The traditional mom and pop grocery store has these days almost been entirely replaced by the mega markets promoting their bulk buying offers and huge discounts meant to entice and secure customer support and loyalty.
We trust that the modern day players in the burgeoning food industry will also adhere to the same standards of quality, freshness and safety that the local entrepreneurs subscribed to.
Sometimes this trust is naively placed into outlets that care more about profits then customer safety and satisfaction. Many times there are too many fingers in the operational pie to guarantee anything substantial for the consumer.
Last Thursday the 19th of the month I visited my local Safeway outlet and purchased a package of extra lean ground turkey breasts. There was a two dollar deduction listed on the front of the prewrapped package.
The contents appeared to be pink and wholesome and I looked forward to enjoying it in a chili recipe to be served on the upcoming weekend. The freshness label indicated that the product was good until the 28th of the month.
Saturday evening I noticed that a clear liquid had somehow mysteriously formed and accumulated inside the package. I had not placed the carton in the freezer but on one of the fridge's inner shelves. This was a procedure I had done for years.
The package was opened gingerly and the excess mositure was drained away. The chicken did not smell tainted so it was placed on an electric fry pan. It slid easily out of the container. A few minutes after the heat was applied a white, odorless ooze began to appear around the fringes of the bulky slab of the ground chicken.
As the electric fry pan started to cook the meat more and more of the white goo encircled the meat. After a few minutes the fry pan was turned off and the chicken was thrown into the garbage bin. It seemed to be too risky an item to eat.
I suspect that the product had been previously frozen and thawed and then placed in the meat section for sale. I did not know how many times this had been done. A number of times in the past whenever I had bought the same product and frozen it at home for later use the same reaction had occurred in the fry pan but to a lesser degree.
There were no external markings on the outside of the plastic wrapped container warning a customer that the product had been previously frozen. The two dollar discount seemed to justify the fact that the product had been handled somewhat badly.
The product line, Eating Right, is not processed in the store. It is an item mass merchandised and handled by a national conglomerate. Somewhere along the line the product may have been frozen during transport and then placed on the shelf in the meat section for sale.
Chicken has traditionally been associated with salmonella. This alone should inspire large retailers like Safeway to place a higher emphasis on caution when selling this product for consumer use.
I wrote an email to the Safeway business ethics division detailing the problem I had with this product line. I tried contacting the local retailer via their customer complaint hotline but their site has been experiencing technical difficulties the entire weekend. Go figure.
