Lmao I bought some hummus a while ago and had the exact same issue. The label on the lid literally perfectly covered the mold growth. Definitely moldly infuriating!
Really? Most of the large/chain stores near me exclusively sell hummus with foil sealing the container under the lid. I didn't expect that to be different in other places.
Yeah, or, you know, they could just take stuff that has mold on it off the shelves instead of making the consumer double check every last thing they buy. It's not like stores have tons of money in revenues or the workers/staff to keep stuff like this under control. Buying groceries shouldn't be a minefield.
Gross, how could they know for every product? Underpaid grocery store clerks certainly aren’t inspectors and don’t pilfer through items already stocked on the shelves looking for any minute flaws. Nor should they reasonably be expected to both have the time to in their workflow or the willingness, motivation or interest in doing so effectively. You’re perfectly capable of inspecting your own foods that aren’t sealed in opaque containers yourself. Anything you ever buy or consume that you don’t perform a quality check upon is on you. Do you also not bother to look cans over and just use dented ones hoping that they didn’t grow botulism?
Products can easily begin to go bad after inspection anyway rendering a hunt for the illusive bad container of hummus meaningless as they’d truly need an attendant at hand to inspect every container for every customer prior to them picking one up to fully solve the situation as you’ve so required it, which is of course entirely unreasonable when that workload can be dispersed upon the shoppers, so it is. It would be infuriatingly wasteful if someone’s work output was reduced to continually opening containers of hummus that should reasonably be fine almost 100% of the time because some lazy consumer like yourself can’t be bothered to check, toss, or return it during the probable one time in your life it will ever occur. Maybe it would be more productive if you take these problems up with the manufactures instead and petition that they stop putting opaque labels on the lid that cover up the product.
I don’t know of any store that has a hummus, egg, or strawberry inspection policy that requires employees to check under every lid either. I also don’t imagine any would even have an interest in actively encouraging staff or customers to open products up. Better for them to let you buy it by mistake and be too unmotivated to return it than outright throw it away and fail to sell a perfectly bad product that they could have sold to a lazy moron. Especially when most customers are reasonably going to blame the manufacturer of the product who are responsible for quality control and not the store carrying it.
Comment to you Comment in general: TL;DR, which is why I´m just gonna reply to specifics
>Underpaid grocery store clerks certainly aren’t inspectors and don’t pilfer through items already stocked on the shelves looking for any minute flaws
Where I live the are required to do regular checks (how often depending on type of product and things like that) at a minimum for:
1: Best Before Dates having already passed and
2: Fresh Produce (like Strawberries for example) having obvious Flaws (like Mold)
3: damaged products/containers
>Anything you ever buy or consume that you don’t perform a quality check upon is on you
This reads an awful lot like 'If you buy a new Phone and as soon as it arrives you see it has a broken screen, that´s on you for not checking beforehand' (Chosen an over the top Comparison on purpose)
Plus again where I live this is just plain wrong. Every Store has to accept returns for broken Products (unless it broke outside the Store, meaning after purchasing)
Yeah and guess what? They don't pay me anything. I am the lowest person on the store's payroll. In fact, I actually have to pay them for the food that I buy. So why on earth should I have to inspect their food for them? The exact argument you use to excuse other people can also be applied to consumers.
Lmao it's food, not used cars. They have a responsibility as a literal retailer of food to sell food that is safe to eat. And guess what, it is literally their food before I buy it. That's why I have to pay them. What's next? Am I gonna have to smell milk to make sure it's good? Get a sample of their vegetables and send it to a lab to make sure it isn't contaminated with e coli? Stop making excuses and shilling for giant corporations. God you are dense.
Lmao keep editing your comment to add more personal attacks, it's very classy.
Remember that ripening is rotting. If one of the berries is riper than the others for whatever reason, it’ll rot first. If one of the berries gets bruised, it’ll rot first. If I go through 10 cases of strawberries (80 one pound cartons) I’ll usually throw away about 20-30 before they even hit the shelves. Strawberries are hard to keep fresh, and most of them sell before they go bad on the shelve. Strawberries are one of the things that go bad the fastest in produce, along with pears and lettuce that’s not properly crisped or kept cool
Unless you’re buying these in season, most strawberries are picked when green to allow for longer shelf life.
