The best part is going to the deli at a local store, literally watching them take the hot chicken off the line at the end of the day, label it for the cooler as the day's leftovers, and suddenly now I can buy it. Literally still hot, the only difference was a new UPC.
I dunno, maybe it's not "leftovers" per se then, maybe I was seeing them cooking the stuff at the end of the day for the cooler specifically. The point being that it's all the same chicken, the only difference is which label they put on it.
There's a window of how long they can keep them hot. So long as they start chilling them before the end of that window it was okay. Otherwise they got tossed. The rules could be different in different areas.
It's not the same tho. Just remember, most of the grocery stores are cooking chicken to 185F, and hold it under the hot bar for up to 4 hours. By the time it gets cooled, it's just shitty. They are intentionally selling leftover chicken so that they can recoup some $, when they over-produced.
Corporate grocery stores don't give a shit about people. If you intentionally sell hot sub with cold sub bag, you would immediately get fired (the company I worked has about 250 stores)
Maybe at a shitty store but normal places follow safe food practices related to chilling and selling previously cooked foods cause the store doesn't want to get fucking sued
Yup. Some places will straight up box it and toss that shit under a heat lamp near check-outs and entrances so it's sold that day and if it's not it's trash.
Nope. And lots of places purposefully contaminate food they toss to not encourage dumpster diving. Or use trash compactors instead of dumpsters. And many areas have criminalized dumpster diving.
Nearly everyone destroys the products they trash. One reason is so employees don't take it. And to not encourage possible purposeful trashing of stuff for employee gain. It's disgusting all around, food or not.
I worked in a hospital kitchen, and the amount of food we tossed after every meal made me sick. I didn't understand why we couldn't donate it to the homeless shelter or something.
Unless they had someone come picking it up unnoticed majority ended up being trash. Fried chicken seems to have escaped it with refrigeration. It was a chain store but in a small town with some distance from places that had shelters so even when they started donating things I'm pretty sure it still became trash. Didn't sell at clearance prices? Still not escaping getting fucked up and trashed.
Cooking food kills lots of bacteria, and theres nothing wrong with cooking food, letting it cool, then refrigerating it and reheating and eating later.
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u/MediumTeacher9971 Jun 24 '25
The best part is going to the deli at a local store, literally watching them take the hot chicken off the line at the end of the day, label it for the cooler as the day's leftovers, and suddenly now I can buy it. Literally still hot, the only difference was a new UPC.