Fresh !! ( What is that? )

The below article is not penned by me and I am not against supermarkets or its policies.  

But of curiosity I was looking for answers for my below questions

• Why my milk expires on exact date according to label of the supermarket?
• How old will that be my milk ?
• Why I am allergic to some products from New Zealand ?

Answers didn't look great , but I found the truth behind the life of many more stuff and reasons for its fantastic looks.

Most shoppers are prepared to spend more on something in the supermarket if it's labelled 'fresh'. But 'fresh' can be used to describe food that has been heat-treated, partfrozen, industrially or chemically altered and stored for weeks on end. 
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MEAT  

Even with the best red meat, there is a long delay between the animal’s death and the arrival of a cut on your plate. This is particularly true in the case of lamb.

The New Zealand lamb now in the shops has travelled 11,000 miles by ship in near-freezing conditions, taking six weeks or more. That means that although it is sold as ‘fresh’ in supermarkets, it is nearly two months old when we eat it. Truth is : if it needs to stay fresh for 6 weeks or more thinks of the preservative added in that !! and that must be the reason I became allergic and sick.

British lamb, by contrast, will be on the shelves within three to four weeks of slaughter.
Good beef should be three or even four weeks old before it reaches the shelves because the flavour and texture of the meat improves if it is hung. 

But other meats are on the shelf sooner: Sainsbury’s says it takes eight days for pork to get from the slaughterhouse to its shelves.  
Anyone's guess: While some meats benefit from aging, many 'fresh' cuts have been semi-frozen for weeks
Retailers know that we look for a fresh red colour in raw meat, and use a number of high-tech tricks to preserve that. Fresh meat may be displayed in ‘modified atmosphere’ packs with harmless gases inside that delay natural discolouring.
Sodium and potassium salts are often added to sausages, salamis and bacon to suppress bacteria and preserve the colour, giving a shelf life of six months or more for some cured meats. 
Most supermarket chicken is four or five days old by the time it arrives on the shelves. But Marks & Spencer says that fresh chicken is on sale the day after slaughter, and then left on sale for nine days.

BREAD

Anyone who has baked their own bread knows that loaves start to dry and harden within hours. So tricks are needed to keep bread soft for up to ten days on the supermarket shelves and then at home.
Our daily bread: But a loaf can be days old and still remain on the supermarket shelf
Depending on where you live, the bread may take two days to get to a supermarket in the first place.
Most popular sliced brands have preservatives and mould inhibitors such as calcium propionate and ascorbic acid. They may be baked using enzymes that don’t have to be declared on ingredients lists, so beware of labels that say ‘stays fresher longer’.

Recently, Tesco was reprimanded by the Advertising Standards Authority for claiming that its shops sold ‘fresh bread, baked from scratch’ when, in fact, it and other stores often ship in ready-made or part-baked loaves and give them a final turn in an oven.
‘Most supermarkets’ so-called bakeries are nothing more than loaf tanning salons,’ says the Real Bread Campaign’s Chris Young.

EGGS

Many recipes call for ‘fresh eggs’,  and there can be a big difference in taste and texture. Yet in a Tesco store yesterday, I found shelves being newly stocked with eggs that were already nine days old — which I calculated by subtracting 28 days from the ‘best before’ date.
Legally, eggs can arrive on shop shelves as much as ten days after being laid (‘extra fresh’ means they are less than nine days old). Marks & Spencer promises to get eggs onto the shelves within seven days.
But most professional chefs would insist on eggs less than a week old, because the raw egg becomes more liquid with age and the taste deteriorates.
Although the egg industry now prints a ‘best before’ date on most eggs, it has rejected calls to print the actual laying date. But if you subtract 28 days from the best before date, you can work it out.

FISH

One of the few things labelling rules are clear about is that frozen food cannot be sold as fresh. Yet no one can quite work out what the exact definition of ‘frozen’ is — particularly when it comes to fish.
Cod, haddock and other trawled fish from the waters of the north Atlantic may lie on ice for up to 12 days or more while the vessels are at sea before making the long journey to the fishmonger, meaning that by the time it reaches your fridge it could be 16 days old. 
But, technically, they have never been fully frozen so can still be sold as ‘fresh’. That means they carry the same labelling as fish caught on Britain’s coast, when the time from net to slab can be just 24 hours.
Although you might think this would pose a health risk, the truth is that much of our food is frozen, de-frosted and re-frozen, yet people rarely get ill.
Matters get even more complicated given that some fresh fish must be frozen by law for 24 hours in order to kill parasites. This happens for tuna and prawns that are eaten raw.
The huge tropical prawns now popular for barbecuing and Spanish-style tapas are often called ‘fresh’ even though that is technically not legal. They have usually been frozen previously, and shipped or air-freighted 6,000 miles or more in a process that can take between six weeks and as much as a year, but are then defrosted for sale as if freshly caught.