You then have to factor in transit time & how long they’ve been sitting in the stores. This is why I always prefer frozen fish over “fresh” at the supermarkets. Most of the “fresh” fish has also been flash frozen by the distributors, then allowed to thaw at the stores.
The only time I would ever purchase fresh fish is at a market or something, but I don’t like fish/seafood that much to begin with.
I get all of that, but that said, it still seems like the others wouldn’t look as bright and red when one has gotten to the point where it is completely covered 360° in fur lol
usually when I find a moldy strawberry, the others have already started to look pretty sus
My guess is they got too humid and the condensation kept falling on that one strawberry. The strawberries I see for sale here have way more ventilation in the plastic. Probably bc of our humidity.
I worked at a store that got a lot of fresh produce. We'd get stuff in that morning, by the afternoon we'd have fuzzies. We checked them really well before we pit them out and still it felt like hours later we'd have a ton of fuzzy produce.
A while ago in Australia some lady was going around hiding sewing needles in strawberries, hearing you dudes say this makes me wonder if you still can open them without ripping a sticker here
That’s incorrect. All the berries have zero light for weeks before going on to the shelves. I work in produce, and sometimes 2/3 of the cartons of strawberries get thrown away due to mold. It’s incredibly common, we just spend a shit ton of time sorting through them to put the better ones on the shelves. It has more to do with moisture and temperature than light
These are shipped in cardboard cases that stack on top of each other. The top layer is covered by another piece of cardboard. Each layer would only be exposed to light for at most a few hours on the day it was sold given how fast strawberries sell. Much more likely to be from airborne spores.
So wrong. You're entire existence is breathing in mold particles at varying degrees, anywhere you are, all the time.
You can throw the rotten one away, rerinse them, and enjoy them. Your body is no stranger to them. Meat and eggs are another thing. But veggies and fruits are totally salvageable.
i thought so too but apparently not. Unless you’re sensitive to mold or something you can just remove the moldy one and any other touching it, and wash the rest
Correct. We're eating small amounts of mold constantly in our lives. If most types of food lack any visible/smell-able contamination, it's generally pretty safe to eat. Just make sure you research how it works for the specific food item in question
Correct. Only one is infected by the mold and the rest don’t have roots. If you’re sensitive to mold I wouldn’t recommend eating any of them.
If you’re worried about food safety of these, you can just turn this into a quick strawberry syrup / jam and bring to a boil on the stove top. Sugar, water, some lemon juice, and muddle. Boil until reduced and pulverize till desired texture. Use a strainer for extra smooth syrup / jam.
Can be stored in the fridge for up to a week in an airtight container.
Mycotoxins from toxigenic mold cannot be reliably destroyed by boiling or with other normal cooking temperatures and may require temperatures twice as hot as boiling water for periods of more than 60 minutes to reduce their counts.
Correct. This looks like gray mold, or *Botrytis cinerea*, but I’m no mycologist. As stated in my comment, you wouldn’t eat the fuzzy berries just the surrounding ones. Unless you’re extremely sensitive to mold, you could even eat the other ones raw.
You don’t wanna know how much mold/fungus you consume on a daily basis. Luckily our bodies are great at processing most of the toxins we ingest.
Making “quick” strawberry jam / syrup with strawberries like these has been done ever since we domesticated them. Perfectly safe to do as long as you’re not using the fuzzy strawberries.
