I was in the middle of making dinner when this happened. I’m grateful I poured it into a measuring cup first. Thankfully I don’t live too far from another source.
I remember milk staying good almost a week past its expiration date when I was a kid. Boy have the times changed.
If a perishable product comes in an opaque plastic container, that’s a deliberate choice. Always be suspicious of it.
It does help a bit with spoilage issues (by blocking light coming into the product) but what you said is totally valid as well.
I’ve had milk two weeks past that still smelled good. I poured it out anyway. The secret to milk is that it has to stay cold. If it warms even a bit the shelf life is cut way short.
I just had one where I didn’t use it at all for a few weeks, and it was a few days past the expiration date. This may help, but it wasn’t opened yet. My wife was like, “Throw it out!” And I was like no ill take the risk. Decided to have cereal the next morning and was pleasantly surprised it was perfectly fine and was able to use it all within the next 3 days.
Then again, I have had times where i just got it, and 2 days later, it was super gross. Here’s looking at you stop and shop store brand milk… got burned twice like that, and I have never purchased it again. I hate that store so much.
Milk is so easy to tell if it’s spoiled, no reason to throw it out without a sniff test.
Not necessarily true. As soon as your crack the seal on pasteurized milk, the Bacillus cereus spores start to germinate even if cold. There is a strain that thrives at fridge temps and within a few days the milk is now full of cereulide toxins. Badtimes at the hospital.
UHT milk would kill the spores though at the factory so it’s safer to keep longer.
Isn’t UHT ultra high temperature? isn’t that the same as pasteurization?
Pasteurization is only about 75°C for about half a minute. This kills any living bacteria in food. That’s why milk packing has warning on how to store it and how to use it. But if the pack is labeled UHT you have more leeway. UHT is high pressure and temp to get up to 130 to 150°C but for only about 3 to 5 seconds. This kills bacteria spores which can survive boiling at 100°C. Yes really. Like the above bacteria mentioned, only UHT can kill the spores. It evolved so that once the temp and moisture is right the spores breakout like Alien from the egg and start multiplying bacteria immediately, within hours.
Note that heat cannot deactive the bacteria shit aka toxins. So even though the bacteria colony can be dead when u recook spoilt food, the toxins will still kill you.
Neat, thanks for the explainer ! I had incorrectly assumed pasteurization was done at the boiling point of water… Cheers
Stop wasting food.
Don’t drink 2 week old milk in the name of not wasting food. It’s not worth the hospital visit. Just adjust your purchasing if you always have milk you’re tossing out.
No.
Don’t you have ultra high heated milk? It keeps fresh for several months at room temperature as long as it’s unopened. It usually tastes a little less great than normal milk but that’s especially not much of an issue if you use it for baking or cereals.
To be fair, to most of those who are used to fresh milk find the taste of UHT milk off-putting, myself included. North Americans do tend to drink more milk too so they go through a bottle long before it goes bad.
For us the reason for going UHT is that we don’t have the fridge space for all the milk we consume. We would have to buy new milk every few days.
And it actually is possible to make UHT milk taste almost like fresh milk. Those are usually just more expensive.
I’m baffled that America insists on selling milk by the gallon. That’s so much milk to finish after opening.
The maximum size we used to get while I was growing up where I live was 1 litre. Then came the big milk, 1.5 L. Now we have this even bigger one that’s 1.75 L, I think. Seems like it’s going to converge on 2 L. 😄
I go through a gallon of milk in 2-3 days and I live by myself. I’m a bodybuilder though so…
When I was a kid my family of four would go through a gallon a week.
I can go through a whole gallon by myself before it goes bad. Now, I might just barely be able to do it most times, but still. Between cooking, drinking, and cereal, I can usually find a way to use it all. I mostly drink it though.
I used to go through 2gallons a week
Dairy is heavily subsidized in the US. 1 gallon (3.8L) barely costs more than 1/2. Might as well buy the whole gallon and turn what you aren’t going to otherwise use into yogurt or cheese.
I somehow doubt you can do much with pasteurized and homogenized 1% milk.
There’s a reason that most dairy products in Europe are made from raw milk.
Yogurt is super easy to make with any (dairy) milk.
There are some cheeses that are better with unpasteurized milk, but it still works with pasteurized milk. I think most cheeses made with unpasteurized milk are just done that way because the pasteurization is an unnecessary step. Cheeses that are aged long enough have the pathogens die off. In the US, that threshold is 60 days. In the EU, tradition is deemed more important than safety, so there is no waiting period. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12146498/#fsn370409-bib-0006
Homogenization is a challenge for curd formation with some cheeses, but you can counteract it with some extra calcium chloride.
