If you smell it and go GUUHH--UGH, ACK ACK, it's probably not good

[Trepa Mayfield]

Today, I wanted to make a recipe with drumsticks. I bought them on Wednesday, and stuck them in the refrigerator to cook on Sunday. Well, things got away from me, including a failed recipe that took an extra day to make (my first failure!), and today is Tuesday. And they went bad, I'm sure.

Tell your stories about bad or rotten food! We can commiserate.

[Solfy]

I'm paranoid about food poisoning. I'd rather run the risk of throwing out good food than spending three days worshiping the porcelain throne and wishing to die like I did last time I caught foodborne nastiness (from a restaurant).

I don't even sniff. When it doubt, throw it out.

If it's growing. . . . stuff, I've been known to throw out containers, too, just to avoid having to deal the the disposal of whatever is lurking inside. This is why I really like the Gladware stuff over expensive Tupperware.

[wring]

I just bought a package of raspberries. They looked good.

Except once I opened them, I realized more than half were moldy. (the 'good' side was pointing up).

[Trepa Mayfield]

I thought of another one. I had just gotten back from college and was looking forward to drinking coffee with milk and sugar instead of the insipid little creamer packets. And we had milk! Yay! So I made the coffee, went to pour the milk--and it smelled off. I knew I needed to throw it out, but I waffled longer than I should have, because I wanted it so bad. And thank god I did. I poured half of it out, and the other half fell. I was scrubbing the sink for a half-hour straight.

Incidentally, does anyone know a good way to dispose of rotten food?

[Solfy]

I bought a pint of milk from the college dining hall "convenience store." I took it back to my dorm room. I poured a bowl of Kix. I poured the milk on the Kix. The milk sat on top of the Kix.

I went back to the dining hall and got my money back.

I never bought milk from them again.

[Jaglavak]

The bugs that rot meat are generally fairly innocuous after cooking. So the sniff is very reliable for raw meat and milk. But the evil fuzz that grows on fruit will knock your dick in the dirt.

My worst fuckup? One incident stands out. I was a snot nosed teen just learning to scorch stuff on my own. One afternoon I was totally starving and the kitchen was pretty bare. Eventually I got desperate enough to read a cookbook, thaw out a chicken, and toss it in the oven. It was one of those fancy ovens with the automatic timer.

Well, those things take like an hour to cook and meanwhile I wandered over to the neighbor's house where my buddy's mom performed daily culinary miracles. She took one look at me and just made me a sandwich. I never had the brass to actually ask for anything, but pretty much everybody on the property got fed. Anyway, after I devoured the sandwich and then did a few gratitude chores I wasn't hungry anymore.

You guessed it. Three days later we started wondering where that gawdawful stench was coming from.

My immune system has bailed me out so many times I should buy it an award or something.

[GoSmoke]

Edamame beans. I bought some in a sealed package and decided to have them for dinner. I opened the package and the smell damn near knocked me across the kitchen.

[Khampelf]

My grandmother was always giving us homemade veggies and meat products. She had a shed dedicated to poultry 'processing'. I was 10 or so, and Mom was teaching me to cook over the phone. After school, she'd call with instructions. One time, she told me take some pork chops out of the freezer. Even frozen, I could tell they were not right. I phoned back saying I didn't think they were good. "Oh, that's just the way pork smells.", she says. OK, I very dubiously put them in the oven as instructed. The smell got worse, but I was afraid to call back. Dad got home first. "What the Hell is that?" he yells. Dad is not a yeller.

"I told Mom I thought they were bad, she told me to cook them anyway."

"We're not eating those."

"What should I do with them?"

"Take them out into the back yard and bury them." He was kidding, but we laughed as we did just that.

We went out to Pizza Hut that night, and Mom admitted she should have trusted my nose.

[Turing Complete]

I put a whole chicken to defrost under cold running water in the sink. I had to leave the house but figured the chicken would be fine. Got back a couple of hours later and the kitchen smelled of rotting chicken. Someone in the house turned the faucet to hot before we left and gave the chicken and bacteria a nice hot bath. A friend suggested that it would be fine to cook and eat, but thousands of years of evolution weighed in and said, "Do not eat!"

[Smithish]

Pro Tip:
If you ever think you are missing a frozen pizza after grocery shopping, the time to look under the drivers seat is BEFORE you leave on a two week vacation and leave the car sitting in 110 degree heat.

