Desperate Russians won't turn up their nose at expired food

[Liberal_in_LA]

Desperate Russians won't turn up their nose at expired food

By Megan K. Stack
May 25, 2009

Reporting from Moscow -- The cheeses are spotted with mold. The sausages are ominously gray. Slime is beginning to overtake the chicken.

But the stooped and slow clientele who crowd this pungent stretch of market stalls in the southern fringes of the Russian capital don't seem bothered. Elderly retirees mass and push before spreads of lukewarm yogurt and moldering fish. Business has never been better, the steely-eyed manager says.

Theoretically, selling expired foodstuffs is a crime punishable by fine under Russian law. But the climbing prices, falling salaries and withering demand of Russia's economy appear to be driving a surge in the sale of past-their-prime goods.

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"If you lower the price to pennies, people will buy it even at the risk of being poisoned," says Irina Vinogradova, director of the Russian Institute of Consumer Evaluation. "This crisis has led some people into a situation where they have absolutely no money to survive on."

Outside the market, known as the Moskvoretskoye, Galina Abrosimova shows off a tub of cottage cheese she bought for the equivalent of about 30 cents. The cheese is tepid;the date on the lid shows it expired two weeks ago.

"So what?" she says, tucking it shyly back into a dirt-smeared shopping bag. "If I don't like the taste, I'll just use it for pancakes."


http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-russia-spoiled25-2009may25,0,2568746.story

[vadawg]

1. i recently was forced by my boss to throw out a slimfast i was about to druink

that was 5 years out of date, my wife always says i dont live by expiration dates either, i say thats why god gave us curry powder.

[Liberal_in_LA]

3. Good boss, looking out for you.

[vadawg]

5. lol not really he didnt want to do the paperwork if i had a medical emergency

he basically told me what happens on my mountain stays on my mountain, but here no medical emergencies.

[XemaSab]

2. Expired canned goods, cereal, or other processed food: no problem

Expired meat, dairy, and other proteins: :puke:

This is capitalism's logical end: the rich eat filet mignon and caviar, the poor eat rancid bacon grease and maggoty meat. x(

[Caliman73]

6. Wasn't that happening before the socialist government came in...

and gave us the Clean Food and Water act of 1906? I agree that unchecked capitalism does lead to such discrepancies.

[napoleon_in_rags]

4. That have similar things going on here.

There are these grocery outlet stores, (we call the groc-out for short) where the food is really cheap, but it comes from overstock, or when the stock is too high and something is very close to expiring. Its one of the only places where I have bought groceries, taken them open and found they were moldy when I looked inside the containers.

[sandnsea]

7. Please don't do that

We all have grocery outlets and they are not selling molded cheese and gray meat. I've bought things from them that I didn't like, but never anything bad. What is going on in Russia is completely different and it minimizes it to compare it. We have nothing like it in this country -- yet.

Really, you shouldn't shop at grocery outlets at all because they're not union. I try to avoid it, only go there when I'm too lazy to drive to the Safeway. The outlet is only 6 blocks.

[napoleon_in_rags]

8. Do what?

We all have grocery outlets and they are not selling molded cheese and gray meat.

They are selling molded yogurt and cream cheese, to be precise. I know because I have gotten it. The yogurt twice. Check out the expiration dates when you go there you see its things that are very close to expiration other places were trying to get rid of, just like at food banks where you often encounter near bad stuff. And more and more people are going there, just as in Russia. I believed in the whole "count my blesssings" about how lucky I am to be living in the USA until I actually left it. Russia is not a third world country.

[sandnsea]

9. They have the food bank food

or a share of the food that used to go to the food banks.

Yes some of it is near the expiration date. It is not two weeks past the expiration date. It is not a store full of molded cheese and smelly meat, which is what they described in Russia. It has nothing to do with one country being better or worse, it has to do with telling the truth. Don't pretend it's that bad here, because it could damn well get that bad and then what are you going to say. And the people of Russia, who are truly having to eat rotten food, deserve the dignity of having their story told, plain, without any phony commisserating.