FRUIT JUICE

Once upon a time, you could get fresh fruit juice only by squeezing it yourself. Now shops offer a huge range of juices with shelf lives from two weeks to one year, all of them with either a direct or implied claim to freshness.
The cheapest — and least fresh — is ‘juice made from concentrate’.
That comes from abroad as a syrup that will have been filtered, pasteurised, evaporated and then frozen: the only fresh thing about it is the water added in the factory to reconstitute it. It will then be heat-treated again. Preservatives are often added, and the resulting shelf life can be a year or more.
Juices sold as ‘not from concentrate’ have either been pasteurised with heat, or treated with high pressure and filtering. They usually have a shelf life of a month. According to the Food Standards Agency’s advice to manufacturers, ‘freshly-squeezed juice’ should have a sell-by date no longer than two weeks after processing. And if it has been pasteurised (heat-treated, as milk is), it should say so, though it is often very hard to find the small print.
Some bottled ‘freshly-squeezed juice’ is exactly that — and has a much shorter life as a result. Marks & Spencer says its is on the shelves the day it is squeezed, is unpasteurised and has a shelf life of eight days from bottling.

VEGETABLES

Our modern taste for fresh green veg and salads at all times of the year (we import more than 60 per cent of all we eat) has led to an immense technological effort on the part of producers, and more dubious bending of the word ‘fresh’.
Fresh green beans, broccoli and peas from Africa or asparagus from South America that have been air-freighted generally reach the shelves within a week of picking, though they can be up to ten days old.
Sainsbury’s says it manages the job with beans from Kenya in three to four days and broccoli in five days.
Baking potatoes have often been around for six months.
Despite requests from consumer groups, no retailer has ever agreed to print packing or picking dates on the potato labels.
Outside the summer months, most salad vegetables and tomatoes travel by truck from Holland or Spain, where they are grown in giant climate-controlled greenhouses.
Salad leaves and spinach are washed in chlorine and then stored in ‘modified atmosphere’ packaging, slowing the rate at which the fresh leaves rot. Typically, salad from Spain is in the shops four days after picking.
These details do not have to be mentioned on the label.

FRUIT

Oranges and lemons are generally coated in a thin film of wax to stop them from being damaged during shipping and to make them look shiny and attractive.
So are many apples; despite the orchards that once covered the country, we now import three-quarters of all we eat.
These will be shipped from all over the world in refrigerated containers, often using special gases to delay over‑ripening, and it can be as much as six months before they reach the shelves.
Bananas from Central America take at least 11 days to reach Britain by ship. So they will be picked when still green, and on arrival treated with ethylene gas — a plant hormone which occurs naturally in fruit but is artificially introduced to ripen it.
Dangerous in high concentrations, artificially-made ethylene is believed to be harmless in the quantities used for the fruit we eat.
The plastic bags in which bananas arrive help preserve them even longer — up to 25 days.
Grapes are most often imported from Egypt. By the time they reach the shelves, they will be between four and ten days off the vines, depending on whether they were sent by air or sea.

MILK

‘Dairy-fresh’ milk means very little.
Straight from the cow, milk starts to separate and deteriorate within hours. To enable it to survive in the shop and then your fridge, ordinary fresh milk has its fat levels altered and is then pasteurised  — heated to more than 70 degrees centigrade — to remove bacteria.
This means it will usually be 48 hours old by the time it reaches the shop, but it stays drinkable for three days in the fridge or up to a week if unopened.
However, the process destroys vitamin C and many of the nutrients present in ‘raw’ milk.  
New technology that removes organisms with microscopic filters allows some milk to be sold as usable for up to 21 days if unopened. Manufacturers such as Cravendale call this product ‘fresher tasting’ — but is that the same as ‘fresh’?
Courtesy : AP