Non-expired non-weird stuff. I’d buy high quality chocolate if I knew it would come unmelted, unexpired and at a decent price. The irk expired zombie green cereal was liked by a couple of grade school kids who aren’t that picky but I am not willing to risk actual money on stuff like that.
@jouest No because if there is a lot of it by the time I finish it then it may be well beyond that and no good. Then I will have wasted my money or some of my money. Barely out of date might work well for a large family where kids inhale anything in reach but not when there is just me. Some stuff tastes fine past the best used date and some does not.
Buying green zombie cereal I have never heard of (came in an irk so didn’t buy) that is past the best used date means you can’t even donate it as the food banks around here won’t take that stuff due to liability reasons. I am not willing to potentially waste money on stuff like that. Of course that is just me. Clearly I am not your target customer for stuff like this so it doesn’t really matter.
@jouest@Kidsandliz I’m fine eating something past it’s Best Before Date, but Mrs. throws things out if they’re near (but not past date). No use buying anything if she’s just going to toss it
@jouest@OnionSoup Depending on what it is I am find with that (past due date) - but some stuff really is crappy much past the date. I have some crackers I like that are 3-4 months past and they are stale (package wasn’t opened yet so that wasn’t the issue).
When I am not familiar with the item and/or the brand I am not going to buy something even close to the date unless the quantity is very small. I don’t want to waste money and you can’t donate things beyond the date even though with many things (most notably canned) are good well beyond that.
Many things like cookies, crackers, other “soft goods” become stale awfully close to the best used by date. I am far less likely to risk buying much of those things that are close or beyond the date. I am only a household of one person, not one with a hoard of kids, and it takes time to go through quantities.
@jouest@Kidsandliz I was brought up the child of a refugee… So it was one of those, nothing goes to waste, you eat every last pea on your plate situations.
I’ll be eating leftovers in the fridge until they’re gone… My wife, if it’s been over 12 hours since it was cooked… She won’t touch it. Two day old lasagne and she’s warning me I’m going to die eating it and I’m telling her “no, it’s fine as long as not more than 5 days since cooked”.
@jouest@OnionSoup Our family was poor and it was the same thing in our house - the clean plate club and recycling leftovers into other meals. Cutting hamburger meat with oatmeal to make it go further… I still remember when I was 3 or 4 and mom only gave us each about 1/4 a glass of milk. I wanted more. She said no. I poured what I had down the sink. Mom started to cry and said, “There is no more, That is all the milk we had.”. Made a huge impression on me as a preschooler. It wasn’t until years later I realized that was also why we were such skinny kids.
@jouest@Kidsandliz we wernt poor growing up. We were probably about as average, middle-of-the-road as you could be. My mother though, had gone through being wealthy and through harsh food scarcity in her life before we kids were born.
It was the mentality of having lived through food scarcity which stuck with her the most … And she passed that mentality onto us kids. Probably doesn’t help my waistline today as an adult that I feel compelled to eat everything on my plate whether I like it, or even if I’m already full.
@Kidsandliz@OnionSoup I had a similar situation with my parents. We were pretty solidly middle class, but both dad and mom had lived through the depression (followed by rationing during WW2). My dad had it particularly rough as a child (his mother died from flu when he was only eight) and was strict about anything being wasted. I guess I kept many of their frugal ways just out of habit. Not such a bad thing, I guess.
@macromeh@OnionSoup I think the depression era left a big impact on people who lived through that (well and as you say WW2 rationing as well). Mom’s dad died when she was 7 as well. Threw that family into poverty. Dad’s family was better off financially. Mom handled our family finances as it caused her too much stress when dad spent more freely. And dad was a minister in the days where ministers and their families were supposed to live in poverty. (Let’s just say the politics in churches has left me with no desire to attend after being forced to for 3 services each Sunday growing up.) Of course as kids we knew if we wanted something to ask dad before we asked mom. Then mom was mad at Dad rather than us for asking. And, of course, we could distract mom from yelling at us by using incorrect grammar or words wrong and she’d get side tracked correcting us. Now I have to think before using lay and lie, bring and take, etc.
