Fridge burn?

[cjsmith]

Put a pound of ground beef in a self-defrost freezer and pretty soon it'll be brown around the edges.

Put it in the fridge and sooner or later you'll see a similar brown. I don't think my fridge crosses the freezing point, not since we lost an expensive bottle of insulin to that very thing and messed with the thermostat a tad. Is the blood simply draining out of the tissue? What's going on there?

Comments

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

Yeah, the packages have air in them when they're wrapped, too. It's definitely happening most where air touches it. What exactly is changed, then? What are the benefits of eating meat that has not had this happen, or the dangers of eating meat that has?

[aelfie.livejournal.com]

Unless the meat's gone bad (which you can tell by smell) its still safe to eat. Its just a looks thing. Most fresh meat you eat has been dead for a couple weeks by the time you get it (its that aging thing).

I'm not sure exactly what's changed, but since we've got an iron based blood system...makes sense that our red blood turns brown when exposed to oxygen. Or well, at least it does to me.

[rfrench.livejournal.com]

Rusty meat! Yum!

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

It does smell different than when it's pink. But there's a whole 'nother smell that means BAD, and that's not it. I gotta ask stuff like this or some fine night you'll wake up hearing horrible sounds from the bathroom. :)

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

My nose is pretty sensitive, so going by smell seems reasonable to me. I wonder, of course, at the borderline of things -- when it's started to have a few more bacteria and their byproduct toxins than you really want, but you can't smell them yet -- or maybe smell comes solidly before the stuff will make you sick. Come to think of it, evolution-wise, that last idea makes lots of sense.

[ed: I kan spel. yea.]