It’s common to add cream to milk to boost the fat content for some cheeses.
You wouldn’t make rennet-based cheeses of the leftovers from a jug of milk, though, cause that’s not enough bang for your buck. I just make what’s essentially like a ricotta. All you have to do is heat it up, and add a little bit of distilled vinegar or lemon juice which cuddles it, and then you strain it through cheesecloth.
Amazing. Thanks for the info.
Any ideas on how I’d make dry cottage cheese out of it at home?
You can buy it in half gallons and quarts, too, but a lot of families go through a gallon in a couple days.
In the UK we have (in UK pints, 1 pint = 568ml): 1 pint, 2 pints, 4 pints and 6 pints. We also have slightly smaller metric sizes (1L, 2L) that are typically seen in convenience stores or on branded milk.
I would say that 4 pints (2.273L) is the typical size that most would buy for regular use, with smaller sizes popular for those that don’t have cereal/porridge. I find that milk from the supermarket tends to keep well, so it’s not that difficult to get through a 4 pinter, unless all you use it for is adding some in your tea - in which case you can just get a 1 or 2 pint jug.
Kids drink lots of milk i used to think people who bought multiple gallons was crazy…
Now I’m at the point we use a gallon in about a 2 days…
Walmart milk expires a few days before the date. Been that way for a while. Some agency should look into it. I mean under a less fascist regime
I didn’t think about it until now but yeah you Americans should be more diligent about food standards and safety now that the standards and consequences for corporate negligence are so low. You wouldn’t want to end up in hospital…
Yeah, it wasn’t even great before and now they have an administration that’ll bend the rules for any corporation willing to pay.
Yeah that’s what I’m saying. We have the FDA (Food and Drug Administration) which is supposed to look out for us on things like that. But they can’t be trusted, especially under Trump.
So, for all the bad things you’ve heard about Trump, not being an American — he does tend to have a certain pattern to who he places in charge of what organisation. For example the FCC (Federal Communications… Commission? Council?), he appointed a former Verizon (national mobile carrier) executive, someone who would regulate in favour of business. So if he installed someone at the FDA, they’d likely be a former Walmart executive — not very keen on enforcing Walmart’s lax expiration dates!
That’s nuts. I just finished a gallon that I opened 10+ days ago, which expired 5 days ago. Tasted just fine, no problems.
This was Rockview, though. It’s one of the best tasting milks you can buy in SoCal.
Meanwhile my costco milk seems to want to last a week+ past the date making me suspiciously sniff and sip it every time after the date
That was happening to our house and then we discovered that our fridge wasn’t running at food safe temperatures.
Might be worth putting a thermometer in.
I make sure to keep the fridge just above freezing. I do this by actually setting it cold enough to freeze then raising it slightly until things stop freezing.
Bought a house (back when such things were still available to plebs). Hadn’t moved in yet, cleaning etc. Chucked some drinks and snacks into the fridge. Next day, barely chilly. Put a thermometer in, 40-some degrees F.
A new fridge was just the first unexpected expense.
Your mistake was not expecting to need to replace all of the appliances.
One of Your many mistakes was not expecting to need to replace all of the appliances.
FTFY
There one I’m working at is soon to switch to delivering their own milk, rather than t g Lee. I’m expecting this is happen more in our area going forward. Their dc is further away and the turnaround time on processing will be longer.
Yeah I’m calling bullshit on the part that OP is not telling us what they scribbled out. This is just ragebaiting or OP trying to negate the responsibility of READING what’s on the jug.
I mean, the fault is with the company until someone as gullible as you comes along and buys the expired jug anyways or however long you didn’t tend to it for.
I do find it a bit telling that Lemmy would assume I’m some lying shill rather than Walmart milk being ass.
Edit: here’s the unedited version. My local store isn’t listed on the jug. I’m not worried about y’all tracking me down.
Take the tinfoil hat off, junior.
All that tells you, is what state with the code of 18. It doesn’t tell you where you are specifically, only the plant of which the jug of milk was made in. In this case, it was made in Indiana (not sure if it was based on the number of states in order, which would make it wrong since Indiana isn’t the 18th state, more like 19th but whatever).
I do happen to work retail and the plausibility of how the milk ended up the way it did is several. The plant didn’t do a good job. Your housing conditions such as temperature and where you stored the milk matters overtime. Someone working dairy didn’t care enough to efficiently stock the jug per company standards. Poor stationing of pallet somewhere from the store in bad conditions. Something.
Anything. I’ve never had a milk jug just come like that though, since I buy almond milk anymore.