I heard Mom say: “We can’t buy that, it’s not on sale” so many times, I actually thought that stores would refuse to sell you stuff that wasn’t on sale.
@blaineg@jouest@Kidsandliz I’ve eaten chunky milk and lived. It is never elegant (sometimes it’s nutty, sometimes it’s bitter, always is it chunky), no one should try to repeat this, but spoiled milk is edible to be ingested directly, turned into cheese, or used in baking (and sometimes this results in a non-toxic food). There are also levels of toxicity, all the common ones are just inconvenient.
I was part of the “skim milk” club: when the gallon of milk was 1/4 finished, my dad would add water; then again when it was 1/2 finished. A gallon jug lasted a month for a family (as opposed to 2 weeks for a single adult). It also made me very prejudiced against any milk that wasn’t whole at school and only as an adult would I consider using low fat milk (I still have grievances against skim for how close it tastes to diluted milk).
@jouest@Kidsandliz@pakopako I lived on the island of Jersey for a little while, and naturally ALL of the cows there are Jerseys - that’s where they come from. (Likewise for neighboring Guernsey.) Both islands take their cows seriously. By law no other breed is allow on either island. And they keep genealogies on the cows.
Pure Jersey milk is so rich that it’s yellow from all the butterfat. Amazing stuff.
The downside was that after that, even whole milk was like drinking water.
I met an old codger on the island that was carrying on a long monologue/rant about how the newly introduced 2% milk was a gubermint conspiracy to remove all the good stuff from milk, and sell it for the same price.
@blaineg@jouest@Kidsandliz@pakopako I noted a while back that there was briefly a change in the WIC rules here which removed whole milk from that program and put 2% in its place. Apparently that’s been reversed.
@blaineg@jouest@Kidsandliz@pakopako
My mother took me to Japan when I was 5 to stay with her family for 6 months. The milk there was weird and I didn’t like it - Asians don’t drink a lot of milk, they’re often lactose intolerant. When we got back I would ONLY drink skim milk. The other kids at school were weirded out.
Stropwafels back when they came individually wrapped and the tiny ones. I used to take them to work and they were such a hit. (the dutch ones not the US ones with too much chicory)
I have done the sausage stuff, but doesn’t flip my switch. I guess they retired thing makes them less tempting.
Oh, and the candy corn. LOL. Mine wasn’t melted, surprisingly for where I live. I remember that (and we ate it all, at work again).
Pasta Drop at work too, was giving it away for days. Ended up with one of the 300+ pound assorted sets of boxes.
Pasta has history and utility going for it, and as long as it’s actual, real made-from-durum pasta and not some allegedly-keto or frou-frou kale-polluted gluten-free vegan atrocity, it has the advantage of being difficult for even a buyer of disturbingly distressed clearance goods to get completely wrong.
Jaffa cakes would be nice. Not everyone has a place to get them. (I will admit that I have many such suppliers; Houston is amazingly multicultural.)
You could see if the folks at that little shop just east of 45 down in Corsicana might make you a deal on a couple of pallets of two-pound oops boxes. They’re always a crapshoot, and my own experience has been that they have far more caramel and far less dark chocolate than I like, but you gets what you gets.
@blaineg@macromeh@pakopako “Dark” is a US-market phenomenon. In the rest of the world, the prinsipal discriminator is between milk and plain, which is only sometimes dark. It is perfectly possible to have a 60%+ cocoa solids content, no milk involvement, and not be “dark” chocolate. I brought home a bunch of that type from New Zealand; it was good stuff.
Don’t like the food deals. Can you mix in other stuff between the food items? I feel like my membership is ticking away as every day is another food item I’m not interested in.
I loved that deluxe goat milk mac and cheese. I’m going to miss those. And those oat bars from a few years ago, the pistachio ones. Oh and those chocolate covered fruit things, Frookits? I like the ramen but its so spicy that I don’t eat it that often, so I have a big reserve built up. I’d eat less spicy ramen much more frequently. When the food being offered isn’t keto or vegan or gluten free or dairy-free chocolate or whatever, it’s usually been pretty good. I don’t buy any of the dietary restriction stuff anymore, it’s always been pretty gnarly and I never finish it. Same with the energy drinks, they’re always gross. I don’t care if stuff is past its best-by date as long as it’s edible.
