I couldn’t resist. Shopping for kefir, I found a bottle two weeks past its sell-by date. Being the only person in the world who believes expired food is better than non-expired food, I thought it would be fun to see if I could get a discount. After all, it’s going to be thrown away.
Nope. “I’d rather not sell it to you,” said the store manager. “We can get a refund for these.” He apologized, took it, and I had to buy a non-expired bottle.
Seth, if your theory about fermented foods is correct, you might also consider what washing the skin with soap could do to the immune system. Every part of the skin has a characteristic microbial flora, which differs according to area, e.g. the feet have a different bacterial population than the lower back. Presumably these bacteria interact with the immune system, and killing them off every day with soap could have deleterious health effects.
There are legal reasons for this.
Grocers can be held liable for knowingly selling an expired product to a customer, if the customer becomes sick from that expired product.
Maybe you should have asked the grocer if you could shop-lift the expired items.
There are discount stores near where I live that sell a lot of products that are close to the expiration date or sometimes well past the date. Plus once the date has passed the price drops to almost nothing. I regularly buy organic yogurt, cottage cheese, and cream for 25 or 50 cents. I have no idea why these places thrive on expired products while other places aren’t allowed to sell them.
Seth (or anyone else who knows), how do you know what foods might develop “bad” bacteria that could make you really sick or even kill you? I have no problem with aged fermented or cultured products. But leaving regular food out to age makes me nervous.
I came across something interesting about fermentation in the latest National Geographical. The cover story is about the discovery of a baby mammoth in Siberia. Although when found it was free of the ice it hadn’t decayed. On examination it was found that it had been “pickled” just through being in the water and thus preserved.
This was noticed by one of the researchers who noticed the pickled smell as he was doing the discection. It reminded him of experiments that he had done to see whetehr primitive hunter gatherers coudl have peeserved meat in this way. He submerged meat in a pool of water and found it was naturally picled by the bateria present. Hence his theory that hunters could have killed large prey (mammoths) and then perserved / fermented / pickled the meat for a long period after:
I’d advise looking at the magazine, but it is covered here:
https://amandainmaine.wordpress.com/2009/04/21/a-near-perfect-frozen-mammoth-resurfaces-after-40000-years/
Tikhonov knew that no one would be more excited by the find than Dan Fisher, an American colleague at the University of Michigan. Fisher is a soft-spoken, 59-year-old paleontologist with a bristly white beard and clear green eyes who has devoted much of the past 30 years to understanding the lives of Pleistocene mammoths and mastodons, combining fossil studies with some very hands-on experimental research. Curious to know how Paleolithic hunters managed to store mammoth meat without spoilage, Fisher butchered a draft horse using stone tools he’d knapped himself, then cached the meat in a stock pond. Naturally preserved by microbes called lactobacilli in the water, the flesh emitted a faintly sour, pickled odor that put off scavengers even when it floated to the surface. To test its palatability, Fisher cut and ate steaks from the meat every two weeks from February until high summer, demonstrating that mammoth hunters might have stored their kills in the same way.
Also
https://www.ns.umich.edu/htdocs/releases/story.php?id=7099
Another intriguing question is how Lyuba avoided decomposition and destruction. Undoubtedly she was frozen in permafrost for most of the time between her death and discovery, but Fisher and Buigues determined that the carcass lay on the riverbank for nearly a year before the reindeer herders stumbled upon it.
“That means that this baby mammoth, flesh and all, sat out on the side of the river all of the Arctic summer of 2006, which would have subjected the carcass to 24-hour-a-day sunlight, elevated temperatures and exposure to bacteria and scavengers,” Fisher said. “So why is it preserved as well as it is?”
Based on previous experiments aimed at understanding how Paleolithic hunters stored meat from large animal kills, Fisher believes Lyuba was naturally pickled in lactic acid produced by microbes called lactobacilli. The pickling would have protected her body from decomposition, and the sour smell likely deterred scavengers.
My grandfather story
He once forgot a bottle of milk (natural, non pasturised) for two weeks, and found it covered with “all kind of colors”, but he drank it nonetheless,
Surprisingly, he felt afterwards, much much better….