Expiration dates and Catching Fire

My two topics today are completely unrelated but I wanted to talk about both of them, so you'll have to get over the disjointed post. I'll start with Catching Fire...I read a book called The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins a while back and it was absolutely AMAZING. Like Twilight, it's supposedly written for young adults but is enjoyable for people much older (due to violent content, I wouldn't recommend it for much younger). Unlike Twilight, the scenario is, unfortunately, possible. This book takes place in the future when America has been renamed and divided into 12 numbered districts and a Capitol, who controls them and leaves them with meager food rations and not enough to go around (the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, anyone?). At one point, the districts tried to overtake the Capitol and failed. As a result, the Capitol requires each district to provide a boy and girl each year, so 24 teenage contestants, to fight to the death. These "games" are televised for "entertainment" (reality TV, anyone?) and are intended to remind the districts of the Capitol's power and the price for any uprisings. The book is chilling, captivating, exciting, suspenseful and just all-around awesome. The next book in the series, Catching Fire, just came out and I picked it up yesterday on recommendation from my Aunt Angie. I've been trying to use the library as much as possible, but there were 61, yes 61, holds on the first copy returned and I just couldn't wait that long. So I'm about halfway through and finding this one just as much of a page-turner. I highly recommend this series!!

Now, on to expiration dates. Tuesday I purchased a standard pork tenderloin from Safeway, my local grocery store. I got it home and realized that I wasn't going to cook it until Saturday, so I checked the back to see if I needed to freeze it. The label said Use or Freeze By AUGUST 22. Tuesday was SEPTEMBER 1. Disgusting!!! So, I trot back over to Safeway yesterday and return the pork tenderloin, explaining the problem, providing my receipt and telling them that I have other errands to run and will pick up a replacement piece of meat on my way home so it doesn't get hot. They give me cash back and I go on my merry way. I go back by Safeway around 1:30 to pick up a new tenderloin and the SAME ONE I returned is BACK IN THE CASE. Sitting right atop all of the new ones that don't expire until September 20. I don't check the expiration date of anything I'm going to cook day of, or day after, purchase because I ASSUME my grocery store is not selling me rancid meat. I'm sure there are lots of people like me out there who do the same thing and one of them could have gotten that piece of meat and made their entire family sick! Granted, maybe it was frozen in their freezer until August 31 and they found it and threw it out there. It could potentially be perfectly safe. But as a grocery store, do you really want to risk it????? I am really disgusted and upset by this whole exchange and feel that I have to be extra vigilant about the products I purchase there from now on. So, to sum it up, check the dates on everything you buy!! You can't depend on the shelf stocker to be looking out for your family.