@omally chocolate fruit?
Were these the Australian **Frooze-ballszz (mashed dates with jelly/nut filling and shaved coconut exterior) or the Solely fruit jerky? (Dried pineapple with banana or chocolate)
Herbal concoctions, dry rubs, hot sauces, and anything else (non-cheesy preferred) I can throw on popcorn. Also microwaveable popcorn buckets. Also salty bitter licorice. And, something you’ve never offered, subscription snack packs that send 1 or 2 unique snacks every month for a year for friends, enemies, or selves to sample and enjoy.
Buldak, Black Rifle Coffee and Fudgy Bombs. It’s been a few years but my daughter LOVED those.
@capnjb that’s like a college survival pack
Non-expired non-weird stuff. I’d buy high quality chocolate if I knew it would come unmelted, unexpired and at a decent price. The irk expired zombie green cereal was liked by a couple of grade school kids who aren’t that picky but I am not willing to risk actual money on stuff like that.
@Kidsandliz what about only a little bit expired?
@jouest No because if there is a lot of it by the time I finish it then it may be well beyond that and no good. Then I will have wasted my money or some of my money. Barely out of date might work well for a large family where kids inhale anything in reach but not when there is just me. Some stuff tastes fine past the best used date and some does not.
Buying green zombie cereal I have never heard of (came in an irk so didn’t buy) that is past the best used date means you can’t even donate it as the food banks around here won’t take that stuff due to liability reasons. I am not willing to potentially waste money on stuff like that. Of course that is just me. Clearly I am not your target customer for stuff like this so it doesn’t really matter.
@jouest @Kidsandliz I’m fine eating something past it’s Best Before Date, but Mrs. throws things out if they’re near (but not past date). No use buying anything if she’s just going to toss it
@jouest
Many people and organizations have the same opinion of this as people had about “a little bit pregnant” in the days before Roe v Wade.
@jouest @OnionSoup Depending on what it is I am find with that (past due date) - but some stuff really is crappy much past the date. I have some crackers I like that are 3-4 months past and they are stale (package wasn’t opened yet so that wasn’t the issue).
When I am not familiar with the item and/or the brand I am not going to buy something even close to the date unless the quantity is very small. I don’t want to waste money and you can’t donate things beyond the date even though with many things (most notably canned) are good well beyond that.
Many things like cookies, crackers, other “soft goods” become stale awfully close to the best used by date. I am far less likely to risk buying much of those things that are close or beyond the date. I am only a household of one person, not one with a hoard of kids, and it takes time to go through quantities.
@jouest @Kidsandliz I was brought up the child of a refugee… So it was one of those, nothing goes to waste, you eat every last pea on your plate situations.
I’ll be eating leftovers in the fridge until they’re gone… My wife, if it’s been over 12 hours since it was cooked… She won’t touch it. Two day old lasagne and she’s warning me I’m going to die eating it and I’m telling her “no, it’s fine as long as not more than 5 days since cooked”.
@jouest @OnionSoup Our family was poor and it was the same thing in our house - the clean plate club and recycling leftovers into other meals. Cutting hamburger meat with oatmeal to make it go further… I still remember when I was 3 or 4 and mom only gave us each about 1/4 a glass of milk. I wanted more. She said no. I poured what I had down the sink. Mom started to cry and said, “There is no more, That is all the milk we had.”. Made a huge impression on me as a preschooler. It wasn’t until years later I realized that was also why we were such skinny kids.
@jouest @Kidsandliz we wernt poor growing up. We were probably about as average, middle-of-the-road as you could be. My mother though, had gone through being wealthy and through harsh food scarcity in her life before we kids were born.
