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 it doesn’t come in a bag, it ain’t real milk. True story
Tell me more
Thankfully I don’t think we have Walmart store brand milk here in Canada. We also don’t allow hormones either.
What if she let’s a little moan slip on accident?
Walmart uses prison labor for dairy.
RIP Frank Dwayne Ellington what a way to go
Butter and cheese are the only civilized ways to consume milk. Caesar would agree.
Tip: Lactose-free milk tastes the same, is easier on your digestive system, and doesn’t expire for over a month.
It doesn’t taste the same. The lactase breaks the less sweet lactose into glucose and galactose, which are about twice as sweet as lactose (all are less sweet than table sugar.)
Also lactose free milk is typically ultra pasteurized, which gives it the longer shelf life, but ultra pasteurization does impact taste. It gives it a “cooked” flavor.
I’ve never noticed a change in taste, but I mostly buy 2% milk. Fairlife does taste creamier to me than other brands, likely due to its “ultra filtered” process however that works. I do wish that brand came in cartons instead of plastic bottles though.
Is your lactose free milk prepared/packaged differently from your regular milk? The two keep for just as long here.
Not really. All I know is when I buy Lactaid, or Fairlife, or one of the many other lactose-free brands in the US, their sell by date is usually around 30 days. “Normal” milk is usually sell by 7-10 days here.
Sell by isnt a standard or gov controlled. I used to keep milk till smelled bad or became chunky. I have noticed that lactose free milk does seem to last longer comparably however, sjnce i switched more recently due to body deciding to be full lactose intolerant
It’s also not entirely lactose free. Ask me how I know.
Cries in lactose intolerance
Lactose-free milk is much sweeter than regular milk and expires in the same amount of time unless you’re buying the long life version.
Yep. That’s because they don’t actually remove the lactose. They add lactase which cleaves the lactose into simpler sugars, increasing the sweetness.
Hope you were making yogurt
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.
Edit: Even if you buy the milk and it ice cold doesn’t mean somewhere in the distribution process it hasn’t been allowed warm up. I have bought milk that went bad within a day.
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.
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
German tetrapacks in the chat
The American version of those are fun. Two months before the expiration date, stored in a dark space around 50F or less, they separate into globs. Not spoiled, just separated. Globs settle in the bottom of coffee. Once you get enough air in there, you can shake the everloving shit out of it, and the globs break apart into a delightful foam that floats on top.
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.
Yeah, plus Walmart attracts trashy customer base so stuff like this is more likely to happen
Pathetic. The soy milk I buy last for almost an entire year.
Indeed. I order unsweetened soy milk once a year so I don’t have to carry it from the store and never run out. 80 1L packs. Still good after a year, no animals were harmed in the process. Even after a year I can leave an opened pack which is far passed it’s expiration date in the fridge for a week without it going bad.
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
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.
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 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!
Yeah, it wasn’t even great before and now they have an administration that’ll bend the rules for any corporation willing to pay.
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
What exactly am i supposed to see here? Just looks like normal milk to me?
I think there’s chunks in it
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.
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.
It doesn’t look curdled, though. The liquid doesn’t look yellowish and semi transparent enough.
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).
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.
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
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.
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.
some whole milk has cream that settles at the top. Are you sure it was actually bad?
Edit: looks like you’re not the only one with issues with this brand. If you keep the container you can get a refund from the manufacturer or walmart.