[Uthrecht]

Yeah, I think "Leave No Food Behind" is a very good motto to live by.

[GoSmoke]

Originally Posted by Smithish

Pro Tip:
If you ever think you are missing a frozen pizza after grocery shopping, the time to look under the drivers seat is BEFORE you leave on a two week vacation and leave the car sitting in 110 degree heat.

Holy crap. I bet that was an "intense" smell. However, you have just given me a brilliant idea for revenge.

[Chacoguy]

I'm telling you frozen shrimp on top of the ceiling tiles is tough to beat.

[Mbossa]

A couple of weeks ago, I opened a can of cat food (it was for my cat, honest!). It was one of those cans with a ring thing to rip off the lid. I noticed before opening it that the can looked a bit dented and discoloured around the lid area, but I didn't look too closely. When I opened it, the lid came off way too easily.

And then the smell hit me. It was the strongest, most putrid smell ever. Then I dared to look inside the can, and saw little maggots swimming around in the meat.

I decided that my cat deserves better than that, and chucked it out. I'm still stuck with the memory of the smell and the image of the maggots, though.

[LurkMeister]

Stories about spoiled food? just off the top of my head -

Shortly after I got my first apartment I was putting away groceries when I took a closer look at a loaf of bread and saw that it was moldy. I took it back to the store and swapped it for another.

Once a week or so after I cleaned out and reorganized my freezer I noticed a distinctly unpleasant odor near it. A bit of investigation revealed a package of ground beef that had fallen behind the freezer (it was one of those chest models).

I also once had a can of cat food that had apparently popped open slightly and sat on the shelf for a while. The smell alerted me before I actually tried to feed it to the cats, however.

[Jeff]

Working in the produce section of a grocery store I had more than my fair share of encounters of the rotten kind. The worst was the time I grabbed a box of potatos and sank my thumb knuckle-deep into a rotten one. Rotten potatos smell bad. Really really fucking bad.

The most consistently reliable awful smell came from the scraps truck - the meat department saved up all the little scraps of meat & cuttings of fat and once per week a truck (with an open bed) from the rendering plant would come along to collect them. In the summer the load spent all day festering in the sun as the truck shuttled between stops, and if it got to you in the late afternoon it stank something fierce.

Worst personal incident involving eating was the tahini incident. I'd bought a small tub of tahini spread (for the first time) and some naan. I'd never tried plain tahini before so when the first bite tasted awful I just chewed at it for a bit, until I looked closely at the container and saw it was full of fuzzy white mold. If you've ever eaten stale peanuts, the taste of moldy tahini is like sour version of that. Blegh.

[Salambo]

Originally Posted by Mbossa

A couple of weeks ago, I opened a can of cat food (it was for my cat, honest!). It was one of those cans with a ring thing to rip off the lid. I noticed before opening it that the can looked a bit dented and discoloured around the lid area, but I didn't look too closely. When I opened it, the lid came off way too easily.

Yessir. One of the things I used to do on a regular basis at my old factory job was can culling - checking for dents, dings, spurs, and any other thing that could cause the product inside to spoil before leaving our factory. One of the worst aspects of that job were the off-season times, when the faster, sharper cullers among us would get sent over to another warehouse in the wintertime, to open and re-cull thousands of cans that had been stored in another warehouse over the hot summer with no AC...

Did you know maggots can jump? I still have nightmares.


...as for things going bad in my fridge, I get particularly pissed with the low life-span of strawberries. Sometimes I can't even get the damn things home before they develop a culture of their own. I'm about ready to just grow my own like I did back home. Much easier. Just a little slower to turn into shortcake.

[Joey P]

My favorite.
My best friend lived with another guy for a few months. I never liked going over there because the house always smelled...off, when you first walked in (through the kitchen). After he moved out, she offered his room to me, I took it, hesitantly (because of the smell, but I never told her about that).
Anyways, right off the bat we had an issue with flies (you see where this is going). We tried EVERYTHING, leave the windows open so they can get out, leave the windows closed so they don't come in. Scrub everything, nothing made a difference. After a few weeks of this, she called me in to the kitchen. "Joey, I found the smell, there's a rotten bag of potatoes in here, come get rid of it"
"No problem, I've been in produce all my life, I've seen some disgusting things (this was before I saw it)"
"Joey, hurry up........it's moving"
When I got there it was used to be a 5 pound bag of potatoes, it was now pretty much nothing but maggots. Barf, it was absolutely disgusting. Luckily that cabinet had a slide out shelf on it, so we could just throw away the whole shelf, which was starting to rot.

