If I'm buying meat from the supermarket, I want to know when it was killed and packed into its wrapping. I have no interest in the day in which it went on to the supermarket shelves or into the shop's fridge - I want to be able to base my buying on the freshness and the quality of the product.
There was a story this week of a Hawke's Bay man who bought a couple of legs of lamb from his local supermarket "Packed on January 16".
He thought, as I would have done, that that meant the lamb had been frolicking round in a field until a couple of days before the 16th.
No.
What he found out after he opened the package and found that the meat was rotten was that the lamb had been killed last year - December 18, in fact.
