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PaperclipPerfector  16d ago (text post)   2423 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for April 17, 2026

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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I haven't noticed those particular things, though I may be the wrong person to ask because I never had a very strong sense of taste.

I have however noticed that the types of beef available at most, but not all, of my local grocery stores seems to have changed. Most of the selection used to be in those styrofoam tray things covered with shrink-wrap, and it consisted of ground beef in various semi-random weights and various cuts of steak also in various semi-random weights. Items that seemed as if somebody in a butcher shop somewhere was lopping of cuts of meat and scoops of ground beef onto these trays in a semi-sloppy way, wrapping them, then weighing and labeling them. Now, those items seem to be gone from a number of stores, replaced with similar items in a fancier-looking package and a more mass-produced style. The ground beef is now only in quantities of exactly 1lb, and too bad if you want any fractional quantities. The steaks also seem to have a more uniform style and cost at least double the price too. The other meats I've looked at seem to have some similar changes, but without as much mass-produced uniformity. I do not like this change, and have been doing my purchases of such things from other stores that seem to have better selections.

Beef that's packaged too long greys it's harmless but undesirable to customers. So stores used to have meat cutters who cut and wrapped chunks of beef into packes for sale. Sealed Air figured out a way to fill a sealed container with a mixture of gases that prevents the color change and seal those gasses in the package. That means meat cutting moved to a slaughter house and packaged meat stays in the package much longer.

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