Nexus Kinnon wrote:
is your refrigerator broken?
Much of the veg isn't in there, but some is, and we've been altering it around to try to make sense of it. The rules have been pretty simple for many years, split open sealed plastic bags as they cause condensation (sweat) inside which breeds rot. But now some veg you buy is packed in nitrogen, without oxygen bacteria cannot grow. They can last many days like that, into weeks with some harder things like carrots, once opened though, they're back to normal. What we're noticing is that organic veg, or anything bought from any place that sells itself as being special (like Abel & Cole), well their stuff goes off in typically 3 days. I guess all those chemicals we don't like are doing something.
And budget range veg can go off just as fast, as though it's budget so they cannot afford to pour chemicals on.
Now I do happen to know that bags of salad are nitrogen packed because they were originally on display as fresh veg, but unsold they go back to base to be torn apart, bagged as fresh salad and sent out again for sale. The nitrogen is the only way to stop such old veg from going off super fast. I am partially presuming that budget veg may also have been "chemical veg" that has been out too long already.
As for the milk, that is in the fridge. The fridge is built into the cupboard, as there is no heat exhaust at the rear, heat is vented to the front, under the front door of the fridge. Thusly the heat rises on ejection from the fridge chassis, into the fridge door, where the milk is. This means that anything in the fridge door seems to be about 2-4 degrees warmer than anything in the body of the fridge. While we expect this would cause the milk to sour quicker (which we don't mind as we just makes scones out of sour milk and we do like scones) it doesn't really answer why the soured milk doesn't smell sour. Or taste sour (yeah I tried it).
Experimentation with the fridge hasn't yielded any firm results, we've had courgettes outside the fridge outlive courgettes in the fridge and vice versa.
I suspect we're just under a new regime imposed by the supply chain where re-issuing for sale has become the norm. Onions still last at least a couple of weeks though, except the ones that have been arriving rotten.