Junior, lmao lick my balls.
Ew, you fucking pedophile. No wonder your profile picture is a pig, because you’re probably a kiddie-fiddler. Fucking pedophile.
What exactly am i supposed to see here? Just looks like normal milk to me?
I think there’s chunks in it
That doesn’t look bad. That looks like it didn’t get homogenized. The “chunks” is just cream. Put the cap back on and shake it up.
Virtually all supermarket milk in the US is homogenized, this is almost certainly curdled due to spoilage.
And it’s possible that this batch simply missed the step. I know people who threw out glass bottled milk because they were too yuppie to know any better. Glass bottled stuff is often not homogenized, so I know what it looks like. OP didn’t mention any smell, so I’m not convinced.
I don’t want to get into the intricacies of milk processing for mass commercial scale, so I won’t explain the whole thing, but in short: no, it absolutely could not have missed that step.
I too can assert a thing without evidence.
I’d love to show you a video or something but everything I’m seeing online is super vague and the couple I watched to completion to see if they showed what I’m talking about ended up being “dairy industry cares about cows” propaganda. The milk is moved from place to place by pipes, not by humans dumping it into vats who could make mistakes.
The only way it could make it through the whole process without homogenization on a standard line meant for homogenized milk is if the ultrafine mesh the milk is forced through to homogenize it were for some reason missing and the batch were sent through anyway, which shouldn’t be possible if proper Service In Place procedures are being followed (lockout tagout for out of service lines).
It doesn’t look curdled, though. The liquid doesn’t look yellowish and semi transparent enough.
Ah i see. With full fat non homogenized milk you always have a big chunk of separated out pure fat/cream sitting on top, but i guess that not it in this case? If in doubt just taste test it, a few droplets of spoiled milk wont harm you.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen non-homogenized milk in a jug like that.
Yeah me neither. I buy it in glass bottles, but considering the fact that canadians have milk bags i dont doubt that this exists too.
Not saying Walmart milk doesn’t suck but have you checked your refrigerator temps? You wanna be sure you keep it as cold as possible. So in the back and not the door.
Time to go to the farm shop and get a bottle from the vending machine!
Having worked the fresh department at Walmart, sometimes the milk would be delivered to the store spoiled. You can’t usually tell without opening it, unless it’s really bad you can smell it through the unopened container (or it isnt white anymore).
I don’t know how much a problem this is with other grocers but nearly all the fresh products at Walmart are close to expiration by the time the store sells it to you. It’s one of the ways they keep the prices lower than competitors.
I would bet the trucks and store refrigerators at Walmart are kept as warm as legally possible, to save money on electricity.
Even without adjusting the thermostat, those cooler doors are being opened and closed thousands of times a day, there’s no way everything inside stays chilled. Not to mention the folks who grab dairy products then leave them next to the beer or electronics when decisions were made…that milk with an Oct 31 date may have sat under a heater vent for hours before someone put it back in the fridge.
They’ve decided dealing with listeria outbreaks a couple times a year is cheaper than running the fridges colder.
Yeah, plus Walmart attracts trashy customer base so stuff like this is more likely to happen
They have driven out other grocers and created a food desert monopoly in some rural areas but yeah sure, let’s blame the people buying food and not the mega corp.
It’s not a dealer’s issue or has anything to do with changing times. Everyone will or already has had that experience at least once. You’re just too inexperienced. There are many reasons why milk can go sour, as we call it here. Most depend on how you as a consumer handle it. Some are just bad luck. For example, if there was a thunderstorm, it’s more likely to turn into an ugly buttermilk mess. Don’t blame Walmart or the milk, because you can’t be sure if it wasn’t your fault.
Quite a lot of assumptions you’re making. I’m probably older than you.
Noone older than 12 who drank milk since he was a kid would be astounded or angry about self made buttermilk 🤣
some whole milk has cream that settles at the top. Are you sure it was actually bad?
Pretty much all milk in the US is homogenized, unless bought from a specialty brand/store. I can basically guarantee that Walmart is not selling non-homogeneous milk in the US.
Bought milk, got half made cheese /j
Whole milk will go bad very quickly, especially once opened and if not kept below a certain temperature. 2% lasts a lot longer. Also changing the location in the refrigerator makes a huge difference, the door area is the warmest part. If you haven’t had an issue before, then it could be that at some point in handling from the store or you the milk was allowed to warm a bit too much. Again, for whole milk it doesn’t take a lot, and any perishables from Walmart is taking a risk vs. other groceries. Find a store that gets local farm stuff if possible, and try 2%, it’s possible to wean off that sweet whole and buy some time and health.
