Celery hearts - overstocked 21 Jan - still pristine today!!
Much the same with the Spinach- 24 Feb & still usable.
Scares me to death Tim. Also the plastic pots of stew etc that sit on the shelves and cakes with a sell by date of months ahead
XX Jeannine
as an experiment I once left a pack of supermarket bought tomatoes in the pantry for months and months and they looked the same at the end as they did when I bought them :o
I should get out more
Fresh fruit & vegetable produce is bought under ripe & treated with sulphur dioxide and sulphites applied as a gas.
Other things like bags of cut salad leaves, fresh fruit salads etc... are washed in a strong chlorine solution. Whilst chlorine levels in tap water are tightly controlled and are typically restricted to no more than 0.5 mg/litre. It is common practice to use chlorine washes that contain up to 100 mg/litre of chlorine to rinse food that's sold as 'ready-to-eat', or to put it another way, 200 times as much chlorine as tap water.
Then as if that's not enough they are packed in 'modified atmosphere packaging'. Essentially the oxygen is removed from the bags & replaced with a mixture of primarily carbon dioxide & nitrogen to prevent any bacteria that survived the chlorine wash from multiplying. It is of paramount importance that foods packaged without oxygen are stored and used exactly according to instructions (usually within 24-72 hours of opening). The absence of bacteria means there will be no odours when the food starts to spoil, and you may not be aware when it becomes unsafe to eat. By the time it does start smelling even slightly off it would be a very bad idea to risk eating it.
So appetising!!
yep tim. just makes you want to dash out and buy it :o
valmarg
The weekly shop would be so much easier if I was ignorant of these things.