In my 45 years as a butcher, I’ve seen horrific things in retail meat markets. I’ve watched managers wash chicken in baking soda and Clorox. That’s right – Clorox.
The chicken was so obviously spoiled that you could smell it. But they did it anyway, repackaged it and sold it as fresh. A very common practice at one of the big chains I worked at.
I’ve been in meat departments where the meat saw was cleaned so infrequently that there were maggots in the bottom of the saw that caught the bone fragments. I’ve seen barrels that meat scraps went into literally crawling with maggots. Wonder how often this still happens.
I'd be interested to hear your horror stories - send them in and let's let folks out there know what's really going on!
i have seen some **** but maggots and giving families rotten chicken .....i would ****ing lose it ...on who ever was responsible.....and fire them on the spot
i am sure i got lots of good horror stories that i buried because I don't want to remember but as they surface i ll tell them. here is one though. I worked for a store about 10 years ago. they liked to buy everything in huge orders. for example they would get 3 or 4 pallets of nothing but striploins or nothing but bone in pork loins stacked all the way to ceiling...well naturally when you get that volume of stuff some times things are going to spoil. so one day I discovered that about 5 cases of whole bone in pork loin was smelling really bad. I went to the owners son who was running things there i told him i think they are rotten. no good for cutting..he told me to throw them in the dumpster so I got a cart and loaded about 5 or 6 90lb cases on it and pushed them out to the dumpster and heaved them in there and forgot them. (note this was in the middle of august and pretty hot outside.) a few hours later the owner (not the son ) finds out aboutt his and he is pissed. he made me grab that cart and go back out to the dumper and get into the dumpster and heave the damn things back out again and made me put them in the cooler and cut and sell them to our customers. thats after they are already spoiled and after they spent a couple hours in the dumpster in the hot august heat. ...good news though. last year that store burned down its a pile of rubble now. now don't get me wrong. i feel bad for the people who lost their jobs but i am thankful they won't be selling that crap to people anymore.
Cole, we all saw a lot of terrible stuff 20 years ago, but it's all pretty much a thing of the past. We live in FEAR of the random and extensive health department inspections. I'd hate to scare people--just when they're beginning to seek out good meat cutter-staffed butcher departments.
The real horror stories are what's happening in the nonunion packing plants. People should avoid pre=packed ground beef and meat at all costs!!!!
fdarn you ask, How come Cole doesn't just join the club?
Cole is a member of the club,has been since March 16th, he does from time to time come on the board and read some of the post. we e-mail each other when he gets a free min in his Schedule. which is about once a week lol we working on trying to get a phone call in.
fdarn theres no way in the hell i would have pulled them damn things outta the dumpster let alone cut them...lol..........i would of told him he has 2 choices leave them there, or the health board finds out...
leon- i had no idea. thats cool. hope he can post on the board sometime. so i can say I know a celebrity
butcher29 - good point. i was a young cutter at the time. i didn't even think of that. but honestly i think he would had just fired me on the spot. NOONE was going to tell this guy how to run his store.
I've never seen anything that bad! When we'd get huge buys, 4-5 pallets of chucks, rounds whatever and it got close to going bad the manager would lower the cooler temperature to 32 degrees. The trim would have ice forming on it. Your hands would just go numb when you were grinding. But you got used to it. You'd have to put twice as many soakers in the trays because the purge would come out of the muscle while it was in the case. Bloody buddy.