I hosted a shrinking product chat over at WashingtonPost.com this morning and an interesting comment from someone in New Orleans came up about milk going bad:
Over the past two weeks, I have ended up with two gallons of milk, purchased at different stores from different dairies, that went bad before their expiration date. When we asked for a refund at the second store, the manager noted that they had gotten several complaints about sour milk lately, which was unusual for the store. The manager wondered whether truck drivers were turning up the thermometer on their refrigerator system or skipping it altogether to save gas…
I live in Brooklyn and a few months ago, even before the summer, I myself started to notice my milk was spoiling a lot faster too. As in, a matter of days. I thought our corner store was just being cheap. I’ve since switched to organic milk because it lasts for weeks. Has anyone else noticed this? If so, what part of the country are you in, what brand do you buy, and from what store?
(Illustration: wedgienet)
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I read this yesterday, and wouldn’t you know, I opened a new carton of 1/2 and 1/2 this morning and it was bad. Exp date not until August 10!
Milk?
Gross.
We’ve decided to hunt out the UHT milk and just have that on hand. It keeps better in a 2-person household and we can buy 2-3 half gallons at a time rather than have to go back and pick up a half gallon every week.
Ounce for ounce, soymilk just has more nutrients in it.
Also, know how doctors always say “breast is best” for our children? That’s because milk is talilored to fit humans, with the proper antibiotics and hormones in it. Now, why would we want to drink milk that is tailored to fit cows, with cow hormones in it? I’m not saying it’s going to cause cancer or anything that extreme, but if cow milk is made to get little calves big and hefty like mom and dad, wouldn’t that be the opposite of what a human would want to drink who is trying to stay thin?
Mine went bad last week earlier by a week than the date Austin Texas, HEB.
@ChuckECheese: Thanks that was an insightful post. I still find it hard to believe that the costs of refrigeration, transportation and storage outweigh the costs of pasteurization, but i’ll take your word for it.
That said,
I stick to my Soymilk, it’s healthier in the end anyways.
We’ve noticed this in the Northern Virginia (DC) area for about a year. The way we deal with this issue is by buying organic milk, which seems to last longer.
We had a similar problem when our refrigerator needed replacing and we didn’t know it. Our milk was spoiling before the expiration date. The milk seemed cold enough when we would drink it, but nevertheless, it was spoiling prematurely. It turned out that during the night, the temperature would rise inside the refrigerator because it was failing. It would then return to normal. We suspected it was happening during the freezer defrost cycle. So, my experience tells me that even a temporary rise in temperature can cause milk to spoil prematurely.
@TheNerd: So as humans we should only drink milk from our species? What about other foods? We don’t eat anything from our own species so far as I know. But thanks for making a plug for cannibalism.
This is something my wife and I have noticed as well. I would assume it is due to something along the production line, something like “take in less milk -> send it out the door sooner” and as a result, it can stay on the shelf longer. That’s my simple theory anyway.
I’ve been noticing this for the last 5 or 6 years, milk has been going bad before the expiration date. Growing up, my family used to buy 5-8 gallons at a time and we never had milk go bad. Now that I’m out on my own I get half gallons going bad a few days before expiration. This modern milk doesn’t taste as good as the stuff I drank 20+ years ago.
@ChuckECheese: I bite my fingernails.
No, but seriously, lactose tolerance exists in a fraction of adult humans. They wouldn’t be able to tolerate human milk either.
In NYC, milk cartons have 2 sell-by dates. The NYC date is a few days earlier. I suspect it’s because crates of milk sit out on the sidewalk waiting to be put into the store’s refrigerator. There just isn’t space in the city for big refrigerated trucks to back right up to the store and unload directly into the cooler. Buying any kind of dairy or meat in New York is a crapshoot.
Same here with my Jewel milk, usually I drink a lot of milk but one in a while I have Milk about 5 days before the sell by date and it goes bad.
@chrisjames: I’m having the exact same problem with Kroger milk. I’ve always bought it in the quart size specifically so that it wouldn’t go bad before I’d gotten through it. Like LuckyBob, I was starting to think that it was a problem with my fridge.
I just got a 1 gallon jug of milk that was bad a week and a half before the sell-by date. No idea what went wrong there, but it smelled like bad fruit when I opened it.
Oh and I live in brooklyn. It was also almost a week before the In NY date.