Journal

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Friday, January 21, 2005
Supermarket horrors

On Tuesday, I did some shopping at Dynasty supermarket in Chinatown. Among the staples I picked up was fresh soy milk, which is so much better than the kind in shelf-stable cartons. Fresh soy milk is cleaner tasting and doesn't have unnatural gums, flavorings, or preservatives. Unlike Silk or Edensoy, Chinese-style soy milk only has two ingredients: soy beans and water. I bought a slightly more expensive brand, Kong Kee, because it's the only Chinese brand that dates the bottles (would you buy milk or eggs without expiration dates on them?) and seals the tops with foil. Chinatown stuff is cheap but not always clean, as you'll see.

I bought two bottles with a sell-by date of 1/29. That's plenty of time to drink the milk. Or so I thought.

When I opened my first bottle, it was "chunky" style. Yes, this milk had solids and it smelled bad! What the heck! So I dug into my second bottle, which turned out to be "custard" style. The milk resembled a solid block of tofu. Talk about fermentation. Ugh, I want my money back! But I don't think that's going to happen. Dynasty has these ghetto receipts, which don't even describe what you bought.

What am I supposed to do? Go back to the store and show them my spoiled milk? I can't contact the manufacturer either. The milk label doesn't show a batch number or phone number, so there's no way to complain. How the milk spoiled during our arctic freeze (Yeah! It feels like 8 below zero today!) is beyond me.

Note to self: next time, shake the milk to make sure it's in a liquid state.

During my shopping trip, I was also disappointed by the lack of product selection, if you can call it that. I wanted to buy dried apricots for Is My Blog Burning, a frequent event where bloggers a take up certain theme and come up with a recipe for it. (The theme this time is beans. Check back tomorrow to see how I made an apricot-bean dessert.) Anyway, all the apricot packages were torn open and cheaply patched up with tape. They also expired 6/04 and had white moldy spots on them. What the heck! This stuff shouldn't even be on the shelves! Only in New York. Only in Chinatown.

Addendum: I just opened my beans from the market and noticed that tape was used to patch up a hole in the bag. My goodness, are all my groceries contaminated? At first, my Dynasty (aka "Da Nasty") mishap seemed like a funny gross-out story to tell my friends. Now it's gone too far. I'm complaining to the Department of Health. It pains me to say this (since they have unbelievably cheap food), but this supermarket needs to clean up or shut down.

posted by Jessica at 7:08 PM | 0 comments

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