I bought a large pork roast on Thursday at Kroger and put it in my fridge as soon as I got home. Yesterday I took it out to throw it into the slow cooker and it had completely molded in just one day! And, since I had it in our secondary refrigerator that we don't open and close repeatedly during the day, when I opened the door to take out the roast, the stench of rotten meat filled the room! This is NOT a complaint about Kroger. We immediately took it right back to the store and they gave us a full refund with the biggest of apologies. The manager looked both disgusted and embarrassed. But, while we were there, just making small talk, another lady in line said she recently had the same thing happen with some chicken she had purchased (at a different, unnamed store). And then, another gentleman piped up and said he had the same problem too. Seems like this could become a problem, and I'm even glad I didn't make the roast on Thursday when I brought it home. It looked absolutely fine the day I bought it, but if it turned that quickly, we would surely be recovering from a bad bout of food poisoning. *Just a quick note for anyone who might be wondering, yes, I am absolutely certain it was not caused by poor refrigeration on my end. My refrigerator works wonderfully and the temperature is as it should be. I just want to make everyone aware to keep an eye out when you're buying/preparing meats. Sometimes it's hard to tell, but just being aware helps!
Either someone didn't do their job and remove the expired meats (did you check the sell by or expiration dates? If a meat has a sell by date that is the dating your buying it on, that means you either have to freeze it as soon as you get home or cook it. If it has a sell by date for several days later, then it'll keep for a little while.) or they got sent bad meat in their shipments and didn't realize. A friend works for a local grocery store, and they recently got a shipment, that included several boxes of lettuce. But when the produce guys went to restock with it, they opened up the boxes to find out all the lettuce was rotten! Like, that stage where lettuce starts getting black and slimy, rotten. Their manger was really angry! (Not at them, the place they got their stock from) Cause that meant they would be out of lettuce, which means losing sales and angry customers. I'm glad they gave you a refund though. No one likes selling bad product to people, cause we know how much is sucks to buy something and have it be bad.
I'm so glad you didn't eat it on the day of purchase, pork can cause catastrophic food poisoning! I wonder what the problem was? Maybe the sell-by dates got mixed up. Either way, I'm happy to hear that the manager at Kroger took care of you so well - I bet s/he's terrified that there will be some follow-up now. Hopefully, they will have contacted their supplier and alerted them. I hope this incident doesn't put you off eating pork in the future though, it's such a cheap and versatile meat.
How weird. I actually had the same problem recently and thought that I must've just had it out too long or got unlucky. Sounds like maybe it's just something going around right now. I wonder what's causing it??
That was one of the many reasons I choice to go Vegan. I don't trust the source of our food in general. I know they are doing things to the fruit and veggies, but I'm sure they are doing much more to the meat.
I've had that problem several times at Trader Joe's. While I like their stores in general, I avoid their fresh meats, because several times they were not fresh at all. It's mainly happened to me with beef roasts, or cubed beef for kebabs. I open the package and it would reek of sulphur, like the meat was rotten or something, even though it looked relatively fine. Also the meat was a bit sticky too, which was not a good sign. I know that some meat companies will inject carbon monoxide or some other gasses into the packaged meat to make it look brighter and fresher, which can cause that smell even though it's otherwise harmless, but I was not taking any chances.
This is why I've always tried to find a local farm everytime I moved cities. It's just so much more worth it. You can get fresh organic meat and freeze it for when you want to use it. Frozen meat lasts for 3-4months so you can go to the farm pretty seldom and get your months supply of meat.