[napoleon_in_rags]

14. I'm bothered because I think the article is pure schadenfreude, nothing more.

All these news stories that take the form of "Oh, look at those people in that country that we perceive as an adversary and how they're suffering, too bad we can't do anything about it" bother me a lot. Did you look at the picture accompanying the story? A bum in a well lit modern market, with clean glass and safety sealed containers?
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-russia-spoiled25-2009may25,0,2568746.story
I'm not disagreeing that Russians may have it somewhat worse, but that's not our country, and its on the other side of the world and therefore we can't do anything about it. What we CAN do something about is our own neighbors. It just strikes me as odd, how much telling the poor amongst US that how "good they have it" while pointing to people in some distant country we are at odds with looks like a really big excuse to do nothing.

[sandnsea]

17. Ah, well that's an entirely different thing

Because I took it as, yikes, if that's going on in Russia, how long before it really IS going on here. I'm sure they thought they had put that kind of thing long behind them.

Keeping poverty in perspective is tricky, that's true. I get really upset when people say we should stop letting folks by cookies with food stamps. They don't understand that that is very often the only treat a child gets, even for things like getting an A on a test that we would want to reward. And will there be no birthday cake, or holiday treats? Sure, that isn't starvation poverty, but I didn't think we wanted that kind of poverty in our country. Sometimes I think the Limbaugh types won't be happy until we do have that.

Still, some kind of perspective should be kept when you think of half the population of Mumbai living in slums.

[vadawg]

10. you think people care if its union, if they are having to buy to survive

the rule is to get the most for your buck, not to support a political belief when it comes to hunger.

[sandnsea]

12. Well duh

Thanks for telling me the obvious. :crazy:

I was just mentioning it to that poster in case he didn't know, you know, just a little fyi.

[vadawg]

13. no problem, i just misread your intent, blame it on being the middle of my shift

:)

[juno jones]

18. My own personal experience w/ GO

No they aren't union but they are locally owned. The owners are there themselves to run it. I generally see the same employees year in year out.

It doesn't seem like too bad of a deal. Caveat: this coming from someone employed in fine dining and mom/pop restaurants. If my employer is working by my side, I'll cut them some slack. If they retain employees they're doing something right.

On edit: as for using food that would have gone to pantries, I really don't see that. I used to get food from pantries in the eighties and most of the cans weren't name brand, nor expired. There were a lot of generics and USDA labels and lots of soup.

Oh and government cheese. Do they still give government cheese? Do they still have conspiracy theories about that substance?

My grandmother used to shop dented can stores thirty years ago. This stuff has gone to Aldi and GO for a long time.

As a poor person, I make slightly too much qualify for aid and have no desire to go to pantries but I can't afford 'Safeway' prices either. I buy most of my food at the dented can shops.

[napoleon_in_rags]

19. I didn't want to unfairly target GO, but I do want to note that we are facing a food quality decline

in this country as well. To be honest, I think that decent food near to its expiration date is the least of our problems in the US, the real problems are more subtle: food made with substandard ingredients to cut corners. We've already seen it a thousand times, with things like trans-fat, an industrial substance which our bodies can't even digest being put broadly into food. Groceries bought at the dollar store have made me literally ill, and I have a strong stomach.

I'm fortunate to have access to a good organic food coop where I live. I decided to force myself to shop their by buying myself gift certificates, $100 a week and so far it seems to be paying off on the health front. What worries me about substandard ingredients is that unlike the Russian stuff, which may have immediate effects in terms of food poisoning, these bad ingredients could slowly be draining our health away in imperceptible ways, or have bad long term effects.

[JVS]

16. I got moldy bread at a german gas station once when I needed to buy food on a Sunday.

Food spoilage can happen anywhere, but the systematic sale of spoiled food is especially bad.

[MajorChode]

11. So how do you know when yogurt has gone bad?

That's the only problem I have with yogurt

[JVS]

15. That's easy for me.

It's ALWAYS bad!