Scientists designed color-changing carbon dot biosensors that can detect spoiled meat in sealed packages in real-time, just in case you don’t trust the sniff-test.
They’re going to make this way too sensitive so people throw away even more food and effective prices get driven up. I guarantee it
Cool cool.
leans forward
Now, can it also not persist in the environment for 1000 years after the thing it was packaging has been unpackaged?
The Dow is over 50,000
haha thats the new fresh thoughtterminating sequence i love it
But what does the scouter say about his power level, Vegeta?
leans forwarder
Huh Vegeta?! What’s it say!?
I’ve had a number of occasions where I purchased meat and it was spoiled before the expiration date. At this point, I’m sick of putting my trust in big corporations and am trying to buy more foods produced locally.
As a negative control, they also prepared an identical sealed tray containing only a wet sponge and the biosensor, but no meat. They observed that the biosensors in the pork and mutton trays turned bright yellow after 24 hours, while the one in the beef tray took 36 hours. In contrast, the control biosensor showed no detectable change.
That’s so cool, meat is still gross, but this is unambiguously a fantastic thing for humanity. If it’s actually used, I’d have to imagine the less reliable yet ass covering legal expiration date sticker will always be cheaper. Hope this becomes the new mandated standard, innovations are meaningless in the face of uncaring capitalism.
If people don’t trust it either, there’s also an alternative, reading the package for the expected spoiling date.
I’ve had Milk that lasts a week longer than the expiration date, and I’ve had meat spoil a week before its use-or-freeze-by date
That date means nothing. It’s a best by date, not an expiration date. It’s just the last date you can get a refund if it goes bad.
But I’ve had a gallon of milk last a whole month after the best by date.
Yeah, the date on the package means even less if you freeze it. Frozen meat is good for years.
(Freeze your ground beef, freeze your bread. Throwing away food is expensive!)
Yes, and freeze sauces, soups, and stews in ice cube trays and then into freezer bags for easy portioning later. This was life changing advice for me.
This is why I can! I don’t have enough freezer space!
I live in an apartment with a very small fridge that has a tiny freezer inside it. I got a small chest freezer that I use for storage. I only use the one in my fridge for freezing stuff, then it moves to the chest freezer.
Do you do meal planning and if so do your plans include your frozen stuff?
We use these for soup:
https://www.soupercubes.com/products/silicone-food-freezer-trays?variant=45179217969378
Pricey for glorified ice cube trays, but really convinent to have the soup portioned to size.
The expiry date has been a necessary and useful tool, but these dots seem like they could be a good idea if they can actually sense when spoilage happens.
Meat could have been exposed to bad conditions that makes it spoil before the expected date.
But maybe even bigger is that the date is always going to be very much on the side of caution, so it might avoid waste where people tend to bin stuff as soon as the expiry hits, even though that food may still be perfectly good.
All meat is spoiled living animal tissues. Way easier way to figure that out :)
Do you live on a dump?
These days the whole planet is a dump unfortunately.
No, actually. Spoiled here refers to the edibility by humans (aka the bacteria and toxic waste of said bacteria is below safe levels), and it’s no longer living tissue given the animal has been killed and butchered.