The reason her and her old roommate (and her and I) never found it is that it was an empty cabinet. He must have tossed them in there and since it was 'empty' we never had any reason to look in it.

[MissJeanLouise]

I hate hate hate being the one to lose the "what in here smells?" game. You know, when something is causing noxious odors everytime you open/close the fridge, but the only way to find out is to start opening things and smelling them.

You know what can smell surprisingly awful? Pasta that has been left over just a bit too long.

Also, speaking of things that roll under seats and are forgotten...kids and their sippy cups come to mind. Milk is bad, certainly. Turns solid after a while. Apple juice, though, developes a certain moonshine quality to it that makes me speculate on its marketability.

[Uthrecht]

Aah, Joey P reminded me.

Potatoes. Oh, yes.

In an apartment my wife and I had (I think it was the first one we had after starting to date), my wife bought a bag of potatoes and stored them. I was not around when she did either. Some amount of time went by. I'm not entirely sure how long. But I noticed a funny smell in the kitchen and started to investigate. I was tipped off by some odd dark brown streaks down the side of the refrigerator. So I went up to look, and found a luxurously large bag of gelatinous potatoes stewing in their own juices. It was putrid and rank. And I got to pull the whole thing off the top and into a garbage bag.

Turned out that she'd stuck it up there as a temporary storage and forgotten about it. WHEW, man. I think there were flies. I'm not entirely sure. My memories are a bit fuzzy.

[SweetPea]

Agreed. Rotten potatoes are the worst. The first time my son was admitted to the hospital, we were there for 7 weeks straight. I had made the kids dinner and then he got really sick before I had cleaned it up. Urgent run to the hospital, and immediate transport via ambulance to the peds ICU at another hospital.

Dinner that night? I don't remember the meat, but there was definitely mashed potatoes. Spoiled mashed potatoes smell terrible. When we finally got back home, I didn't even try to clean it up. I dumped the whole mess, dishes and all, in the garbage and bought new cookware.

[3acres]

Originally Posted by MissJeanLouise

Milk is bad, certainly. Turns solid after a while.

I say, isn't that...cheese?

[Jaglavak]

Originally Posted by Salambo

....shortcake....

And I ain't lyin'.

[GoSmoke]

Originally Posted by 3acres

I say, isn't that...cheese?

Yeah................really rank ass cheese.

[FilmGeek]

I once left an egg wash (two eggs, whipped with a little water to help bread brown) in the sink and didn't rinse the bowl. We were being really lazy about the dishes until it started to smell like "old people". That was the rankest thing I can think of.

We have a bowl of refried beans and sour cream that apparently has been in our fridge for several months. It was in the back of a crisper drawer. I'm afraid of it, as it is COMPLETELY white with fuzzy mold. If it were a kitten, it would be delightful. As it was once food, it is not.

[AuntiePam]

Originally Posted by Jaglavak

You guessed it. Three days later we started wondering where that gawdawful stench was coming from.

Me too -- chicken in the oven. Mine was a chicken carcass. I was making chicken and noodles. The carcass was picked over but I wasn't ready to toss it yet, so I put it in the oven so the counter-surfing dog and cats wouldn't get into it. And forgot about it until a couple days later when my husband says "What's that smell?" I go "Ooooh that smell" and do my shimmy dance, and he says "No, honey, something stinks."

Ditto on potatoes. I don't even buy them anymore unless I plan to use them like immediately.

[Locked In The Trunk Of A Car]

What are these grocery stores doing to potatoes? They're supposed to last for months in a cool dark place, and sprout vines. The ones I've got recently just disintegrate.

[Uthrecht]

Originally Posted by AuntiePam

my husband says "What's that smell?" I go "Ooooh that smell" and do my shimmy dance, and he says "No, honey, something stinks."

C'mon, your shimmy dance isn't that bad.

[Euryphaessa]

Originally Posted by AuntiePam

Ditto on potatoes. I don't even buy them anymore unless I plan to use them like immediately.

Really? Ours last forever, it seems. They start sprouting and everything.

[AuntiePam]

With potatoes, the problem is that if I don't use them right away, I forget I have them.