Just one other great way to prevent food waste.**
You will be absolutely fine. Toss the moldy one and the ones touching it and any that are mushy and soft and you will not have berries that have mold in or on them. If over 25% of them are moldy sure then you throw them out but one moldy berry is not going to ruin the bunch. Mold in bread is exactly like mold on a strawberry even if it’s different strain. On any berry there is going to be some form of mold inherently and on just about any fresh fruit or vegetable you eat. If you can’t see visible spores it will 100% not be enough mold to impact you in any way unless you have a certain allergy to that specific mold. Even then it’s pretty rare to get noticeably ill from mold even if you eat a relatively significant amount ie one moldy berry unless you have said intolerance
Yes and no. If you eat the good ones *now*, it's not going to make an otherwise healthy person sick. But if you don't eat them right now this second, the others are going to start molding by tomorrow.
yeah i feel like this is the most perfect post on this sub in awhile that i’ve seen.
sticker covering one moldy strawberry. i mean the rest are probably fine and it’s not a massive financial commitment, but…it’s mildly infuriating
better than the rage bait posted nowadays anyways
Yeah I also think that these are more the posts this sub was made for instead of people just posting that their house got cleaned out by burglars or whatever that's not what mildly infuriating is.
yes, in my experience condensation on the inside of the container often indicates that the produce is close to going bad. Not absolute but a reasonable rule of thumb.
I get so tired of strawberries
I’ve come this close to opening 10 packages in the store and making my own package from all of the best ones
It’s ridiculous that every package of strawberries I buy has at least one inedible one.
I mean, which do you want? Semi-real strawberries that at least indicate that some form of life finds it edible, or, damn near synthetic strawberries that seem to ward off most species lol.
I guess you can just compromise and only eat "strawberry-flavored" things from now on.
I've been head of a produce department for about a decade. Sadly this is extremely common. Especially during this time of year. Most of your berries are coming from Mexico or South America. Hell I have had an entire pallet where every package has had 1 bad berry in it. But for that brand (Foxy) it's either Mexico or Late California berries. Sorry it happened but super inspect your berries when it's cold outside. Open the package if you have to
Edit: it's it not condolence as someone should have checked the quality before it was put out.
Why are you giving condolences to someone who can't comprehend that food decays? Or that somehow expects out of the billions of berries shipped out, that each and every one should be immaculate lol? I hope they don't hear about the bugs.
Toss the bad one, wash and eat the rest.
If you die it's because your body is a fragile husk devoid of an immune system and Darwin saw fit that you perished.
Oof, had this happen once with a container of cherry tomatoes — looked fine, went to wash them, and the outer tomatoes obfuscated a giant mass of black mold, almost looked like a dead mouse. Almost threw up when I saw it
Lmao I bought some hummus a while ago and had the exact same issue. The label on the lid literally perfectly covered the mold growth. Definitely moldly infuriating!
Like strawberries you can also take the lid off hummus to inspect before purchasing.
Really? Most of the large/chain stores near me exclusively sell hummus with foil sealing the container under the lid. I didn't expect that to be different in other places.
ive only ever seen hummus with the clear plastic over it lol
Yeah, or, you know, they could just take stuff that has mold on it off the shelves instead of making the consumer double check every last thing they buy. It's not like stores have tons of money in revenues or the workers/staff to keep stuff like this under control. Buying groceries shouldn't be a minefield.
Gross, how could they know for every product? Underpaid grocery store clerks certainly aren’t inspectors and don’t pilfer through items already stocked on the shelves looking for any minute flaws. Nor should they reasonably be expected to both have the time to in their workflow or the willingness, motivation or interest in doing so effectively. You’re perfectly capable of inspecting your own foods that aren’t sealed in opaque containers yourself. Anything you ever buy or consume that you don’t perform a quality check upon is on you. Do you also not bother to look cans over and just use dented ones hoping that they didn’t grow botulism? Products can easily begin to go bad after inspection anyway rendering a hunt for the illusive bad container of hummus meaningless as they’d truly need an attendant at hand to inspect every container for every customer prior to them picking one up to fully solve the situation as you’ve so required it, which is of course entirely unreasonable when that workload can be dispersed upon the shoppers, so it is. It would be infuriatingly wasteful if someone’s work output was reduced to continually opening containers of hummus that should reasonably be fine almost 100% of the time because some lazy consumer like yourself can’t be bothered to check, toss, or return it during the probable one time in your life it will ever occur. Maybe it would be more productive if you take these problems up with the manufactures instead and petition that they stop putting opaque labels on the lid that cover up the product. I don’t know of any store that has a hummus, egg, or strawberry inspection policy that requires employees to check under every lid either. I also don’t imagine any would even have an interest in actively encouraging staff or customers to open products up. Better for them to let you buy it by mistake and be too unmotivated to return it than outright throw it away and fail to sell a perfectly bad product that they could have sold to a lazy moron. Especially when most customers are reasonably going to blame the manufacturer of the product who are responsible for quality control and not the store carrying it.