It was the mentality of having lived through food scarcity which stuck with her the most … And she passed that mentality onto us kids. Probably doesn’t help my waistline today as an adult that I feel compelled to eat everything on my plate whether I like it, or even if I’m already full.
@Kidsandliz @OnionSoup I had a similar situation with my parents. We were pretty solidly middle class, but both dad and mom had lived through the depression (followed by rationing during WW2). My dad had it particularly rough as a child (his mother died from flu when he was only eight) and was strict about anything being wasted. I guess I kept many of their frugal ways just out of habit. Not such a bad thing, I guess.
@macromeh @OnionSoup I think the depression era left a big impact on people who lived through that (well and as you say WW2 rationing as well). Mom’s dad died when she was 7 as well. Threw that family into poverty. Dad’s family was better off financially. Mom handled our family finances as it caused her too much stress when dad spent more freely. And dad was a minister in the days where ministers and their families were supposed to live in poverty. (Let’s just say the politics in churches has left me with no desire to attend after being forced to for 3 services each Sunday growing up.) Of course as kids we knew if we wanted something to ask dad before we asked mom. Then mom was mad at Dad rather than us for asking. And, of course, we could distract mom from yelling at us by using incorrect grammar or words wrong and she’d get side tracked correcting us. Now I have to think before using lay and lie, bring and take, etc.
@Kidsandliz @macromeh @OnionSoup We weren’t poor, but frugal.
I heard Mom say: “We can’t buy that, it’s not on sale” so many times, I actually thought that stores would refuse to sell you stuff that wasn’t on sale.
@jouest @Kidsandliz
Just a little bit of peril?
@blaineg @jouest @Kidsandliz I’ve eaten chunky milk and lived. It is never elegant (sometimes it’s nutty, sometimes it’s bitter, always is it chunky), no one should try to repeat this, but spoiled milk is edible to be ingested directly, turned into cheese, or used in baking (and sometimes this results in a non-toxic food). There are also levels of toxicity, all the common ones are just inconvenient.
I was part of the “skim milk” club: when the gallon of milk was 1/4 finished, my dad would add water; then again when it was 1/2 finished. A gallon jug lasted a month for a family (as opposed to 2 weeks for a single adult). It also made me very prejudiced against any milk that wasn’t whole at school and only as an adult would I consider using low fat milk (I still have grievances against skim for how close it tastes to diluted milk).
@jouest @Kidsandliz @pakopako I lived on the island of Jersey for a little while, and naturally ALL of the cows there are Jerseys - that’s where they come from. (Likewise for neighboring Guernsey.) Both islands take their cows seriously. By law no other breed is allow on either island. And they keep genealogies on the cows.
Pure Jersey milk is so rich that it’s yellow from all the butterfat. Amazing stuff.
The downside was that after that, even whole milk was like drinking water.
I met an old codger on the island that was carrying on a long monologue/rant about how the newly introduced 2% milk was a gubermint conspiracy to remove all the good stuff from milk, and sell it for the same price.
@blaineg @jouest @Kidsandliz @pakopako I noted a while back that there was briefly a change in the WIC rules here which removed whole milk from that program and put 2% in its place. Apparently that’s been reversed.
@blaineg @jouest @Kidsandliz @pakopako
My mother took me to Japan when I was 5 to stay with her family for 6 months. The milk there was weird and I didn’t like it - Asians don’t drink a lot of milk, they’re often lactose intolerant. When we got back I would ONLY drink skim milk. The other kids at school were weirded out.
@Kidsandliz @macromeh @OnionSoup
It’s easy:
If it’s a hen, it’s “lay”.
If it’s a politician (or other lawyer), it’s “lie”.
@macromeh @OnionSoup @phendrick I’d add to lie the CEO’s of for profit medical care.
@Kidsandliz @macromeh @OnionSoup @phendrick Yeah, really - why do private businesses/corporate entities get a pass? They lie incessantly.
I’ve gravitated toward the “healthyish” snacks. Never been fully disappointed, sometimes surprisingly impressed.
@ybmuG Much depends upon one’s definition of “healthyish”.
