporations are allowed to get away with trying to sell poisoned food in plain sight. Even if they weren't trying to (which is doubtful), how would this slip by unnoticed?
It didn't look like this in the store, it blew up about two weeks after I got it home.
Many people in the comments are talking about seeing packages like these in stores and telling employees, and many of the people in the comments are employees from stores who were instructed to weed packages like this and write them off as a loss. Some of the people in the notes are complaining that their managers told them to sell food like this and saying that they were able to escalate and get the food removed from the shelves, but honestly a lot of people - even people who work with food - don't know what a package of spoiled food looks like.
This isn't intentional, it's not something that most stores or food packagers try to do on purpose, it's simply food that went bad for one reason or another; perhaps there was a tiny pinhole in the packaging, perhaps it reached too high a temperature for too long because it was on the outside edge of the box when it was being unloaded from the refrigerated shipping truck.
Sometimes packages will go bad when they are on store shelves or when they are in transit; stores are not supposed to sell these items when they are visibly bad, and employees who are well trained from stores that have good policies will replace the item, just as a clothing store shouldn't sell you a shirt with a dye pack stain on it.
Another example: a few weeks ago I bought a carton of heavy cream from the store. I had it in my house for two days and when I opened it, I realized there was mold on the lid of the carton. So I took it back to the store and exchanged it for another carton. When I got that carton home, I took of the sealed, tamper-proof cap and could see mold through the pull-tab lid so I opened it slightly to confirm, then went right back to the store. An employee asked me if I had taken both packages of cream from the same box on the shelf, then went back with me to check. I opened the tamper proof cap on one carton and showed her the same mold through the pull tab, she opened another and saw the same. I took a carton out of the other box, opened the tamper-proof cap, saw nothing, and opened the pull tab to be sure - that one was fine, so that's the one I took home and the employee took the entire case of cartons off the shelf so that nobody else would get a moldy carton.
Another example: I used to get morning glory muffins from Trader Joe's because they were made with ingredients i'm not allergic to. I would buy three boxes at a time and store them in my fridge or freezer at home. I had to store them in the fridge or freezer, because they would get moldy very quickly because of the moisture and sugar content of the muffins. Trader Joe's only carried those muffins for a few months because they went bad so quickly. I remember going into the store several times and finding two or three boxes with mold visible on some of the muffins, and handing off those boxes to employees to be safely disposed of.
This kind of waste is planned into the business model of grocery retailers; they know that sometimes the food they order will be damaged or go bad in transit, or will sit on shelves too long and go off.
Stores don't want you to eat bad food and get sick because that opens them up to potential liability. If you get food from a store that goes bad within its best-by date, or if you see food on a shelf at a store that has gone bad, inform an employee and if you have purchased the food, return or exchange it for a package that hasn't gone bad.
The takeaways from this should be the following:
- Learn to recognize what spoiled food looks like and smells like so that you do not eat spoiled food.
- Food - packaged and fresh, processed or natural, organic or otherwise - goes bad for a variety of reasons through a variety of processes. Learn safe food handling practices to limit your risk of consuming unsafe food.
- If you find spoiled food at a store, or if you find a package of food that is leaking or has a hole in it, or if you find frozen food that has a thick crust of ice on it, inform an employee and ask them to remove it from the shelves. Ask to speak to a manager about it if you have to. (Food that has a thick crust of ice on it has been thawed and refrozen - it has likely gotten to a temperature that is unsafe for storage and should be discarded)
- Do not eat spoiled food. It is not safe to eat spoiled food. Even if you cook it and kill the bacteria in food that has gone bad, there may be poisons left behind by the bacteria that can kill you. Spoiled food is not ever safe to eat and it is not "just" going to give you indigestion - eating food that has gone bad is dangerous and can kill you. Don't do it.