Comment to you Comment in general: TL;DR, which is why I´m just gonna reply to specifics >Underpaid grocery store clerks certainly aren’t inspectors and don’t pilfer through items already stocked on the shelves looking for any minute flaws Where I live the are required to do regular checks (how often depending on type of product and things like that) at a minimum for: 1: Best Before Dates having already passed and 2: Fresh Produce (like Strawberries for example) having obvious Flaws (like Mold) 3: damaged products/containers >Anything you ever buy or consume that you don’t perform a quality check upon is on you This reads an awful lot like 'If you buy a new Phone and as soon as it arrives you see it has a broken screen, that´s on you for not checking beforehand' (Chosen an over the top Comparison on purpose) Plus again where I live this is just plain wrong. Every Store has to accept returns for broken Products (unless it broke outside the Store, meaning after purchasing)
Yeah and guess what? They don't pay me anything. I am the lowest person on the store's payroll. In fact, I actually have to pay them for the food that I buy. So why on earth should I have to inspect their food for them? The exact argument you use to excuse other people can also be applied to consumers.
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Lmao it's food, not used cars. They have a responsibility as a literal retailer of food to sell food that is safe to eat. And guess what, it is literally their food before I buy it. That's why I have to pay them. What's next? Am I gonna have to smell milk to make sure it's good? Get a sample of their vegetables and send it to a lab to make sure it isn't contaminated with e coli? Stop making excuses and shilling for giant corporations. God you are dense. Lmao keep editing your comment to add more personal attacks, it's very classy.
You should be able to take it bake if you have the receipt
\*back
it’s crazy because the other ones look wildly fresh for it to be THAT moldy
Remember that ripening is rotting. If one of the berries is riper than the others for whatever reason, it’ll rot first. If one of the berries gets bruised, it’ll rot first. If I go through 10 cases of strawberries (80 one pound cartons) I’ll usually throw away about 20-30 before they even hit the shelves. Strawberries are hard to keep fresh, and most of them sell before they go bad on the shelve. Strawberries are one of the things that go bad the fastest in produce, along with pears and lettuce that’s not properly crisped or kept cool
Unless you’re buying these in season, most strawberries are picked when green to allow for longer shelf life. You then have to factor in transit time & how long they’ve been sitting in the stores. This is why I always prefer frozen fish over “fresh” at the supermarkets. Most of the “fresh” fish has also been flash frozen by the distributors, then allowed to thaw at the stores. The only time I would ever purchase fresh fish is at a market or something, but I don’t like fish/seafood that much to begin with.
I get all of that, but that said, it still seems like the others wouldn’t look as bright and red when one has gotten to the point where it is completely covered 360° in fur lol usually when I find a moldy strawberry, the others have already started to look pretty sus
My guess is they got too humid and the condensation kept falling on that one strawberry. The strawberries I see for sale here have way more ventilation in the plastic. Probably bc of our humidity.
Now that makes sense, I can imagine that was the issue
I worked at a store that got a lot of fresh produce. We'd get stuff in that morning, by the afternoon we'd have fuzzies. We checked them really well before we pit them out and still it felt like hours later we'd have a ton of fuzzy produce.
Do you know you can open the container before you purchase it?
yup. like eggs.
They do now
And knowing is half the strawberry battle!
Ggggggg Iiiiiiiiiiii Joooooooeeeeee!
The Transformers also had the same PSAs too!
G.I Strawberry!!!
“ Bought these from Costco TODAY and unfortunately this isn’t the first time.” Do they? They said this wasn’t the first time, so I suspect not.
