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Foods that are decades past their expiry dates are too common
When I heard last week that inspectors had found a shop selling food that was 43 years past its expiry date, I thought, wow, they go to the same supermarket I do
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hen I heard last week that inspectors had found a shop selling food that was 43 years past its expiry date, I thought, wow, they go to the same supermarket I do.
I've seen food items there that aren't just dried out, but are actually fossilizing. I sometimes visit just to show my children how mineralization works: 'See how microstructural features are retained, so that people in 10 million years can trace the early evolution of the MSG pie?'
Anyway, in my experience you're fine as long as you stick to foods from the Holocene and Pleistocene eras: Avoid anything pre-Mesozoic.
Later, I found the actual Xinhua report about the expired food. The shop was in the Guangxi region of China. But this problem happens all over Asia. A reader once sent me a package of food he bought from the most expensive delicatessen in Hong Kong. Under the expiry date sticker was another one. And another one beneath that. And another one beneath that, etc.
It was like one of those archeological digs where you peel away one geological era at a time. There were six layers. Clearly the shop manager saw expiry dates as miniature creative writing projects. Given the thousands of items in the shop, he was probably Hong Kong's most prolific author.
Recently in Madras, a scientist at the Indian Institute of Technology announced a product that could do away with expiry dates completely, I read in the Deccan Chronicle. Anshika Agarwal's food packaging changes color if the contents are bad. As the father of two teenage girls, I think they should make clothes out of this and force boys to wear them.
But perhaps the most shocking 'bad product' story of recent days was the 'exploding breasts' tale. A Beijing woman lay on her front for four hours playing an addictive mobile phone game (I bet it was Candy Crush), causing her breast implants to burst, the Shanghaiist reported.
A doctor later told the woman that she had 'substandard breasts', something I would never say to any woman, Barbie doll, or supermarket chicken even.
Yet deep down I am always secretly happy to read about retail products being exposed as rubbish. This is because I am a shopping hater, or 'male'. Fate has played a cruel and vicious trick on me, placing me in a family with addicted three Olympic-class shoppers, or 'females'.
Scientists say that this is evolutionary, with men being hunters and females being gatherers. Caveman: 'Cook this sabre tooth tiger leg for my dinner.' Cavewoman: 'Cook it yourself; me and the girls are off collecting shells to make primitive necklaces.'
Last week someone put a video on the Chinese copy of YouTube showing a tour guide 'encouraging' tourists to shop. After driving them to a remote shopping mall, he ordered them to spend money on overpriced rubbish, waving a knife and saying: 'I will kill you.' I guess this is what they mean by 'hard sell'.
Now I need to stop writing this and go eat. Anyone want to share a semi-fossilized MSG pie from my local food shop? We just need to get to it before the archeologists do.
The writer is a columnist and journalist.
