Best If Used By...

OK.

One secret most people secretly know, that they don't share with people because it's a secret, is that once you freeze something, it's pretty much unchanged from then until you thaw it.

They once found a woolly mammoth buried in ice; it was approximately 20,000 years old, and the flowers it was lying on when it died were still their original colors. So, once it's frozen, it's pretty much good.

That doesn't help the companies that manufacture frozen food, though; so they run a scam on the consumer. See, the law says that "best if used by" dates are immutable laws of reality, and that products past their due dates must be taken out and destroyed. The law says nothing whatsoever about frozen products that are simply undated, because the FDA knows as well as you or I that as long as it doesn't thaw, it's fine indefinitely.

But, see, food manufacturers know this, too, and so in order to force the grocery stores to buy more of their product, they have started putting pre-freezing sell-by dates on frozen products; some as short as EIGHT DAYS.

And if those products aren't sold by that date - often the case - the store has to, by law, DESTROY the product. And that passes right along to you and me as increased food prices; the store compensates for increased shrinkage - product they buy but don't sell for whatever reason - with slightly higher prices.

Now, this is true, and it is stupid. But it merely scratches the surface. Wednesday, the factory where I work - a packing plant - threw away product worth almost - at a guess, for reasons I will explain shortly - three times as much as my wife and I earn in a year COMBINED.

Why? Because we have a major customer who insists on pre-freezing sell-by dates.

Now. This is a poultry packing plant; we have three products associated with this particular event, those being ground chicken, ground white turkey, and ground dark turkey. We triple-grind it, and freeze it in those little heat-sealed styrofoam and plastic containers that hamburger comes in now.

And for this particular customer, we slap a date on it before it goes in the blast freezer.

And as a result of that, and for no other reason, we had to destroy THIRTY-FIVE PALLETS of ground poultry. Here's the reason for the guess - I know how many boxes per pallet, how much per item, how many units per box, all that; what Idon't know is the exact number of pallets of each product.

But, ok, here goes:

12 units per box.

52 boxes per pallet.

35 pallets.

That's twenty-one thousand, eight hundred forty individual packages.

Now, the dark turkey is the cheapest, at $3.50; the chicken's $4, and the white turkey's $5. I don't know how much EXACTLY is in there of the other two, but just using the price for dark turkey for the batch is bad enough: $76, 440. That's right; SEVENTY-SIX THOUSAND DOLLARS.

But here's the thing; at a guess, I'd say about a ninth of it is chicken (2426 individual packages,) and two ninths is white turkey (4853 individual packages.)

So, that's 14, 560 packages of dark turkey: $50, 960.

4853 packs of white turkey: $24, 265.

2426 packages of ground chicken: $9, 704.

So that means that - using my patented "this is how many tags I scanned so that's the approximate percentage we produce" guesswork method - we chucked $84, 929 worth of perfectly good ground poultry in the trash, because our customer insisted on a meaningless sell-by date.

Eighty-four thousand dollars.

Must be nice. If you can't just sell it, why not donate it to charity, or the food banks, or something?

But, instead, nope; off that all goes to become dog food.

*Sigh*