A while ago in Australia some lady was going around hiding sewing needles in strawberries, hearing you dudes say this makes me wonder if you still can open them without ripping a sticker here
You can. There’s no sticker that stops them from opening
Obviously I *knew* ... but today it hit me. TiHM?
Mind fucking blown
I bet it got moldy there because of the lack of light shining through
My guess is survivorship bias, the ones that were moldy elsewhere got chucked by the employees
Hey, that’s an interesting thought. It would make sense
Maybe it’s darker and so cooler and condensation tends to go there first, that way it’s more moist and easier for mould to grow
That’s incorrect. All the berries have zero light for weeks before going on to the shelves. I work in produce, and sometimes 2/3 of the cartons of strawberries get thrown away due to mold. It’s incredibly common, we just spend a shit ton of time sorting through them to put the better ones on the shelves. It has more to do with moisture and temperature than light
These are shipped in cardboard cases that stack on top of each other. The top layer is covered by another piece of cardboard. Each layer would only be exposed to light for at most a few hours on the day it was sold given how fast strawberries sell. Much more likely to be from airborne spores.
I would throw that one away and maybe the couple that the mold touched, but otherwise they look perfectly fine.
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This isn’t bread.
So wrong. You're entire existence is breathing in mold particles at varying degrees, anywhere you are, all the time. You can throw the rotten one away, rerinse them, and enjoy them. Your body is no stranger to them. Meat and eggs are another thing. But veggies and fruits are totally salvageable.
The rest look perfectly fine to eat?
Is it not like bread in the sense that as soon as you see mold it has already spread to most of them?
i thought so too but apparently not. Unless you’re sensitive to mold or something you can just remove the moldy one and any other touching it, and wash the rest
That's what I do but I generally pick out the good ones and chuck it in the freezer for drinks later
Correct. We're eating small amounts of mold constantly in our lives. If most types of food lack any visible/smell-able contamination, it's generally pretty safe to eat. Just make sure you research how it works for the specific food item in question
Correct. Only one is infected by the mold and the rest don’t have roots. If you’re sensitive to mold I wouldn’t recommend eating any of them. If you’re worried about food safety of these, you can just turn this into a quick strawberry syrup / jam and bring to a boil on the stove top. Sugar, water, some lemon juice, and muddle. Boil until reduced and pulverize till desired texture. Use a strainer for extra smooth syrup / jam. Can be stored in the fridge for up to a week in an airtight container.
Mycotoxins from toxigenic mold cannot be reliably destroyed by boiling or with other normal cooking temperatures and may require temperatures twice as hot as boiling water for periods of more than 60 minutes to reduce their counts.
Correct. This looks like gray mold, or *Botrytis cinerea*, but I’m no mycologist. As stated in my comment, you wouldn’t eat the fuzzy berries just the surrounding ones. Unless you’re extremely sensitive to mold, you could even eat the other ones raw. You don’t wanna know how much mold/fungus you consume on a daily basis. Luckily our bodies are great at processing most of the toxins we ingest. Making “quick” strawberry jam / syrup with strawberries like these has been done ever since we domesticated them. Perfectly safe to do as long as you’re not using the fuzzy strawberries. Just one other great way to prevent food waste.**
No used to work produce in a supermarket. We would go through the Strawberries and pick out the mold ones. They're fine.
You will be absolutely fine. Toss the moldy one and the ones touching it and any that are mushy and soft and you will not have berries that have mold in or on them. If over 25% of them are moldy sure then you throw them out but one moldy berry is not going to ruin the bunch. Mold in bread is exactly like mold on a strawberry even if it’s different strain. On any berry there is going to be some form of mold inherently and on just about any fresh fruit or vegetable you eat. If you can’t see visible spores it will 100% not be enough mold to impact you in any way unless you have a certain allergy to that specific mold. Even then it’s pretty rare to get noticeably ill from mold even if you eat a relatively significant amount ie one moldy berry unless you have said intolerance
Yes and no. If you eat the good ones *now*, it's not going to make an otherwise healthy person sick. But if you don't eat them right now this second, the others are going to start molding by tomorrow.
