Its lunchtime and you are hungry, you open the refrigerator to find the only thing in is some suspicious meat product that has some little writing on the side saying: use within 20 mins of opening or die horribly… well ok: 3 days is more likely… anyway the point of all this is that if you are like me and don’t have much of a memory for when you open food products then you may end up not eating the food to be safe or eating something that might just be bad for you…
The solution is a device that combines the functions of a pair of scissors, a sharp knife, one of those bottle openers that look like a medieval torture implement and, most importantly, one of those date stamp things used in libraries…
The device is used to open any of those bullet proof plastic modified atmosphere packages and as the date stamp is there it is no hassle to stamp what is left of the packet…-- RobertKidney, Apr 03 2002 Sharpie permanent marker http://www.sanfordc...jhtml?id=prod650413 [phoenix, Apr 04 2002, last modified Oct 04 2004] "Yes, it's safe, it's very safe, so safe you wouldn't believe it."-- waugsqueke, Apr 03 2002 just show it to the cat, better than any date stamp. fight you for it fluffy.-- po, Apr 03 2002 Croissant because it seems complicated.-- reensure, Apr 03 2002 [po] has the right idea; if the cat's prepared to eat it, it's probably OK (except for flies).-- angel, Apr 04 2002 Croissant for image of po duking it out with fluffy-- thumbwax, Apr 04 2002 Croissant from me cos it's an excellent and extremely useful idea. Only problem is that I'd probably forget to change the date stamp every day. What I'd really like would be for the package to do it automatically, to somehow make a note of the day it was opened when you ripped the lid back. You'd need ink designed to fade entirely after precise periods of time (ie days) after it is printed, until exposed to air, when it is fixed. Erm... hmmm.-- Saveloy, Apr 04 2002 you wussies - just eat it. If it's still recognizable, doesn't smell rotten, and the first bite stays down, then you've nothing to worry about. If in doubt, get drunk first.-- quarterbaker, Apr 04 2002 Good idea Saveloy. One further point: you don't want to calibrate the ink to fade after a predefined period of TIME. The time it takes for the food to go bad depends on the conditions such as temperature. So if we can make some kind of organic ink which "goes bad" in the same time and in the same conditions as the food, and changes color as it goes bad, we've got a good indicator.
Unless, of course, you want to add the color to the food itself. Then you can make sure the sausage really turns green (or cyan, or black) when it's not edible anymore...-- mattitude, Apr 05 2002 random, halfbakery