Last night I pulled the dairy order out of the cooler to sort it in the stockroom before putting the sorted goods under refrigeration again. You always want to avoid heat shock, especially with ready to eat products, which is almost every dairy item. It is also crucial to avoid cross contamination. This process should begin with the manufacturer and continue with the wholesaler—but not last night.

Of the two pallets the first one had light coffee creamers and long neck plastic bottles crushed under the weight of butter and carton-packed juice. That is normal, about $100 down the trash chute every night before I even get this stuff sorted.

The other pallet really gave me pause. Most clerks just rip out the case cutter and slice open the plastic wrapper, hoping the pallet does not disintegrate into a 1 ton jinga stack. That is why us few clerks who retain better than 50% of our at-birth cerebral function and are not prone to show up drunk or stoned for work, are detailed to perishable duty by the one dude in the joint who can actually spell and sign his own name. [He wears a tie if you happen to be looking for him.] If I had cut the wrap and the shroud underneath, we would have lost half of the $2,000 yogurt order from cross contamination. That is the best case scenario.

The worst case scenario is I’m on vacation and Mush Mouth Mike cuts the shroud and all two gallons of bacteria laden chicken blood drain through the unsealed cases of yogurt and cottage cheese, and then gets on the clerk’s hands as he puts up your ready to eats, and clings to your granny’s Activia yogurt cups, and people start dropping their bowels on kitchen and dining room floors all through the neighborhood—and the dude in the tie who can spell is not a happy camper and Mush Mouth Mike spends the rest of his life as the janitor in the nastiest ghetto store in the chain.

Those five heavy blood-dripping cases of raw chicken that had been heaved on top of the pallet, and which crushed another $100 worth of yogurt, should not have been so placed. Only the random fact that plastic shrouds are placed over freight selected in one department before the order picker cruises to the other department saved this order. The raw chicken would be placed overtop of ready to eat lunchmeat without a shroud, that is why it should always go on the bottom. But always and never are not applicable when it comes to safe food handling among our degenerating work force.

Back in the day we had a chicken cooler in which large wax-coated cardboard cases of raw chicken were stored and the low man on the meat room totem pole chopped it up. Those coolers smelled so bad that I have seen men pass out upon entering. I once saw 7 construction workers drop like flies in October when they tore down a chicken box during a summer remodel.

A USDA inspector once told me that two thirds of all chicken that passes inspection is diseased and that the meat cutters and cooks should handle the nasty bird corpses as if it were toxic waste. For that reason chicken has been cut at plants and shipped out ready packed for the last decade.

The chicken is the food animal most likely to make you shit your guts out and is the leading candidate for generating a pandemic of avian flu, probably in southern China. If you must partake of this nasty beast here are some shopping tips.

1. Chicken that is not displayed in a factory sealed package with a printed date. If it has been wrapped in the store and dated with a scale-generated price sticker than the seal was busted or it is outdated chicken that has been rewrapped by the likes of Rancid Ray, legendary slum meat cutter of Northeast Baltimore.

2. Chicken that has spices sprinkled on it in the package. This is done to cover age-discolored meat.

3. Chicken that is leaking blood from the package. Remember chickens are the Eboli sufferers of the farm animal world.

4. Vegetables ‘for grilling’ that have been displayed in the chicken section or any part of the fresh meat case. Even if cross contamination does not happen in the display case, the veggies have been trimmed with a meat knife that may very well have been used to gut an out of date chicken package.

5. Cheese that is displayed in the fresh meat case. This is explicitly against Health Department Regulations in Maryland, but is a common retail reality.

6. When you get this dirty bird home treat it like a recent victim of a zombie attack and decontaminate the prep area with a bathroom grade cleaner.

Bon appetite!