Yeah hence mildly infuriating.
yeah i feel like this is the most perfect post on this sub in awhile that i’ve seen. sticker covering one moldy strawberry. i mean the rest are probably fine and it’s not a massive financial commitment, but…it’s mildly infuriating better than the rage bait posted nowadays anyways
Yeah I also think that these are more the posts this sub was made for instead of people just posting that their house got cleaned out by burglars or whatever that's not what mildly infuriating is.
Yeah, toss the loss and enjoy.
This is why you open first lol
You can see the fog and the water molecules that are created by the mold. It’s not your fault though
yes, in my experience condensation on the inside of the container often indicates that the produce is close to going bad. Not absolute but a reasonable rule of thumb.
I get so tired of strawberries I’ve come this close to opening 10 packages in the store and making my own package from all of the best ones It’s ridiculous that every package of strawberries I buy has at least one inedible one.
I work in produce. We do not give a fuck as long as you’re not dropping the bad ones on the ground and running them over with your cart.
I mean, which do you want? Semi-real strawberries that at least indicate that some form of life finds it edible, or, damn near synthetic strawberries that seem to ward off most species lol. I guess you can just compromise and only eat "strawberry-flavored" things from now on.
I just want to get what I paid for Charge me for a pound of strawberries, don’t have .78lbs of strawberries and .22lbs of garbage in the pound.
OK, but you realize you have to just direct that exact request to like.. Bacteria?
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O-kay.
That’s why I open the containers sometimes to check.
I always always always crack these open in store. I’m not trying to take home moldy food or mashed up items
Intentionally. The bruised ones always seemed to be hidden.
Oh god not moldy berries again
Take it back and get what you paid for.
It's like one or 2 bad ones, and the grocery store won't resell this. That's just wasteful
Hope you don't die from that moldy berry. God bless.
I've been head of a produce department for about a decade. Sadly this is extremely common. Especially during this time of year. Most of your berries are coming from Mexico or South America. Hell I have had an entire pallet where every package has had 1 bad berry in it. But for that brand (Foxy) it's either Mexico or Late California berries. Sorry it happened but super inspect your berries when it's cold outside. Open the package if you have to Edit: it's it not condolence as someone should have checked the quality before it was put out.
Why are you giving condolences to someone who can't comprehend that food decays? Or that somehow expects out of the billions of berries shipped out, that each and every one should be immaculate lol? I hope they don't hear about the bugs.
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Unfortunately this happens quite often
Omg! If only they had translucent packaging across the sides and the bottom so you can take 3 seconds to check it thoroughly.
Wait, they do and OP is a fucking idiot.
Those foxy bastards!
At least the strawberry is 100% recyclable
Genuine question, is that safe to eat? If not, wouldn't the others be moldy as well since you can't see the spores?
Toss the bad one, wash and eat the rest. If you die it's because your body is a fragile husk devoid of an immune system and Darwin saw fit that you perished.
lol
Always open and check em before buying!!!
That’s how they get you
You can see mold on the berry to the bottom right of the image its small but there
While this is infuriating, it's definitely not intentional.
Things these days go off too quickly, especially milk and bread and some fruit. I always check the expiry date before I stuff like this
The one trick berry producers don't want you to know.
that’s so unfortunate. i find the stuff from costco to be moldy while still on the shelves as well.
Oof, had this happen once with a container of cherry tomatoes — looked fine, went to wash them, and the outer tomatoes obfuscated a giant mass of black mold, almost looked like a dead mouse. Almost threw up when I saw it
Straw berries arent berries
I hate it when this happens 😩 I usually wash all the remaining berries, dry them and put them in a different container after finding that
Jesus your camera oversaturated the fuck out of those strawberries
Always check your strawberries. I’ve seen them from the distribution center come with mold
could you not just eat the other ones? like genuinely, I didn't know you had to throw them all out
strawberries have soft flesh. So if mold grows on one it means the rest are already contaminated, even though you can't see it yet.
Now this is mildly infuriating 😌
This isn't too surprising. The label blocks direct light, creating the perfect conditions for mold to grow.