@werehatrack it’s meh, so by default it’s all “ish”
Beef Jerkey, aged balsamic vinegar, pasta (lol), imported cheese, snacks
@tinamarie1974 PAAAAASTAAAAAAAA!!!
@tinamarie1974 @yakkoTDI PAASTAAA!
Woof! Purina treats!!! Yeah. Lots of them!
PASTA DROP!!!
Stropwafels back when they came individually wrapped and the tiny ones. I used to take them to work and they were such a hit. (the dutch ones not the US ones with too much chicory)
I have done the sausage stuff, but doesn’t flip my switch. I guess they retired thing makes them less tempting.
Oh, and the candy corn. LOL. Mine wasn’t melted, surprisingly for where I live. I remember that (and we ate it all, at work again).
Pasta Drop at work too, was giving it away for days. Ended up with one of the 300+ pound assorted sets of boxes.
Pasta has history and utility going for it, and as long as it’s actual, real made-from-durum pasta and not some allegedly-keto or frou-frou kale-polluted gluten-free vegan atrocity, it has the advantage of being difficult for even a buyer of disturbingly distressed clearance goods to get completely wrong.
Jaffa cakes would be nice. Not everyone has a place to get them. (I will admit that I have many such suppliers; Houston is amazingly multicultural.)
You could see if the folks at that little shop just east of 45 down in Corsicana might make you a deal on a couple of pallets of two-pound oops boxes. They’re always a crapshoot, and my own experience has been that they have far more caramel and far less dark chocolate than I like, but you gets what you gets.
@werehatrack tl:dr, pasta and Jaffa cakes.
I just saved everyone 137 words
1/2 my mercatalyst history are snacks: some shelf stable, others very shelf stable. Fruits, cheese, meat, cookies, chocolates, pasta…
@pakopako so what’s the verdict??
@jouest
that @pakopako is a target market for stuff like this and you should listen to this person rather than me?
@jouest Yes.
Dark chocolate.
@blaineg MOAR DARK CHOCOLATE
@blaineg @werehatrack Quality dark chocolate, 55% cocoa or better. Preferably without nuts, raisins or other distractions (salted is OK).
@blaineg @macromeh @werehatrack isn’t dark chocolate classified as 55% or higher?
@blaineg @macromeh @pakopako “Dark” is a US-market phenomenon. In the rest of the world, the prinsipal discriminator is between milk and plain, which is only sometimes dark. It is perfectly possible to have a 60%+ cocoa solids content, no milk involvement, and not be “dark” chocolate. I brought home a bunch of that type from New Zealand; it was good stuff.
Don’t like the food deals. Can you mix in other stuff between the food items? I feel like my membership is ticking away as every day is another food item I’m not interested in.
@hiroo Knives with speaker docks!
I loved that deluxe goat milk mac and cheese. I’m going to miss those. And those oat bars from a few years ago, the pistachio ones. Oh and those chocolate covered fruit things, Frookits? I like the ramen but its so spicy that I don’t eat it that often, so I have a big reserve built up. I’d eat less spicy ramen much more frequently. When the food being offered isn’t keto or vegan or gluten free or dairy-free chocolate or whatever, it’s usually been pretty good. I don’t buy any of the dietary restriction stuff anymore, it’s always been pretty gnarly and I never finish it. Same with the energy drinks, they’re always gross. I don’t care if stuff is past its best-by date as long as it’s edible.
@omally chocolate fruit?
Were these the Australian **Frooze-ballszz (mashed dates with jelly/nut filling and shaved coconut exterior) or the Solely fruit jerky? (Dried pineapple with banana or chocolate)
@omally @pakopako These:
https://meh.com/forum/topics/36-pack-frookits-chocolate-covered-probiotic-fruits
@Kyeh @omally Woah. Those look good
Herbal concoctions, dry rubs, hot sauces, and anything else (non-cheesy preferred) I can throw on popcorn. Also microwaveable popcorn buckets. Also salty bitter licorice. And, something you’ve never offered, subscription snack packs that send 1 or 2 unique snacks every month for a year for friends, enemies, or selves to sample and enjoy.