[Jaglavak]

Originally Posted by Locked In The Trunk Of A Car

What are these grocery stores doing to potatoes? They're supposed to last for months in a cool dark place, and sprout vines. The ones I've got recently just disintegrate.

It's variable around here. Sometimes the spuds last until they sprout, sometimes they get fuzzy in just a week or two. Rumor has it that the big growers will store potatoes for months depending on the crop and the market. I'm always suspicious when they're selling a 10 lb bag for only 25 cents more than a 5 lb bag.

[Lungfish]

The only time I have smelt something and went GUUHH--UGH, ACK ACK was when I sniffed a womans conch when I was about to go down on her. For some reason describing the smell as a rotten dead fish to her caused her to change her mind about going the dirty with me.

[Jaglavak]

Cleanliness is next to ohmygawdliness.

[DogMom]

Originally Posted by 3acres

I say, isn't that...cheese?

You know, you would think that, wouldn't you. My dad certainly thought that, and found "something that says how to make cheese" so when we had a half-gallon or so of milk go off, he carried it to the basement and let it do its thing in the hopes of acquiring cheese. Followed the instructions of whateveritwas, and everything. A year of experimentation and bad-smelling basement later, my mom finally talked him into throwing the nasty thing out.
No, it wasn't cheese. I'm pretty sure whatever it was, was plotting to kill us in our sleep. Probably from the smell alone.

[3acres]

Originally Posted by DogMom

...I'm pretty sure whatever it was, was plotting to kill us in our sleep. Probably from the smell alone.

Sounds like your dad made a fine batch of limburger cheese!

[DogMom]

Eurgh, no, not even THAT pleasant. Believe-you-me, I've smelled limburger and on a stinky ratio, things go something like this:

Limburger --- My brother's feet --------------- That STUFF that was lurking in our basement.

[Fenris]

I have a storage freezer in my basement. I was putting some meat in it (it was on sale). One of the plastic bags ripped and to make it easier to juggle, I set a pack of chicken thighs right there on top of the freezer while I put everything else away.

And then went away for a week and a half.

The package was (luckily) sealed tightly so only a bit of the odor escaped (it was enough though and the package was swollen like a balloon. I was almost afraid to pick it up, fearing it would burst on me.

[GoSmoke]

Just in case you were wondering, sour cream DOES go bad. I had a container of it in the fridge and apparently forgot about it until this evening. It actually brought my husband in from the other room.

[Nebelhund]

I have an unopened package of ribs in my garage fridge, from last summer...sealed. I'm afraid to open them, but somehow think they are still good. Schrodinger's cat thing...

Totally random but one of my son's friends can neither smell or taste anything. It happened after having a tombstone fall and crush his skull. Mentally he is fine, but he lost the smell/taste and whatever controls growth. His dad is 6' 6", mom about 6', tall sister but he is tiny. Very odd. I've told him he has a future in winning bar bets (eating/drinking anything).

[GoSmoke]

Originally Posted by Nebelhund

I have an unopened package of ribs in my garage fridge, from last summer...sealed. I'm afraid to open them, but somehow think they are still good. Schrodinger's cat thing...

Totally random but one of my son's friends can neither smell or taste anything. It happened after having a tombstone fall and crush his skull. Mentally he is fine, but he lost the smell/taste and whatever controls growth. His dad is 6' 6", mom about 6', tall sister but he is tiny. Very odd. I've told him he has a future in winning bar bets (eating/drinking anything).

I really, really wouldn't open the ribs if I were you.

[Nebelhund]

Just went and checked the ribs, "Best if used by 8/4/09". I also noticed that there doesn't seem to be as much liquid in the package anymore. They still look like ribs and not fungus though.

My son keeps bugging me to cook them. I'm not that stupid.

[PapSett]

About 7-8 yeaqrs ago, I began smelling something 'off' in my laundry room. Could NOT figure out what it was or exactly where it was coming from. After several days, it was putrid, and I really began digging in to fint the source of the smell; my father and I thought something-a mouse, maybe- had died.

What I found was a bag containint a ring of liver sausage. GREEN liver sausage. We had not a clue how it had gotten there; there is no food in the laundry room. Neither of us remembered buying liver sausage. But it was PUTRID, the package bloated and leaking.

I can still remember the stench.

[blank]

Not spoiled food as such but I did used to have a cupboard in my back-garden for storing some of the more noisome cheeses.